“Well, good!” Bell says. “Go on then, buddy.”

Justin puts his hands out to the others the way they always had at home, back when Asher said the prayer before every meal and they all joined hands. What seems like ages ago now, when Asher was a pastor and they prayed all the time. Even when they went out to eat, right in the middle of the restaurant. Had he been showing off, making sure others knew that he was a preacher? Now he wasn’t sure.

Justin is sitting between Bell and Evona so he takes hold of their hands.

“Thank you for this food and these people,” Justin says, squeezing his eyes closed. “Thank you to the Everything. Amen.”

“Amen,” they all say together.

“That’s a pretty perfect prayer,” Evona tells Justin.

From the time Justin was very small Asher has taught him how to say a simple but succinct prayer of always being thankful for the food and the people who were gathered to eat it. For so many years Asher worried about making sure Justin understood the Bible and attended church, although over the last year he hasn’t attended to his ways of believing at all, resigned himself to the fact that Lydia was going overboard with it all. Somehow Justin has already come up with his own way of thinking.

There is red beans and rice, corn bread, chunks of tomatoes and cucumbers swimming in vinegar, avocados picked from the tree by Bell’s front porch, sliced and drizzled with balsamic vine­gar. Neither Asher nor Justin has ever eaten an avocado before.

After they fill up their plates and start eating, Evona tells a long, funny story about a time when Bell’s back had gone out on her and Bell laid in the courtyard for hours until Evona returned from the beach to find her.

“I was trying to help her up but I was too weak—”

“That’s her nice way of saying I was too fat!” Bell says.

“And once I got her up she just couldn’t even move her legs, bless her heart. Her back was gone—”

“And so then we both just sort of folded down onto the gravel path out there and by this time it was dark—”

“We just sort of slid down on the ground with me on top of Bell—”

Then they are both so tickled that Asher finds himself laughing in a contagious way and he catches Justin laughing, too.

“I was trying to get out from under her,” Bell says, “and there we laid all tangled up about the time a couple of the guests came home from the beach—”

“And they were about the worst guests we ever had,” Evona says. She is laughing so hard now that tears are in her eyes. She can hardly contain herself.

“They had complained about everything their whole stay,” Bell says.