But he never saw her look that way again. There was happiness in her life in the years to follow, sure, there was goodness, and even times she laughed, but it was never the way it was before that night; that expression was another thing that got left behind in the house on Andover Street, cemented in his mind as firmly as his own initials in the concrete foundation of the porch. He once tried to explain all of this to his younger brother, but they didn’t get very far, their histories so different. Horace grew up with a mother who was serious and quiet, the pensive and kind wife of a farmer in eastern North Carolina, and Frank’s mother was the cheerful, bright-faced wife of a surgeon in New England. Horace was his whole brother, but only DNA could prove such a thing, because they’d grown up in two separate families.

The facts were simple when written down, and Frank had been called upon to tell them for years. The simpler and faster the better when someone said, “Oh no, I am so sorry. What happened?” It was the middle of the night, and the southbound train derailed and landed on the northbound track between small southern towns, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, on a night when snow covered the ground, there in a part of the world where such was a rare occurrence. The people got off, only one person seriously harmed, and huddled there, waiting for help and relieved that the accident had not been worse. But it was dark and icy, and the man sent ahead to issue a warning slipped and broke the fusee he had intended to light to alert the other engineer, and on and on—one thing leading to another and another, mistakes and missteps and human error leading to the crash that shook those early morning hours, barely past midnight, jolting passengers, many of them soldiers like his father, who had managed to stay alive in the war and then were on their way home for Christmas, perhaps waking just in time to realize their lives were over.