WHEN THE SKY CLEARED, the Big Thompson flood was still there. Leah and Tyler walked with their neighbors to the barricades the police had erected on a high point above the riverbed. Riverside was somewhere under a deep layer of churning brown water full of debris—hissing propane tanks, twisted trampolines, downed ponderosas with their gnarled exposed roots. Leah could not believe that the town could be so immensely deep. It held so much more than she'd thought it capable of, and everything familiar underneath that churning water was certainly unrecognizable now.

Later, she navigated the barricades, found an open route to the hospital. Elmer's left leg was in traction, the top of the hospital bed propped up, the newspaper spread out in front of him. The air around him shimmered with restlessness.

“How you feeling?”

Elmer looked at the bag of donuts she carried, the boy she balanced on one hip. Leah wondered whether this was going to work, this peace offering. She wouldn't be making it except for a vague sense she had that they'd found their way back to each other, that she could forgive him for blaming her, that he'd forgiven her as well.

Some time passed before he spoke. “You're pretty lucky Marcia's gone home. I'm not sure she'd abide a younger woman bringing me donuts in my vulnerable state.”

“Oh,” Leah said. How embarrassing. “I didn't mean . . .” but then she saw the twinkle in his eyes and relaxed, just a little.

Elmer grunted. She put the donuts on the nightstand next to the bed and sat down on the edge of a visitor's chair. Tyler sat on the cold tile, ran a Hot Wheels car along the metal bars under the bed. “Anything I can do to help?”

“Well, yeah,” Elmer said. “I don't suppose you could close up all those Riverside gates when the water drops. I'm going to have some trouble getting out there for a month or so, at least.”

“I couldn't even budge the one I tried yesterday.”

“It's not rocket science,” Elmer said. “Take some grease.”

Elmer pointed to his jeans, which had been folded and laid neatly over the back of a chair. Leah tried to picture Elmer's wife, Marcia, worried, tired, folding the jeans, working from the assumption that daily care and maintenance of other humans, especially those who can't all the way care for themselves, is an intimate and powerful form of love.

“Keys in the pocket. I got a couple of the gates on padlocks.”