ACT I: THE CALL

Tony called at six in the morning, which meant either something was wrong or something was possible. Frank knew this the way he knew that the night shift at Walmart meant his hands would smell like cardboard until noon.

"There's gold in the old mine," Tony said. No hello. No how are you. Just the proposition, dropped like a stone into water.

Frank was making coffee in his apartment above the laundromat on Elm Street. He set the phone on the counter and stirred three packets of sugar into the mug because that was all he had left and sugar was cheaper than cream.

"What old mine?"

"The one outside town. The one Dad keeps talking about. The one with the golden fox."

Frank looked at the coffee, then at the wall, then at the phone. "There's no golden fox, Tony."

"Doesn't matter if there is. Dad said there's gold down there. That's what matters."

Frank hung up. He finished his coffee. He put on his Walmart vest and went to work.

He should not have gone back. He knew this. But at eleven that morning, while folding shirts on the third floor of the supercenter, he thought about his father sitting in his recliner in the house on South Street, muttering to himself, and he thought about Tony and the other eight siblings who had never once asked him how he was doing, and he thought about the old mine, and he decided that whatever was down there—gold or nothing—it would be better to find out than to spend the rest of his life wondering.

He called in sick. He drove to his father's house. His father was not there, which was not surprising. His father was never there when you needed him to be.

He called Tony. They met at the mine entrance at two in the afternoon.

ACT II: THE HOLE

The mine was not much of a mine. It was a hole in the side of a hill that had been dug in the 1890s by men who thought they were going to strike it rich and ended up striking nothing but coal dust and disappointment. The entrance was caved in about halfway, leaving a gap wide enough for a man to crawl through if he did not mind scraping his shoulders.

Frank went through first. Tony followed. They did not bring ropes. They did not bring much of anything except two flashlights that were probably not going to last the hour.

The mine was cold and smelled of wet iron and something that might have been urine. The floor was uneven, covered in loose rock and the skeletal remains of a mine cart that had rusted into a shape that was no longer recognizable as a cart. Frank's flashlight beam fell on bottles—glass bottles, empty, some of them still bearing labels from companies that had gone out of business before Frank's father was born.

"Over here," Tony said, and his voice echoed in a way that made Frank realize how deep they were.

They found a junction. Left or right. Tony went left. Frank followed.

The passage opened into a chamber that was larger than the rest, with walls that had been shored up with timber that was now soft as bread. In the center of the chamber was a pile of something that gleamed in the flashlight beam.

"Gold," Tony whispered.

Frank walked toward it. He knelt. He picked up the gleaming thing. It was a bottle cap. Copper. From a beer that had been opened maybe a hundred years ago.

He set it down. He did not say anything.

ACT III: THE DARK

They were in the mine for three days. Not because they were searching for gold—though they pretended to—but because the mine was bigger than it looked, and the passages twisted in ways that made it impossible to find the way back, and by the time they realized this, it was dark and cold and there was nothing to do except sit on the floor of a mine and wait for morning.

On the first night, they argued. About whose fault it was that they were lost. About how the mine maps from the 1920s showed a different layout than what they were seeing. About whether their father had ever been smart enough to know where the gold was.

On the second night, they stopped arguing. The cold had gotten into their bones, and the cold made talking difficult. They sat in a circle, backs against the wall, flashlights off, listening to the sound of water dripping somewhere in the dark. It was a sound that Frank had heard his whole life—in his father's house, in his father's sleep, in the pipes that ran through the walls of every old building in this forgotten town. Water dripping. Water dripping. Water dripping.

On the second night, his father spoke.

Old Stan had been sitting apart from the others, as he always did, in the place where the light did not reach. He was muttering, as he always did, but tonight the words were different. Tonight they were clear.

"I came to this country with nothing," he said. "No money. No family. No English. I worked in the mine for twenty years and I lost a leg and I came home to your mother and she was pregnant with Frank and I was happy. I was happy because I had her and I had you and that was more than I had right to have."

Frank sat very still. His father never talked like this. His father talked about mines and gold and foxes and nothing else. But tonight, in the dark, he was talking about his mother, who had been dead fifteen years, and about Frank, who he rarely spoke to except to ask for money he would never repay.

"I gave everything to your mother," he said. "Everything I made. Everything I had. And when she died, I had nothing left to give except the stories. The mine stories. The gold stories. Because they were the only stories I had that made me feel like I had given you something real."

Frank did not know what to say. He said nothing.

ACT IV: THE SURFACE

They got out on the morning of the third day. Not because they found the way, but because Frank stood up and started walking in what felt like the right direction and the others followed, because following was easier than deciding.

The mine entrance was where they expected it to be. The grey light of a Rust Belt morning greeted them like an old enemy. Tony fell to his knees and vomited. One of the younger siblings, a man named Ray who had been addicted to heroin for six years and had not been clean for more than a month at a time, began to cry without sound, his shoulders shaking, his face buried in his hands.

They walked to Frank's car. They did not speak. They got in. Frank drove.

They did not find gold. They did not find a golden fox. They did not find anything except what was already there: a hole in the ground, a town that had been forgotten, a father who had told his children stories because stories were all he had, and eight siblings who had come looking for money and found something worse—the truth that there was no money coming, that no one was coming to save them, that the only thing they had was each other and the terrible burden of knowing it.

Tony was the first to speak when they stopped at a gas station on the edge of town. He looked at Frank, his face still pale, his eyes red-rimmed, and he said, "Thanks."

It was the first time Tony had ever said thank you to Frank. It was also the last time he would ask him for money. Frank knew this the way he knew things: without being able to explain how he knew.

He drove his father home. He helped him into the recliner. He made him a cup of coffee and set it on the table and sat down across from him and watched him drink.

"Did you find it?" his father asked, his eyes cloudy but not entirely gone.

"No, Dad," Frank said. "There was no gold."

His father nodded. He did not look disappointed. He looked, for a moment, perfectly clear-eyed and perfectly sad and perfectly himself.

"I know," he said. "I know there wasn't."

Frank sat in his father's house on a grey afternoon in the rust belt town that nobody talked about anymore and he did not know what to do next and he was okay with that. For the first time in his life, he was okay with not knowing.