They choose a spot at the side of Bell’s house. Justin digs awhile but isn’t much good at it, so Bell shows him how to stand on the shovel to get the blade to go deeper, how to tug up on it to throw the dirt aside. “Hard to use a shovel properly when you’re wearing flip-flops,” she complains, but seems to be doing just fine despite her sandals. She is good at digging, her shoulders and arms moving like that big metal piece on the side of old-timey railroad engines that joins all the wheels together. Justin doesn’t know what that’s called but he can picture it in his mind. He tells her what he is thinking.

“I’ve worked these old arms plenty enough. I don’t believe they’s a job I haven’t done to make my way in this world.”

Shady watches from a good distance away, now sitting at full attention, his ears up like he knows something is dead and being buried.

When they have a good-sized hole they put the shoe box in and rake the dirt back over, the clods making little tap-tap-taps and clup-clups on the lid until there is a dark mound. Bell pats the dirt down with the toe of her shoe and then they stand there again, not knowing what to do next.

“Should we say a prayer or something?” Justin asks.

“You can, I reckon,” Bell says. “You’re better at it than I am.”

In Justin’s mind he knows what he wants to say: Everything, thank you for giving us this good old iguana. He was beautiful. Amen. But he can’t say that out loud, not even in front of Bell.

When Bell sees that Justin isn’t able to speak, she puts her hand on his shoulder again—he can feel her sadness working its way from her fingers into his skin, an old sorrow that the iguana has conjured back up for her—and says: “Everything that is, is holy.”

“Amen,” Justin says, so quiet he isn’t sure if he has said this aloud or not. He thinks: Olivia Bougainvillea Iguana.

Justin and Bell sit on the porch afterward. Shady jumps up on the wicker love seat and sits with him. Bell rocks in her bright yellow rocker like a queen and looks out where the gray clouds are crowding together to turn the sky a dark blue.

“You feel things in a real deep way, don’t you?” Bell says after a while.

“I can’t help it.”

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of. But sometimes it’s a lot to carry around.”

“Why are you so sad?” he asks.

“Everybody in this world has troubles,” she says. “Not a person who don’t.”