“So you were faithful to Claire,” I said. It was the first time I’d spoken her name, and it unsettled me to hear it come from my mouth, almost as if I were afraid the word might invoke her spirit to join us in the room.

“Faithful to her, or maybe just faithful to the writing.”

Lucinda Williams’s voice filled our silence for a few moments. She sang of car wheels on a gravel road, of things left behind but not forgotten.

“That evening after I came back from the hospital, I gathered all my notes for the Kosovo book and threw them in the fireplace. I struck a match and watched them burn. I don’t know why I thought that would make any difference.”

Allen paused.

“But this situation with Ruth Kowalsky, it’s like I’ve been given another chance to be a good father by helping get another man’s daughter out of that river. I didn’t see that at first, when Hudson asked me to do this story, but I see it now. Does that make sense?”

“Yes,” I said, but I was thinking something else, that sometimes you don’t get another chance.

“I used to be arrogant enough to think I could save the world, but I know better now. The best you can do is find a single good cause, no matter how small, and put all your energy into that.”

“Luke says the same thing,” I said. “He says that’s what the Tamassee is for him.”

“Because of what he saw in Biafra?”

“Yes.”

“It was hands-on for him, I guess—people literally dying in his arms.”

“Yes,” I said. “It was.”

“It wasn’t that way for me. What I witnessed wasn’t something I felt in a personal way. I always seemed somehow removed from it, like there was a partition between me and the victims. I used to try to rationalize that. I’d compare myself to relief workers, or ER doctors back in the United States. Like them I couldn’t get emotionally involved. If I did, the suffering would overwhelm me, and what I was doing was too important to allow that to happen. That’s what I told myself.”

“Maybe it would have overwhelmed you. And what you did was important. People needed to know what was happening there.”

The CD ended and the room was quiet except for the ticking of the chestnut mantel clock passed down to my mother from her mother. The day after Momma’s funeral I’d taken it from Daddy’s room and placed it on my bureau. I hadn’t asked and he’d never said a word about my taking it.