“Heart attack waiting to happen,” his grandfather had said of old Mr. Kimes, the nice man who cleaned their fireplaces, who had little fatty sacs near his eyes, deep creases in his earlobes. “Good thing he’s as thin as he is or he might’ve died years before. Wouldn’t have seen his boy come home from the war. Wouldn’t have seen his grandbaby.” He could hear the rattle of a cough and call pneumonia before he even thumped a person’s back and listened closely. He talked of things many consider old wives’ tales: the hiccups of death, the moment of brightening, the feet that will not get warm and keep moving, one over the other, like sticks rubbed together. “Well, I guess some old wife must have said it,” he liked to say, often smiling big at Frank’s grandmother when he did so. “Yes, some old wife probably said it right before her husband dropped dead, and so it became true.”

And then everyone was surprised when he himself dropped dead, right there in the living room, without any warning at all; he came in saying what a very busy but good day it had been. He had successfully diagnosed a case of pneumonia and one of pleurisy, had removed a pinto bean from a toddler’s nostril, and had changed the dressing of a man who’d lost his right hand to a saw in the lumber mill. He had complimented Frank’s grandmother’s cooking, said it smelled wonderful, and he was going to sit a minute by the open window and listen to the music someone was playing in the house next door. Then he took off his coat, sat down, and died.

She wasn’t cooking, his grandmother said; the raw chicken was still there in the sink, alongside a colander of peeled potatoes, and there was no music coming in from the outside. This was her story and one she told for the rest of her life. “I witnessed him smelling and hearing another place,” she said. “It makes me feel hopeful.”