Leo turned around and sat up. He drank the water and looked at Jim. “I dreamt I was lying in snow by the river.”

Jim took the empty glass and had Leo lie back down on his chest and stomach. He cracked another ice cube from the tray. “I was just down there praying to your mother.”

“She was in it, too.”

Jim ran the ice along his son’s back from his neck to where his butt began. “I told her to meet that tiny baby at the station. I know that she will.”

Leo held his breath. His stomach muscles tensed and something caught in his throat, then shuddered back down.

Jim rubbed the cube over Leo’s skin until he had to get another one from the tray. “They say when a child dies she becomes an angel. Yours didn’t make it to being a child, so I’m certain she’s been conjured into something better—a muse, I think.”

“What’s that?”

“A muse is a goddess, son. Zeus had nine daughters and I believe each one of them looked after a different kind of art. Your mother’s favorite was Erato because Erato like to preside over the poems. But ours is Euterpe. She sits in the lap of all musicians.” Jim pressed the towel down on the wet sheet. “That’s where yours is, out there with Euterpe, looking to help a bluesman dry on a song.”

Leo felt the towel on his back. It burned, and when he shut his eye, a tear squeezed out onto his pillow.

“There’s plenty of time for children, son. There’s better fish in the river too.”

Leo slept through the night and straight till noon. On the kitchen table was a note from Jim.

Don’t make any plans. We got a birthday to celebrate. Take some aspirin for that back.

Leo stood shirtless near the fridge and drank down two glasses of orange juice. He ate three bowlfuls of Cheerios one after the other, then he made himself a peanut butter and honey sandwich and finished it off while he heated up the last of Jim’s morning coffee. He took a full cup out to the stoop and sat down.

The sky was gray but a little too bright to look straight up at. The air was heavy and warm again and the mill smelled stronger than the pines. Leo drank his sugared coffee. A car horn honked up on Paper Boulevard. The skin on his back felt dry and tight, but it didn’t sting as much. Yesterday didn’t seem real. If somebody came and told him the roof at the job is naked of shingles just like before, Leo would almost believe them. Being with Floyd happened, though, sitting in that air-conditioned truck, letting him off the hook about Chick, letting Floyd talk about fucking and Allie in the same breath-Jesus.