Up the beach a loud group of college kids are vacationing on their parents’ dime. They have been raised with too much money to simply be still and seem to think themselves the only people in the world who matter, so there is no need to lower their voices. One of the boys—his hairless chest and legs oiled and glistening in the sun like a seal’s skin—drinks rum from a white bottle so that everyone can see him. A girl in a blinding-pink string bikini chides him in her Valley-Girl-by-way-of-Atlanta speech, but he shouts “This is Key West, Aimee. Everything is allowed.”

Asher has been here long enough to resent that kind of thinking.

A biplane slices the sky, silent, far out over the sea.

“Can I get in, Dad?” Justin asks, barely audible over the constant, warm wind. Asher nods, and unfurls his beach towel, which flaps and snaps at the air until he manages to settle it on the white sand. He has brought along a book Zelda had insisted he read—Jonah’s Gourd Vine, by Zora Neale Hurston (It’s about a preacher who loses his way, too, she said, shoving the novel into his hands) —but he is too paranoid to take his eyes off Justin.

So Asher watches his son and everyone else. This is the off-season, August, and most schools have started back, so the beach is not very crowded. Except for the college kids, most everyone seems to be a local. No fanny packs, no electric rental cars parked crooked at the curve.

A very fat man strolls by in a Speedo. So fat that only one thin, black line of the bathing suit can actually be seen in the front, and then, in the back: total flatness, as if his back goes straight to the tops of his thighs. Not far behind him is a woman in a shimmering gold bathing suit, complete with a matching, floppy-brimmed hat. A pair of gold-colored flip-flops dangle from the fingers of her right hand. She is talking on a cell phone as she twists along the water’s edge. Two teenaged girls—confident in a way that Asher had never been, not ever—sashay by, giggling. So much like girls back home. Asher reckons teenaged girls are the same everywhere: either totally confident or not at all, but surely always giggling when they find one of their own kind.

Justin splashes into the water, pausing to study a white rock at the edge of the surf. He reaches down and runs his hand over its surface. God lives in rocks and water and sky for Justin. Asher knows this without ever having been told.