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

She wanted to ask Elmer how he managed the heart-searing confusion of parenting, ask him for advice about how he would handle Tyler, his thoughts about sparing the rod, about how to talk to people who could not love her boy the way they were supposed to, about how she could be sure she loved him enough, that she loved him the right way. What should she do when people saw things in her boy that weren't there? How could she make rational decisions about something tangled so tightly around her heart?

Elmer handed Tyler a donut, met her eyes, didn't say a word. She didn't know what to make of what passed between them in that silence, but she felt understood.

DAYS LATER, WHEN THE water had receded fully, Leah put Tyler in his car seat and drove to Riverside, the wreckage of five years of her working life. She hadn't found a new child care center, didn't trust anyone with her boy, not anymore. She had been taking him to work with her, assuring her boss it was just temporary, but she had no plan, not yet. The new parking lot at Riverside had been torn to pieces, the asphalt chunks found miles downstream. The new roof on the bathrooms had been torn off. Two large dumpsters were submerged in one of the quarry ponds. The native aquatic plants had in fact been too young to withstand the force of the water, and their tender roots had released and washed away.

Bobby was there, skipping rocks into the pond, and Tyler, fascinated, ran to stand next to him, to get a better view. Leah took a deep breath. “Bobby, I don't know what—”

Bobby waved a hand to stop her. “It wasn't your fault, Leah. I'm sorry for how it's been between us. I didn't know what to feel about anything for a long time.”

Leah sniffed. “Me either, I guess.”

“Dad sent me down here to help you. With the ditches.” He still didn't look at her. Leah wondered if it was only her or everybody that Bobby couldn't face head-on. She didn't know how things stood between him and Amy, his wife. She'd never thought about how the town might have turned on him as well, never wondered how he was feeling about his roots these days.

The three of them walked the site, trying to keep their feet on the weeds and cheat grass, keep their boots from suckering down into the sticky mud. One by one, Leah turned the wheels to close the ditch gates. Only the one she could not move before the flood needed any grease at all. The change in the levels, like so many other things, was not immediately evident.

Tyler was throwing pebbles into the ditch, his laughter bright and loud. Bobby joined in, laughing too, the two of them suddenly oblivious to her presence.