Without glancing at his old man, Leo left the parlor and the house and walked down Saunders Hill Road. In the early evening light, the river was a slow-moving brown and blue. Its pebbled bank was pink in some places, gold in others, and Leo picked up three stones. He threw one in a high arc into the trees. He threw the other two downstream. One hit a boulder and bounced off it into the water. Leo didn’t see where the other went and he couldn’t see why his father didn’t have another woman yet either. Jim wasn’t the only man to ever lose his wife. Gerry Poitras’s mother left his dad to go live with a phone lineman in Springfield. That was when GP was nine or ten. But he had a new mom now, a blonde woman with big breasts whose name was Betty. Gerry’s old man had met her on a train to Boston on business. She had no kids of her own and she seemed to like Gerry and his little sister Ruth as if she had invented them herself.

And Mr. Poitras wasn’t nearly as handsome as Jim Suther; he didn’t have the muscle, he didn’t have the thick black mustache, he probably couldn’t pick a tune or sing a note. He just had a flattop hair cut like his son, a fat close-shaved face like Lars, and a big round gut that always made his neckties look short and his pants too low. But still, he had Betty, and Jim had nothing but this piece of the Connecticut River every day at sundown.

Leo wedged his sneaker under a softball-sized rock, picked up the stone, then threw it as far upstream as he could. It made hardly a splash, just got gulped into the current. A family of birds was making all sorts of sound above and behind him and Leo thought he should get around to learning their names and migrating habits and stuff like that. Then he saw one up in an alder branch. The bird was all black except for the tips of its wings which were bright red. Leo heard cars parking behind the house up the hill, the slamming of the screen door, Lars’s laugh. When the door slammed again, the bird flew off the branch, out over the river, and into the trees on the other side.