His mother had said things she needed to say at the end of her life, and so did Preston, whether Frank wanted to hear them or not, and both times he wondered, Why now? Why tell me this now?

Preston had said, “I fell in love with your mother when I saw her, and I felt bad, so help me God, because nothing in my life had ever happened to me like that.” Preston was in his bed at home, and Frank sat beside him looking out the window to where he is standing right this minute. The sycamore was off to the left, and there was a picture of Frank’s mother on the dresser looking as she did when they had first arrived here, a woman in her early thirties, the photo taken in Boston, in fact, on a day when she would have returned to their home on Andover Street and at the end of the day climbed into bed beside Frank’s father.

“There she was, grieving and pregnant with another man’s child, bloody with a shattered ankle and shoulder,” Preston had said, “and I thought she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.” He said he had always felt so ashamed of that, and then he told how he had always wished she would say that he had made her life so much better, but she never did. She said she was grateful. She said she was comfortable, but it was clear to him that none of it even came close to matching what she had once had. “I always hoped for more,” Preston said. “Even though maybe I didn’t deserve it.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Frank had asked. He had come alone to see him, Lil back home with the kids and all their activities: Girl Scouts and football and carpools. When he’d called her early that morning, she had told him they had a big freeze, leaving the rhododendron drooped and coated in ice, but there in North Carolina, it was like spring, and he had left Preston for a minute to go and peer down into the vault, the hatch hinges rusty, cobwebs filling the space. He could see the mason jar of flattened pennies in the far corner, the old rusty church key, just as he had left it. He had planned to go down there later that afternoon after Horace arrived and when he had changed out of his good clothes, but everything had happened so quickly that he spent the afternoon making funeral arrangements instead.

“I convinced her to stay,” Preston had said. The bag by his bed was filled with dark urine, and his hands looked nothing like Frank could recall; they were thin and pale, so different from those coarse tan ones searching for quarters behind ears and stealing noses.

Frank had put his hand on top of Preston’s. “My dad asked that she not leave him.”