Frank did not inherit his father’s gift or desire to be a surgeon, and in fact was teased in high school biology for getting light-headed when formaldehyde frogs were splayed out in front of him on a lab table. He was much more in sync with his father’s father, a general practitioner of that earlier generation, when so much was diagnosed by clues—the eyes, the by-products, the gums, the reflexes. His grandfather always said that what he did was not unlike someone unraveling a mystery, and he taught Frank to put all the pieces together like a puzzle, like the blind men trying to describe an elephant and each bringing forward a different part. “The real value is when you can put it all in context,” his grandfather had said many times, and he might’ve said those words when they learned Frank’s father had died, but of course that was impossible, since his grandfather had died the year before.

The real value is when you can put it all in context, son. Decipher it, solve the riddle. Memory had taken two fragments of Frank’s life—both true—and lined them up to provide a story. He thinks about it all a lot these days, the different parts of life, what he and Lil have jokingly called the long limp to home plate, something not as funny as it used to be. Both his father and grandfather had died way too young—his grandfather in his early sixties, and his father barely forty. Out at third. Out at second. Often, it had been easier to think of them that way, briefly out, but still in the dugout, just waiting for another inning.

Frank’s grandfather was thin and always impeccably dressed—suspenders and bow tie and long sleeves on even the hottest of days, a wry, bemused smile that always suggested there was more to learn and understand. In 1973, when a physician with the last name Frank made the discovery of what is known as “Frank’s sign”—a crease in the earlobe that might suggest cardiovascular disease or diabetes—Frank felt closer than ever to those childhood exchanges, as if he could hear his grandfather calling out to him from the grave: Think, Frank. Look, Frank. Your job is to find the clues and put them together. Frank was nearing retirement before it occurred to him that his grandfather’s words had likely been what led him to an interest in history and archeology in the first place; so much of life was such a mystery that it was satisfying to hold a solid object for study and enlightenment, classification. How often had he stood in front of a class and held up a skull or a leg bone and asked the students to imagine the body that once housed it. Did it have scales? Feathers? Fur?