He told how Mrs. Brewster once showed up at their old back door with a plate of chicken feet on rice, everything boiled to a thick, goopy white, which Frank’s mother accepted graciously. “Say thank you, Frank,” she had said, while the old woman was encouraging him to take a bite, but he just stared at the gelatinous bones with horror. Surely, he thought, we will go home soon, only to later watch the man who would become his stepfather gnaw on those spindly, rough bones and pronounce that he’d had better but they weren’t terrible.

By then, it seemed his mother brightened whenever Preston was around, thanking him as well for his great generosity. How could she have ever managed her recovery and those early months with a newborn without him? And for him to make room for Frank to join them when school got out. “So generous, so very generous,” she kept saying. Preston had stayed across town with his sister so that there was no mistaking his intentions, allowing his home to serve as a convalescent spot for several survivors in those first months after the crash, and then just Frank’s mother.

“Preston was the last person to speak to your father,” she whispered to Frank that night in early summer when he was shown the small cot in the corner of what Preston called the parlor, the dark floral wallpaper making it feel like a jungle, the horsehair sofa itchy on his legs if he tried to sit there to read. The window looked on to the front porch where there was a swing, and past that the street, then a dusty dirt road with a field. He had stood there many times, looking out, willing a taxi to pull up and his mother to emerge in her traveling clothes and tell him they were going home—no, not on the train, they would take the bus—but a year later, when her leg and shoulder were healed and when Horace was crawling and into everything, it became clearer and clearer that wasn’t going to happen.

His mother’s life seemed to dead-end like that broken track, and by then his grandmother had left Lowell and moved to Worcester to live with Frank’s aunt and her husband. She missed them, but she was doing very well. She wrote to Frank that she had a little garden and cooked a lot; a black cat had taken up there, and she had decided to let him stay. She named him Midnight, after the radio show Frank liked to listen to, and she looked forward to him visiting.