I learned about it—well, not that he died of AIDS, because no one would have talked about that in Coalfield, even in the nineties—when I was in college, making out with Aaron. My mom called to tell me that he had died. She said that he’d passed away in his sleep, and I immediately wondered about my backpack, if he had kept it, if his sister would find it. I had been too embarrassed to retrieve it when I still lived in Coalfield, wanted to preserve the possibility that our entire interaction had been a dream. But now, knowing someone else might stumble upon it, I was so nervous, because my backpack had my initials sewn onto it, something my mom had paid ten dollars extra to get, and that seemed like the dumbest way possible to have this discovered. “What do you think will happen to his belongings?” I asked my mom, and immediately I thought, What the fuck are you doing, Frankie?

“What, sweetie?” she asked.

“Uhhhh, hmm, um, well, like, do you think, like, there will be an estate sale or anything? Or will a museum want them? He was an artist, right? Might be some neat stuff. I might come back to Coalfield to bid on something.”

“Honey, did you smoke weed?” she asked. “A museum is not going to take Mr. Avery’s stuff. He was not that famous of an artist.”

And then I felt really sad because I did want to get my backpack so I wouldn’t get discovered, but I also wanted his haori, to wear it as I walked across campus. But instead, I just told my mom that I had to go study. And we never talked about it again. As far as I know, my backpack is still somewhere in his sister’s house. I now wondered if Mazzy had found it, but I was getting way ahead of myself. I had eaten seven of the burgers already. I needed to slow down. I had to let Mazzy tell me what she knew, so I could figure out what she didn’t know.

Mazzy said, “And finally, after Henrietta had unearthed from various basements and barns, and even a few friends’ houses, every single painting of Henry’s in existence, she then gave me this huge bundle of letters from Randolph Avery. I mean, they must have written to each other at least once or twice a week until Avery died.”

I imagined that, somewhere in his sister’s house in Coalfield, all of Mr. Avery’s letters from Henry were hidden away, perhaps in the same place as my book bag.