I guess I should say that this was all before you could just google anyone and anything and actually get results. I had barely even used the internet at this point. And it wasn’t like Randolph Avery was someone that you’d just know about if you were a teenager in Coalfield in the nineties. It wasn’t until later that I realized who he was, how famous he had been. He was a hugely influential artist in the early eighties; he had pieces at MoMA, at LACMA. For the two years since he’d moved in with his sister, who was the postmaster in Coalfield, he was just Mr. Avery, this weird, sweet man who sometimes would talk to me with this faraway look on his face, like he had no idea how he’d ended up in this place.

“What did you do last night?” I asked Zeke.

“I mostly just drew in my notebook. There’s not much else to do at my grandmother’s house. She doesn’t have cable or even a VCR. She just wants to play Uno all the time, so I do that for as long as I can stand it. The whole time, my mom is just playing her violin, which makes everything feel kind of creepy.”

“She plays the violin? Like, in the same room as you?”

“Yeah, in the living room. She’s just constantly playing, like me and my grandmother hired her to perform for us. And when she finishes a song, it’s like, what do I do? Clap? Tell her that it’s good? It doesn’t matter anyway, because she just starts a new song. And then when she gets tired, she goes onto the front porch to smoke cigarettes, which she never did before.”

“Yikes,” I said. I thought about my mom, after my dad left us. For months, she had this stunned expression, like every five seconds she realized, once again, that this was all real, that she wasn’t dreaming. And then one night at the dinner table I noticed that her shoulders weren’t up around her ears, that her body was relaxed. Maybe she had met Hobart. Maybe she had realized that after all this time with my dad, it wasn’t so bad to be without him. Whatever it was, she got loose. It made me happy. I wondered how long it would take for Zeke’s mom. I wondered if it would ever happen.

“And then I go into my room and draw,” Zeke continued. “I was working on this design. I was kind of thinking that maybe we should make another poster.”

“Another one?” I said, stiffening.

“Yeah, like keep it going but also change things up a little. Like, can you think of something else you want to say on the poster?”

“No,” I replied, feeling a little sad. “I already said it.”