Returning to his office, he opened the FedEx and signed the documents. Would he ever go back to Pisgah? The younger people had left for bigger cities, the older—those who could afford it—for Florida or Arizona. Nora and Walter lived in Jeff City now, with their six big blond boys. The radiation treatment for Nora’s acne had caused melanoma. Her nose had to be removed, reconstructed, and covered with skin from her forehead, resulting in a smooth, utterly symmetrical face that was perfect, but not her. On his last trip to Pisgah he had run into Miss Kelly. Overjoyed, she had performed a spontaneous little dance, like that of a mechanical ballerina in a music box. Frank had only been back once, for Jude’s wedding, where he got so drunk he fell over and cut his head open. Last anyone heard he was in Alaska, a world of men. Bennet and his cronies replaced the old guys on the porch of the Franklin and spent their last years in penny-ante purgatory. All dead now, except Finn, waiting on that porch like a child whose parents have forgotten to pick him up from kindergarten. Clyde too was still alive, his heart stubbornly beating, though Alzheimer’s had eaten his brain clean away. He was in a private nursing home in St. Louis, paid for by the interest on the more than two million dollars that had come to him a few years ago from Pela and Olenka’s Cincinnati bank account. During a bad winter, the sisters had been found huddled together beneath a blanket on the floor of their kitchen, dead from hypothermia. So Clyde, their son-in-law, who had lived in relentless poverty all his life, had been left a fortune when he was just a shell. Could there be any more poignant or ironic fate than that?

Raj returned to the bedroom to close the window. Gone. Pisgah. He thought of those dusty country roads lined with blue chicory, Annie walking between him and Lew, Fifty-Three loping ahead, snapping at bugs. A beautiful place: hummingbirds in the honeysuckle vines, bumblebees in the hollyhocks, shocks of corn becoming embers at sunset. Nostalgia. But he let himself feel it because he understood also that when the crows took the fields, and winter returned, so too would the old injuries, passions, resentments. Regrets. Lew. Lew. Lew. Would he ever stop seeing it? Or waking in the night with that terrifying sensation of falling?