Frank stares into the night, willing the lights of St. Martinville to appear in the distance. The man sits silently in the driver’s seat beside him, wearing the same hard expression he’s been wearing since he first appeared tonight. His wife sits in the truck bed, even though Frank had already climbed up there himself when they were ready to go. But the woman insisted that he ride inside the cab—so that he could direct them more easily to the cemetery, she’d said. And so she sits with the tombstone, her back against the cab window, watching the road behind them disappear into the night.
Frank looks at the clock on the dashboard: eleven-thirty. It was later than he’d thought it was when he climbed into the truck, a good deal later; now every time he checks the clock desperation courses through his body. The promise of seeing his son one last time has today been sustenance to Frank, has kept at bay thoughts of tomorrow, thoughts of the future, when Willie is gone. Now, Willie is alive. Still, Willie is alive. Frank still can tell himself that he will see his son again, and this has been a comfort whose magnitude he hadn’t recognized until now.
The man’s voice breaks the silence. “Sorry about your boy.”
Frank glances over at the man. He does not know how to respond, and so he simply nods once to acknowledge the condolence. “Sir,” he mumbles.
“Where was he stationed?” The man asks this without taking his eyes off the road.
Frank swallows. He has never been one to be untruthful, but the lie came so easily when the woman asked him how his son had died. It makes him feel uneasy to have blamed the war, as if in saying this he will have made it true, and now he will lose Darryl, too. But what else was he to say? He brings a hand to his face and with forefinger and thumb rubs his eyes.
“Sorry,” he hears the man say. “Understand if you don’t want to talk.”
Frank lowers his hand and looks over at the man, whose eyes dart back and forth between Frank and the road ahead. Frank nods. “Obliged,” he says. “For everything.”
The man returns his gaze exclusively to the road, where, when Frank follows suit, he sees St. Martinville up ahead. Frank shuts his eyes in thanks.
“Show me which way to go up here,” the man says.
The cemetery is on the north side of town, not far from the river, but Frank says nothing as they drive past the street they’d need to take to get there. “This way,” he says, a minute later, and points to a street that leads in the opposite direction.