There were good times, there were things he loved, and yet he had never revealed that to anyone, not even to Lil until that first day they came to look. That was when he told her how much he had loved that tree, and the river with its cold brown water, and the little pavilion that had a skating rink and swings. He loved the movie theater downtown and the way the whole town smelled like cured tobacco in the late summer. He liked that his mother seemed peaceful and settled with it all. Quite simply, he had grown to love the town, warts and all, but he’d never learned to have a foot in each place, an ability Lil had always possessed, half in the present and half in the past.

On the way, they had passed long stretches of flat, dusty fields, and he was aware of both the simple beauty and the poverty, neither of which he had noticed as a young man. There were small trailers and lopsided houses, some looking abandoned and left to deteriorate, and yet there was a car, a satellite dish—barren dirt yards and old recliners on front porches, discarded broken furniture in heaps alongside the road. And then in the midst of it all, there was life, work shirts and sheets on a line, a cheerful Easter wreath on a battered screen door; a barefooted child smiling and waving a dirty hand, an old woman watching him from the stoop, where she sat with a cigarette and a bag of chips. That’s what he and Lil saw that first ride over.

“Don’t look so sad,” she had said, as if reading his mind. “There might be a warm, soapy bath at the end of that child’s day, someone who loves him there to say good night.” She said she thought that child might be standing there feeling sorry for them, old people out riding around because they were too old to play ball or swing from trees. “He might say, ‘Did you see those old wrinkled people with nowhere to go? They didn’t have any chips either.’”

The young woman had opened the door, chain lock still in place, and asked if she could help him, and that young boy, with a shock of dark hair that stood out in all kinds of cowlicks, squeezed against her and looked out as well. He was wearing a bushy fake mustache that hung low over his mouth and a bright-green towel tied around his neck like a cape. Frank has seen him in the yard other times when he passed, walking a figure eight with a big pine branch thrust forward like a sword—round and round, lemniscate, infinity. Frank had caught a glimpse of the inside of their house that day; the southern-facing window of the dining room where his mother had hung lace curtains now had venetian blinds that were closed tight.