The sun is so bright and hot he squints into the distance and to the place he needs to be. Not much farther. His shirt is completely damp, and he wipes his forehead with his handkerchief. He has walked this stretch of rail more times than he can count. To those seated on a passing train, this must look like the middle of nowhere. All those pennies on the track flattened—bitter copper—angering his mother, her face flushed when he had stood with the flattened piece in his hand. He can’t stop thinking of all that, and wondering if they are still where he hid them. People talk about their bucket lists; well, there you go. His markers along the tracks have changed, but he knows he has reached the spot, and he stops and takes a deep breath. Birdsong fills the trees, and the distant cars come and go like ocean waves.

Preston is the one who had told Frank that it was believed most of the people in those cars died instantly. It was in the early years of their relationship, and Frank had questioned most of what his stepfather said. It seemed any acceptance was a direct affront to the memory of his father. The stories of those lost were too painful to hear, and yet what choice was there: so many young servicemen heading home, German immigrants from Long Island, probably so happy to have escaped their homeland before all the ugliness took it; a couple and their seven-week-old baby, and they were also from Lowell. His grandmother had read that part aloud from the paper, and he always meant to ask his mother if she had connected with that young family along the way, perhaps in the train station or while on board, if they had found this connection of babies and home. His mother would have asked where they lived, and then she would have said, “I live on Andover,” and the street name would have been enough.

In the early years of their marriage, Frank and Lil had looked at a house on Trull Lane, right off of Andover. Lil loved it—the young neighborhood and families, the nice backyard, and it was so convenient to his teaching—but at the last minute, he realized that he hated the proximity to the life that got away. The house had been painted gray, and there were heavy-looking curtains up in his window, where there had once just been that simple shade with the bone ring. It was a relief not to have to pass by it each day.