Before the service began, his aunt Anne and her three silent, muscle-bound sons, all in high school now, sat in the pew directly behind Harry. He leaned back to kiss her, and she said: “I still don’t believe it, Harry,” genuine grief in her voice.

“I know,” he said, “I don’t, either.”

“I meant to call you, Harry, but I didn’t have your phone number. I spoke with Alice and she said you’d be coming home soon, but I want you to visit us as soon as you feel able to leave her alone.”

Harry said he would.

She was telling him again how she was still in shock when the service began. Harry turned back as the minister adjusted the microphone at the pulpit. He took a deep breath to prepare himself, but the service was relatively painless. The minister, except for the opening and closing prayers, kept the religion to a minimum, aware that Bill Ackerson was a twice-a-year churchgoer at most (Christmas Eve services and maybe Easter Sunday). For the eulogy she simply recounted his life story, his childhood in Maine, the Peace Corps service in the Pacific Islands, his years as a book scout and then a bookseller in Manhattan, meeting his first wife and having a son, his wife’s brave battle with cancer, then his return to Maine and his second marriage. She talked about his love of the coast of Maine. “Alice spoke to me about Bill’s need to see the ocean every day. How it grounded him. He found his true and spiritual home here in Kennewick, and for that we should all be grateful.”

Alice dipped her head next to Harry, and covered her face with her hands. He slid toward her and put an arm around her narrow shoulders. Behind him he could hear stifled crying.

After the eulogy, Carl Ridley walked gingerly to the pulpit, a trembling sheet of paper in his hand. Tears already streaked Carl’s papery cheeks before he even spread out the sheet of paper in front of him. There was a long pause, Carl smoothing back his thinning hair, but then he was speaking, saying how Bill’s office was decorated by two things: stacks and stacks of books, and one poem, tacked onto the wall. The poem was “If,” by Rudyard Kipling (he pronounced it “Kiplin’”). Harry had heard the poem before, or at least the line that went, “If you can meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same,” but he’d forgotten that the poem was a message from a father to a son. Harry tensed his jaw. His aunt, from behind him, put a hand on his shoulder, making it worse. But then at the end of the recitation—“You’ll be a man, my son!”—Paul leaned close to his ear and said, “Jesus, salt in the wound,” and Harry quietly laughed, feeling better.