Frank will never forget the look of shock on her face when he said this; it was if she was hearing the news for the first time.

He was about to walk and meet Millie Rogers to go to the movies. It was 1949, and they were going to go see a movie called A Letter to Three Wives, which he wasn’t big on but his date was. Millie was the kind of girl everyone noticed, because she was pretty and smart, and her father owned a department store, and it felt good to be with a girl like that. It gave him clout without him having to do a thing, and it also left him there in the shadows while she glowed in the spotlight. Millie Rogers could twirl a fire baton, and when he put his hand on her thigh during the movie, she didn’t move it.

He was thinking of all this but not breaking eye contact with his mother. “Dad was dead. We could have had a funeral at our church in our town, and we could be visiting that cemetery. That’s where we would be right now.”

“We couldn’t find him,” she said. “I couldn’t find him.”

She began to cry, and Frank lost all thoughts of Millie Rogers then. Part of him wanted to lash out at his mother, and the other part wanted to hug her. He was almost afraid to breathe, and so he did nothing.

“And I was pregnant. I was pregnant and I was afraid I might lose the baby, and that was all we had left of him, and I had broken bones, a shoulder and an ankle. They said I was so lucky.” She wiped her eyes and looked at him until he had to look away, over at the mantel clock. Millie would be on her porch waiting; they would surely miss the cartoons if he didn’t hurry. “Lucky,” she said, “because the baby was okay, and because I still had you, Frank.”

He doesn’t remember what else was said, just that when he got to Millie’s, she was out on the sidewalk, waiting, and silent through the whole brisk walk to the theater, though by the end of the movie she had leaned her shoulder in close to his, and all was forgiven. And, of course, he always thought of the unspoken, the way that he had wished himself onto that train, there between his parents, a wish that had it been granted, could have been his last wish.