His mother had described the moment so many times that Frank felt he had lived it as well. It was as if she had to keep telling it in order to believe it, as if some time she might tell it and find something new. And so he listened. To his knowledge, he was the only recipient of her going back through and over it all; she did it only when it was just the two of them all alone. When she died, Frank asked Horace and Preston if she had ever talked about it to them, and they said no, assuming that she hadn’t talked to him either.

“He was sleeping,” his mother had said. “He was wearing civilian clothes: a yellow cotton shirt with green flecks that he had bought as a souvenir, even though it was December. He thought it was funny and said he knew it would make his mother laugh when they got home.” His hair was combed back. “Thick and black, just like yours, honey,” Frank’s mother always said. He was wearing Aqua Velva, like always. He had a newspaper on his lap, his hand—with his tapered, tan fingers—on top of the obituary of the man who had created Corn Flakes. She said it was an odd thing to remember, but she had, perhaps because she was thinking that after, if she still couldn’t sleep, she would ease the paper from his hands and try to read a bit, in the dim light, about Mr. Kellogg, a detail that would be present in her mind forevermore, every trip to a market a reminder. She was thinking about reading the paper as she made her way through the car; she was thinking about how good it would be to get home, her body being jostled from side to side as she made her way into the small lavatory. She was wearing a skirt she could no longer button but had pinned to her slip; she was trying to straighten her stockings; she was reaching, the pooch of Horace filling her abdomen in a way that made it hard to bend over, when everything happened.

She closed her eyes as she told it all—“I’ll be right back”—as if to conjure his father’s face, an expression Frank never saw in the presence of his stepfather lingering there. It was a pause, an acknowledgment of all that rushed out of her life in that moment.

And why did this please Frank? He should have wanted her happiness, her comfort. Why did some part of him relish the pain and loss he saw on her face and heard in her voice?