"Well Daddy, is there anything you'd like to say before it's over?" queries Frank's eldest daughter in an effort to get him to air any regrets from the disheveled full-sized bed he used to share with her mother.
"Don't know what to tell you, sweetie," he sighs, his bone-thin frame breaking into a shiver before cryptically whispering out into the cramped second-floor bedroom:
"Wish I could have seen Francis's little girl in West Virginia."
Francis was his estranged twin. Formerly inseparable since their post-influenza birth in 1919, they'd seen each other only twice in the fifty years since running away from the turmoil of home in western Pennsylvania soon after their seventeenth birthday.
The upheaval started when Frank and Francis were ten and the Third National Bank of Pittsburgh closed doors on their father Orville's operating cash. His buses had limped along on declining fares, soon to be supplemented by expansion of a side gig leftover from Prohibition.
Whiskey may have temporarily saved the bus company, but it also destroyed their lives with increasingly drunken binges. Orville's last straw at domesticity came when the twins big sister and primary caretaker turned up pregnant without a suitor.
It didn't take long for his wife Ellen to put two-and-two together, booting the old man and reporting him to the Pennsylvania State Police. She took on sewing and cleaning to keep the formerly prosperous home going even as her older children plotted their escapes. Now thirteen-year-olds, Frank and Francis left school after seventh grade to work in the nearby oil fields, eventually fleeing as soon as they could drive.
And drive they did in opposite directions and away from their twin for the first time in their lives.
"What little girl in West Virginia?" the daughter blurts, attempting to hide her alarm from him and her mom who's been fretting about up and down the stairs in and out of earshot.
"Just leave it be," Frank begs, wincing to roll away onto his side.
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