So far in his day’s tally, there was only one lie. Teresa knew the parts of him that he’d shown her, willingly, over nine years of marriage. She knew parts he’d never wanted her to see: the depths to which he’d sunk after losing his NASA job; the way he could brood after one of his father’s lacerating, off-the-cuff remarks about what Roy was doing with his life. But she didn’t know all of him. Leona knew more, somehow. Not all, but more. She was right to advise him not to make any major decisions while he was in this state. She was right to press him, to get him to promise. But he’d lied to her.

He rode the arch of the Hubert Humphrey Bridge for the third time in under twenty-four hours, leaving the island behind him, descending back onto the mainland where the roads had been drained of floodwater. The westbound traffic lights were stuck on green: there was no excuse to drive slowly. He had a family to return to. He had the day ahead of him, already penciled in with necessities, with duties, with chores. He had a lie on his mind and a vein sparking beneath the skin of his left temple.

As the town thinned out on either side of the highway he found himself thinking again about Matt. He desperately needed to be a father figure to this kid, to pull him aside and tell him, somehow, that what he’d been doing in the bathroom of the motel didn’t make him a freak, that it was normal, that he was normal, and that everything was okay. What devastated Roy was that a conversation about jerking off would fall so near the end of the time line. It would stand out in the boy’s memory, stinging with significance because it would be one of the last intimate conversations he had with his stepfather before …

Roy turned into the parking lot of the Ponce de Leon and rounded the building to the rear of the motel.

Before he left them. Soon, though he didn’t know exactly when. Soon, though he’d lied to Leona about not already having decided to do it. A deep breath before knocking on the motel-room door. A somber entrance. That’s what he pictured. But she was standing outside, across the parking lot from the room, waiting for him, her purple purse hanging from one shoulder and her sandaled feet planted apart on the gravel. She was smoking a cigarette. She exhaled smoke and stared down his approach, waiting for him beneath the dome of this full-blown, cloudless sky bright enough to expose all secrets and lies and betrayals. His face adjusted and readjusted itself. He felt his throat try to swallow, and seize.

II

Frankie asked who Ponce de Leon was.

“The guy who discovered the fountain of youth,” Joe said. “It makes everything get younger.”