“It would be too hard to fit back in, especially since I didn’t fit in all that well when I was here.”

“I can understand that,” Allen said.

Allen’s hands and forearms were on the table. As he spoke, he closed his left hand and pressed it into his right palm, covering the wedding ring.

“How do you know so much about the Tamassee? Did you spend a lot of time on it as a kid?”

“Some. But most of what I know I learned later.”

“How was that?” Allen asked, his right palm still covering the ring.

So I told how about Saturday mornings at the community center when I’d helped Luke and the others he’d gathered to win the Tamassee its Wild and Scenic River status. How the following summer I’d worked as a photographer on the river, taking pictures of rafters. I explained about working with Luke, who knew the Tamassee better than anyone else on the planet. I told Allen about cool, dewy mornings when we launched at Canaan Sluice and paddled down to Five Falls, our day spent taking action shots of the rafters. I described evenings we were alone on the river after the tourists and other guides had left, just Luke and me in a canoe as the sun fell behind Sassafras Mountain and the only sounds were the river and an occasional bullfrog.

“Sounds like Huck and Jim,” Allen said.

“Yes, but a little more than friendship, at least for a while.”

A smile creased Allen’s lips. Something else flickered across his face as well—curiosity.

“I see,” he said. “You think he’d talk to me?”

“Yes, if you mean about the river.”

“The river,” Allen said, his smile widening before he filled his mouth with the last spoonful of cobbler. “But who knows what other topics might come up.”

He checked his watch.

“Time to go,” he said.

A TRACTOR WAS PLOWING THE FIELD BEHIND MAMA TILSON’S, and when we stepped out into the parking lot I smelled the rich open-earth odor of a fresh-turned field, a smell I always associated with spring but not necessarily the planting of new life.