The image of Preston’s dead mother stayed with him for a long time, even though it was clear Preston had gotten the message, either from Frank’s reaction or perhaps Frank’s mother made a request, because the photo was not there the next day, replaced instead by a calendar from the local hardware store, which Frank’s mother then later replaced with the coupling of those paintings The Blue Boy and Pinkie, like so many homes at that time. Lil called them “the Depressing Duo”—and during the only visit they all made when the children were young, Frank overheard her tell Becca and Jeff that at night Blue Boy left his frame and jumped into Pinkie’s. She didn’t tell them that Pinkie’s portrait was to commemorate a twelve-year-old girl dead too soon, and he was relieved they never found out. In Lil’s version, Pinkie was a party girl, talking and laughing so much that Blue Boy asked her to be quiet. Frank was also relieved the kids didn’t discover the root cellar in the backyard, something he wasn’t ready to share, not even with Lil.

That visit, he had pried open the lid and peeked into cobwebs and darkness; he had shined his flashlight to see his jar still there, the rickety chair.

Preston had dug and lined it like a vault—for keeping things cool or escaping a tornado or, God forbid, some kind of air raid—with a tiny ladder leading down to where no more than four people would even fit. “It’s like a grave,” Frank’s mother had said, shaking her head and then turning away. Soon after, Preston more or less conceded that maybe it wasn’t a great idea after all, and other than storing some canned tomatoes and peaches, he let Frank take it over as his camp.

At the end of her life, Frank’s mother began talking when it was just the two of them, always with a kind of urgency, so that no one else heard her. “I’m so sorry, Frank,” she said, Preston in the kitchen fixing a pot of coffee. It took some long minutes, and Frank’s coaxing, before she finally completed her thought. “I’m sorry I took you from our home.” She said that she had been so happy there it was too painful to imagine going back. She just couldn’t picture that house without his father in it.

“Can you see?” she asked.

Preston came in about that time, and she closed her eyes again, easing into the faint shallow breath of earlier.

“She asks that a lot,” Preston told him, his large fumbling hands more helpless than ever. “She says, ‘Can you see?’ But I’m not really sure what she means, and so I just say that I do.”