But then Preston told him something else, something Frank has kept to himself all these years, simply because he didn’t want to think about it or analyze or imagine.

There is a sound in the brush, and Frank pauses, listens, probably a squirrel or a bird. He knows the root cellar has to be close if it’s still there at all. He takes a stick and pokes into the brush, the brambles catching his sleeve, but then he sees a small cleared area, and there it is, the lid covered over with loose pine straw and sticks, and a heavy rock, as if marking the spot, with a scrap of paper beneath. He steps closer and sees a makeshift tarp shelter under the low branches of myrtle, maybe the camp of that kid who lives here, or perhaps someone homeless who has wandered up from the tracks. The train is due in a little over an hour, plenty of time to try once more to see inside the house and then to return. From here, the brambles and hedge so high, he can see only the roofline, and the stone chimney Preston built himself.

“Can you imagine building a chimney like this, Frank?” his mother had asked one night over dinner—though then they would have said “supper.” “Preston spent hours working, all those stones cut just right and then fitting them there.” At the time, Frank avoided making eye contact with his mother or Preston, who was seated right across from him, his thinning hair slicked back from his shower, and Frank stared into his butter beans—he remembers so clearly the beans on that pale-yellow plate—and said that, yes, of course he could, but now he stares at the structure, thinking about Preston cutting and hauling stones—stone by stone—at the end of what had already been a ten-hour workday, and he feels that awful wave of regret, wishes he’d been kinder, had asked his advice and opinion about things, this man who stepped in as husband and father, his whole life relinquished to being the runner-up.

If Frank could talk to his mother now, he would want to say what Lil had said years ago: that she was young and afraid and grieving, and what else could she do? His mother had heard her dying husband say, “Don’t leave me,” and so she didn’t, but Preston told Frank that what he had heard was “Please shoot me,” someone trapped and begging to die. Frank wanted to ask why he was telling that. Why now? But he chose to just listen because what did it matter? “I didn’t tell the truth,” Preston had said. Truth, Maat—a word that originally referred to a measuring device, a stick or a reed. Measure it. Weigh it. Heart of my mother.

Shelley