“I lived here,” he had told her. “My stepfather is the one who ordered this house from Sears; my mother planted the rosebushes.” It was clear that she didn’t want to ask him in. “I would love to come inside, show my wife.” He had turned and pointed to Lil, who had lifted her hand and waved. “We wouldn’t stay long.”

The woman had paused then, one hand on the boy’s head, as if she were considering it all, but then said she was sorry. “Another day would be better. My husband isn’t home, and he knows more about the house,” she said, and before Frank could say anything else, she closed the door.

Frank’s memories of Preston’s house are as vivid in his mind as the house on Andover Street, as if all of his focus during those years was on whatever minutiae surrounded him. He recalled arriving and finding his mother in bed, her ankle broken, her shoulder broken, her stomach swollen with Horace, and this stranger catering to her every need. Frank had stood looking out on the backyard that very first day, fists stuffed deep in his pockets, and then he had turned to see a picture hanging on the wall of the dining room of someone laid out in a coffin. At first he couldn’t believe what he was seeing and stepped closer to examine it. He had never seen a dead person except in the movies.

“That’s my mother,” Preston told him, as if there were nothing at all strange about the photo being there. “When she died, we realized we had no likeness of her. So we had that taken. She was a wonderful woman.”

Frank didn’t know what to say, so he just stood there studying the image: a padded casket lid open, an old woman in a black dress with her hands folded on her chest, where she had a Bible and some flowers. He waited until he heard Preston leave the room, and then he made his way outside into the sunlight and the baked brick stoop—the heat he grew to find comforting that summer, like being swaddled in down, the same way he was drawn to the distant shimmering mirages when he looked up and down the rails, urging him forward step by step.