Out of the hundreds of people who came to see Frank all laid out at the front of the room, I recognized a couple dozen. We hugged and cried and I didn’t tell them anything, as bad as I wanted to. It was better to keep it all to myself, until I knew more. For all I knew the person who was with Frank when he died was in the room. It had to be someone he knew, I thought. The room was full of addicts. The closest I came to explaining anything was with the man who ran the rehab center.

“Where were you when it happened?” he wanted to know.

“Asleep,” I told him. “We’d been down in the city for a couple of days. I woke up and Frank was gone.”

“Anything happen out of the ordinary?”

I shook my head and then changed my mind. I would tell him one thing. “We were in a fender bender, nothing bad.”

“Sometimes that’s enough,” he said. “Or maybe it has nothing to do with it. It’s hard to tell sometimes. Sometimes you never know.”

—

I tried not to look at Frank, but he always seemed to be in the corner of my eye. People approached, usually coming from taking a look at him, and Frank would be there in the background, lying there in the coffin. I didn’t want to see that. I didn’t want to know anything about it. Froehmer had taken care of it, just like he said he would, but I was left with the thought that Frank was going to be buried in someone else’s clothes.