“He’s talking about flying some former navy SEAL in from Illinois. Brennon believes he knows what caused the dam to collapse today. He says a few minor adjustments and the dam will be ‘viable.’ ”

“Brennon believes he knows,” I said, repeating Allen’s words back to him. “And Phillips is going to let him try after what happened today?”

“Who knows the politics of this?” Allen said, frustration in his voice as well. “Who knows what Luckadoo or Senator Jenkins or the damn governor for that matter will tell Phillips to do?”

A half mile up, the two-lane asphalt darkened with recent rain. The tires shushed and whispered.

I spoke only after we parked in the motel lot.

“I’m going to lie down in my room,” I told Allen.

“You can do that on my bed.”

“No. I want to be alone awhile.”

“I’ll be in my room,” Allen said. “You change your mind, come there.”

Allen took my hand and didn’t seem to want to let go. I freed myself from his grip.

“We’re going to have to talk about this, Maggie,” Allen said.

“Not now,” I said, and went inside.

I closed the curtains and found an easy-listening station on the radio. I didn’t undress, just lay down on the bedsheets and tried not to think. My head hurt, but there were no aspirin in my purse. I did not close my eyes because I knew I would see Randy’s flipper disappearing into the pool.

The radio did no good so I turned it off.

Think about something else besides today, I told myself, and I cast my memory out like a fishing line.

I was eight years old. Ben and I wore our Sunday clothes, though it was a Thursday afternoon. We were at our Grandfather Holcombe’s farm. He was in heaven, the grown-ups said, though Ben and I knew better because we’d peeked in the box. When we’d eaten our fill of fried chicken and banana pudding, we sneaked off from the adults and went down to the bridge that crossed Licklog Creek. We lay on the gray splintery boards, our foreheads pressed to the slats. Water spiders skimmed the surface as salamanders bellied across the sandy bottom. A snake unspooled on the bank and crossed the pool before disappearing into a clump of reeds.

My grandfather is dead, I had thought to myself as I looked into the pool, then whispered the same words as my mouth pressed against the wood.

And now, twenty years later, I remembered something I had forgotten—my father stepping through the barbed wire in his suit. Ben and I expected to be punished, since we’d been warned never to go near streams or ponds without a grown-up.