The blue in Allen’s eyes seemed brighter, like the blue you see when long-cured firewood burns. I knew he had never told anyone what he was telling me now.

“Yes,” I said. “I understand.”

“When I felt Miranda’s cheek I realized the Bible is right about us being made of clay, because that was what she felt like—cool, clammy. I lifted her off the morgue table, and as I held her she felt so solid. And every dead body I’d seen in Cambodia and Rwanda and Kosovo suddenly had solidity as well. So does Ruth Kowalsky’s.”

I listened to time clicking like hooves on pavement. But time isn’t something you can rein in. It moves on without pause, taking us with it no matter how much we wish otherwise.

Allen’s attention was now on the clock as well. A wry smile flickered on his face.

“I’m so glad we could have such lighthearted fun on our first date. Maybe next time we can read aloud passages from Blood Meridian.”

“I haven’t read that one.”

“Classic Cormac McCarthy. In other words, four hundred pages of unrelenting bleakness. It’s like falling into a well with no bottom. You keep thinking the book can’t get any darker, but it always does.”

Allen checked the clock again.

“I need to go,” he said.

We kissed, a final lingering kiss, and I walked him to the door.

“This is good,” he said, “being with you, I mean. But a little scary, too, like what I’m feeling is happening a little too fast and part of me hasn’t caught up yet.”

“I know,” I said, touching Allen’s face with my left hand. “Wherever this is going between us, there’s no rush to get there.”

I closed the door and started clearing the table. Don’t expect too much, I cautioned myself. But I put on another CD, and as I washed the dishes I sang along.

WHEN THE DOCTORS AT THE BURN UNIT IN COLUMBIA HAD done all they could, when all the skin grafts had been completed, it hadn’t been enough. The taunts and stares and the nicknames Ben had been given by classmates, the middle school and high school ball games and dances Daddy made him attend, the nights he stayed in his room listening to songs about things he must have believed he’d never experience, all of that he had endured, never acknowledging the pain he felt to Daddy or Momma or me.