A sink in another room is filled with beard stubble where somebody has shaved without washing out the bowl. People think they can do anything in a rented room.

Guests are always leaving stuff. Especially little things, which Justin finds especially interesting. If Asher says he can keep a find, Justin puts it in his Keds shoe box that also houses his nature collection. He has shells, sea glass, bird feathers, pressed flowers, a pale-blue bird’s egg (empty, with one tiny hole in the shell as if something sucked out all the juice).

The cottage-finds item Justin seems to cherish most is a small silver medallion. He thought it was a dime when he first found it lying on one of the room’s tiled bathroom floors. There is a man in a robe stamped onto it. He’s holding his arms up in the air and there are animals all around him: a dog, a fox, a squirrel. There are birds on both of his shoulders and on one of his hands.

Sometimes in the evenings when he is going through his collection, Justin takes the medallion out of his shoe box and holds it between his index finger and thumb.

Asher loves it when Justin lays his collection all out on the wicker table on the porch in the pink light of late evening. In some strange way he even covets the treasures his son has found. There is a metal pencil sharpener that looks like a globe, with lots of bright colors for countries. A book of matches (on the cover: drag queens standing in for the I’s and E’s of the words AQUA NIGHTCLUB KEY WEST). A wallet-sized picture, deliberately left behind, of a woman from the 1950s, holding a metal stringer with about a dozen little fish hanging from it. She is wearing white capris and a white sleeveless blouse, a white headband in her black hair. She’s smiling but she looks sad. On the back someone has written Thelma in a crooked mix of cursive and printed hand­writing. Asher knew it would fit right in with Justin’s collection. Asher figured Thelma had been wild and sad every day, sometimes at the same exact time, and she went dancing in a red dress and she liked dogs, and sometimes she would sit on the riverbank while she was fishing and tears would fall out of her eyes while she thought of someone she loved but had lost. There is also a tiny little blue bottle of cologne: Davidoff Paris, Cool Water, .5 fl. oz. Justin likes to hold the bottle up to the sunlight. He says it is the blue of a thundercloud made into glass. He sprayed the cologne on his neck once and it did smell like cool water, somehow, but it was so strong Asher made him go wash it off.