“If you’re going to walk out there, please take the phone,” Lil had said the first time he went. They had just moved in, and Lil was unpacking, Becca and her girls there to help. She handed him that awful thing Becca had bought and given to them, the Jitterbug—an oversized phone with gigantic numbers, like they might be stupid—and he pulled Lil off to the side where Becca couldn’t hear and said, “Absolutely not.” He said, “I’d rather die on the tracks,” and he said if their children really wanted to talk to them, then let them call on the real phone or write a letter or keep coming over; he said if he needed a phone, he’d do what he had always done, find a pay phone, or stop at a gas station and ask to borrow one.

Now Frank has an iPhone like everyone else, and for him that’s all it is, a phone, just like the computer is nothing more than a typewriter. He believes totally in history, and the endless cycle of those civilizations that advance so far out on the limb that it snaps and sends them right back down to the dirt that birthed them. Study the graves and the caves and what was most necessary in life and you will find that it was the simplest things: utensils and tools for eating and drinking and staying warm; the occasional object there in the skeletal hand—totem, toy, relic.

He pulls off the highway and inches up into the pines, where the car is shaded from the heat. The air is heavy and humid, starlings screaming from the trees. It’s very different from where he and Lil live, with their house tucked into that golf course that could be anywhere or a part of a movie set. But here, there is something primal, which strikes him every time he comes, the heavy rails stretching in either direction, the dusty fields, and the hot cloudless sky. So much about being there feels like a time warp, like he might turn around and see his stepfather standing there in an awkward attempt at having a conversation. But of course there are all the differences, too: litter in the roadside ditches, beer and soda cans, scraps of fast-food meals, cigarette wrappers and butts. He has even seen on these recent visits syringes and condoms tossed to the ground and finds himself wondering what on earth these tall, scraggly pines have witnessed at night. He doesn’t even want to imagine. A car roars past, muffler in need of repair, and someone yells something unintelligible, which makes him feel vulnerable and old, as well as ashamed that he is so aware of his privilege, and of his instinct to run to the safety of his car.