Yet while they play Asher continues to think about Evona over there, reading, alone, and the way Justin had been amazed to see someone doing this. The only reader Asher had ever really known was Luke, who read everything, all the time. For most of his life Asher had devoted all of his reading to the Bible, of course. That had been expected of him, to read the Bible and nothing else. His congregation had hired him because he had not been to seminary. Only recently had he realized the way books could give a person wings.

He thinks about the man he had been, just a couple years ago. Judging and preaching and telling others how to live, filled up with the weight of thinking he knew what God wanted.

11

11

The dark, rocking water. Overturned cars zooming by on the swollen river, entire trees with their green leaves still intact. The bright yellow lumber from houses that had exploded in the flood. The Cumberland River filling the entire valley. Then: Luke thrashing in the water, screaming. But the roar of the churning water overtaking his voice. A wave overtakes his face, filling his mouth with water, and he is spluttering, fighting, struggling to keep his head above the deluge. And then, he’s gone. Asher: standing on the ridge, unable to move. A coward paralyzed by fear.

Asher startles awake, sits up in bed and is surprised to find his face wet. He has not cried since before he got Justin back. There had been nights in that barren trailer out on Cheatham Lake that he had lain awake on his back with tears falling into his ears. But that seems like ages ago now. And he has not wept in a very long time.

Now the grief—of losing Luke, of losing Justin, of what it has taken to get Justin back—climbs up from his chest. Asher doesn’t want Justin to hear, so he slips outside. He eases the door closed and the mourning breaks out of him. He tries to cough the tears into his cupped hands, but the large grief cannot be contained.

“You alright?”

Asher bolts up and slides into the rocker, as if she hasn’t heard every bit of his outburst. He looks across the shadowy porch but there is only the lattice, no sign of her at all. Evona must have already been sitting out there, watching the bluing darkness. Night never becomes as thickly dark on Key West as it did back home; the light is different here, even at night, as if the water surrounding them illuminates the sky.

“You alright?” she repeats.

“I’m okay.”

“You want company?”

“I’m okay,” he repeats.

Evona comes around the lattice anyway, bends, and sits on the porch floor by his leg. She cranes her neck back to look up at him. “You don’t seem alright.”

“I’ve been holding it in for a while.”