“He got a job teaching high school. And he confided to a group of students about this discovery he’d made about himself. And that led to someone telling someone else until the school had to investigate. He got fired. It’s the only job he ever cared about. He was born to teach, you know? But no one would hire him, so he went from job to job, only working to keep his habit going, until the habit got bigger than the job, then he started stealing and getting caught and getting fired. Then he started stealing from my parents, then our grandparents. My grandmother found him hiding under her bed, trying to make off with her jewelry. She called the cops on him and my father refused to let anyone post bail for him. He detoxed in jail.

“He started using again as soon as he got out, just to spite our dad, I think, to prove he was still in control. He wasn’t in control, but he hadn’t found bottom yet. Bottom was a long way down. We had nothing to do with him, not even when he went into rehab the first time. Not when he was almost dead in the hospital. And then when he got clean, he didn’t want anything to do with us. Then he reached out. He’s been in a real good place. I never would have thought…”

“He wasn’t always good,” she said after a while. “But he was better, wasn’t he?”

“For a long time,” I said. “When did you hear from him last?”

“When you were down in the city,” Casey said. “He said you were down there and told me where you were staying and I remember I said, ‘is it because of the horse?’ And he got real excited. ‘What do you know about the horse?’ he said. I told him that everybody knows about it. ‘Tell me,’ he said. I told him that some guy has an old circus horse that comes and lies down in the street in front of the hotel sometimes. ‘The woman at the hotel said she didn’t know anything about it,’ he said. ‘She’s probably just tired of talking about it,’ I told him. ‘It’s in all the guidebooks.’ He started laughing, laughing really hard. He said it had been bothering him. ‘You don’t even know what hotel you’re staying in,’ I said. He laughed some more. He said you were going to laugh too.”

“He wouldn’t do anything until he figured it out,” I said. “And it’s true about the hotel. They acted stupid about the whole thing.”

Casey laughed. “Frank had his superstitions, didn’t he?”

“Always?”