I remember my father teaching me to build the frame of a paper lantern. The frame splintered in my hands and the lantern wouldn’t fly when we lit the candle. I remember the sound of other boys' matches scratching and their lantern flames floating toward the branches of a tree. I carried my ruined lantern home and left it in the kitchen sink. Paper as thin as scripture fell apart in the water.

I stop at the blinking light. A car slows and passes and the fallen leaves settle in its wake. I think of the smell of autumn fires. How in the fall my father came home after dark, the scent of leaf smoke clung to his clothes. And my mother at the piano with the hymnal folded open on the music stand. The sound of her singing as she played. The smell of bonfire still in the room after she closed the fallboard.

I turn back toward the pharmacy and stop at the abandoned window. I wipe away the letters of my name. The body of the whale beached in the dust of the floor. The last time I saw my father pray, a preacher told the story of Jonah inside the fish. The smell of incense. The noise of my father’s knees as he bent forward onto the heavy wooden kneelers. I try the door of the abandoned store. I tell myself I knew it would be locked. That I would have been afraid to go inside if it hadn’t been. I imagine Jonah inside the body of a whale made of sticks. I remember another child’s lantern getting caught in the branches of a tree and all the ash that fell as the leaves began to burn. Other boys shouted and the night smelled like the smoke in my father’s clothes.

My mother comes out of the drug store. The pharmacist follows her to the sidewalk and I watch them talk. I can almost hear my mother’s voice. The pharmacist smiles and my mother smiles. She turns and waves. And I wave. She is holding a white paper bag. A car passes and I watch its reflection in the dark storefront window. I can’t remember what kind of car my father drove.

My mother comes close and the prescription pills rattle. I show her the whale through the glass.

“This used to be a junk store,” she says.

“It’s broken,” I say.

“I keep hoping someday this town will come back,” she says.

We walk past the blinking yellow light. My mother points where the shoe store was and at the law office where she sorted files when she was young. She shows me a bench with a checkerboard etched into the stone surface. On Friday nights the teenagers in town would circle the square with their windows rolled down.

“Nowhere else to go,” my mother says.

The trees around the courthouse are different shades of yellow and red.

“The color is beautiful this time of year,” she says.

I reach out and touch a leaf. I know my father once circled the square with an arm out an open window. My mother in the passenger seat drawing baby names on the back of a dinner napkin. I know the lights lit the storefront windows that Friday night and the sound of my father’s radio was loud. I think of Jonah in the dark reaching out and touching the solid shape of a wooden rib. I know my father turned the radio down and my mother whispered my name for the first time. And they circled the square again and again until they had somewhere else to go.