“Please don’t go stand on the tracks, Frank.” The tone in Lil’s voice, her worried frown, was so familiar to him. His own mother had said the same thing. “Please, Frank,” she had said, “don’t stand on the tracks,” and by then, he could drive a car, he could do any damn thing he wanted to, except he wasn’t yet legal age, so he couldn’t leave. He couldn’t join the service yet; he couldn’t go off to college. He was a sophomore in high school, dating a girl who had lived in that town her whole life, and so had her parents before her, in a house on Elm Street. He liked her. Truth is, he liked a lot of the people there, even though he didn’t always let on to his mother. It was easier, if unkind, to make her listen to him wondering about all the friends he had known in their other home, his real home, he said, his real life, and watch her turn away in sadness.

“You’re the one who brought me here!” he finally told her, raising his voice in a way he had never done.

His father had been a relatively soft-spoken man—there were never any arguments that he could recall—and his stepfather was silent much of the time, though when he did talk, it was often with a kind of humor Frank had never before witnessed. He was the sort of man who if nervous would do things like pull a quarter from behind your ear or pretend to steal your nose. Horace, ten years younger than Frank, had never known any other father but Preston, with his kind, dark eyes and solemn expression, clothes dusty from his tobacco fields. “Got your nose, son,” Preston would say, and Horace would laugh and laugh, their mother smiling that sweet, weak smile Frank had always associated with the way she looked at people with some infirmity that led her to express pity.

“Here’s a nickel. Oops, no, there’s a nickel,” Preston had said, his beefy, tan hand rustling behind Horace’s dark, curly hair—their father’s hair.

“Just give him the goddamned nickel,” Frank said, and he knew his mother wanted to slap him; he could see her jaw go tight before she turned and rushed forward in a loud, overly cheerful way to make something of that simple stupid magic trick.

“Please don’t go stand on the tracks, Frank,” his mother would say, and he finally asked her why. Wasn’t that her reason for staying down here? He asked why she had made such an awful choice to leave their home, the only home they had ever known.

“I stayed because I couldn’t leave,” she said. “And because your dad was here.”

“He was dead!”