He’s forgetting, and faster with each day it seems. Her notes remind him of the little stickers in all of their windows, opaque maple leaves that are supposed to warn the birds, and yet they stubbornly keep slamming into the glass, a desperate act not unlike when he caught Lil abandoning the tubes and portable oxygen tank to wander out onto the porch to smoke. “Just one,” she said. “One little puff.”

Frank is tired of desperation, tired of forgetting.

Several times now he has skipped an appointment and instead driven to see his childhood home and the train tracks where his father died over seventy years ago. The last time he went, he felt guilty deceiving Lil; she had waved a Post-it note at him: Appointment. Today. Cardiology. Her ability to remember the present was completely eclipsed by the past—filled with the minutiae of the past—while the present was a trail of notes that resembled a board game, which took them to lunch and then to dinner, to pay a bill, watch a movie, with spurts of television news or a call from one of their kids or the knock of a neighbor he likely did not care to see in between. That particular day, he had come home to more notes: The doctor called. You missed your appointment. Where were you? Advance two steps. Do not pass go.

They say he needs a valve replacement. His daughter hounds him about that valve replacement, no longer willing to accept his excuses of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” because she says it is broke; it does need to be fixed. They say it is so much better these days, that his is like an old rusty screen door, though he and Lil had grown used to hearing it years ago, the rhythmic ticking.

“We will always remember this,” Lil sometimes said with a quiet, calm resolve that assured him that the two of them were in a good place. She signed her notes with the little face that made them both laugh, a face that looked like The Scream—round eyes and oval mouth; it was their daughter’s trademark as a four-year-old, her archaeological signature, her “Kilroy was here,” and she left it everywhere, crayoned behind drapes, scratched into the arm of the leather sofa, penciled inside books and on her bedroom door. Becca was the child always documenting and remembering, begging for souvenirs everywhere they went—little license plates with her name, snow globes, cheap dolls. Her drawers were filled with rocks and feathers and leaves and bottle caps. She loved to hide little pieces of Halloween candy everywhere, so she continued to eat it well into November.