“Leave them be,” Asher says, but there’s a little laugh in his voice.

Nine o’clock in the morning and already the heat has settled down over the island like a yellow bowl meant especially for brewing more heat. The post office stands in a still pool of air.

Inside the post office the air conditioning is far too cold. All the clerks are wearing sweaters. Justin zooms straight to a big plate-glass window that is frosted over and puts out his finger to write in the milky dew.

“Don’t, Justin,” Asher says. “That makes the windows look nasty.”

Justin minds him, but with some hesitation. Justin has a weakness for surfaces that beg to be written upon. Once, at the Dollar General back home, on a dusty pickup he wrote In trunk! Call cops!

Asher hustles down to Bell’s post office box to check the mail but glances behind him because Justin is dawdling behind. He watches as Justin puts his finger to the cold glass and writes: HELP. And just as Asher reaches him he finishes: I’VE BEEN KIDNAPPED!

Asher swoops across the slick polished tiles and rakes his hand across the window, wiping away the words.

“Why did you do that?” he whispers angrily.

Justin is small and cowering there before him. “Not because I have been kidnapped. Just because it’s a funny thing to write. The way you’d do if it was the trunk of a car.”

“But it’s not the trunk of a car, Justin.” He struggles to keep his voice low. “And we can’t be drawing attention—”

“I’m sorry,” Justin says, frightened, small.

“It’s alright,” Asher says.

Yesterday Bell was on her porch taking communion and Asher snuck into her office and got online. He googled his and Justin’s names and there they were, all over the place. Their pictures. Lots of the articles got everything wrong. More than a couple reported that Asher had assaulted Zelda. Which he had.

Most all of them were like this:

An Amber Alert has been issued for a nine year-old boy in Middle Tennessee who was kidnapped by his father.

Justin Kyle Sharp was spending the night at the home of his grandmother, Zelda Crosby, near the community of Cumberland Valley when he was taken by his father, Asher Sharp, 35, a former pastor who gained notoriety one year ago after his emotional breakdown in front of his church congregation was recorded and became a viral sensation on the internet. Sharp was hailed as a folk hero by many within the gay rights movement.