A Cuban woman and her grandson approach and make their place nearby. Asher homes in on the music of their talking. The grandmother is still curvy enough to make Asher aware that she had once been a stunning knockout. She has rolled her Levi’s up to her knees and tucked her blouse under the bottom of her bra, exposing a pale hunk of belly fat. She speaks to her grandson in a pretty rat-a-tat-tat: “¿Jesús, meterte al agua conmigo? ¿O tienes miedo?”

A heron wanders the dunes, amazing in its clean whiteness.

The sun broils down, boils down, a punishing, comforting heat unlike anything that Asher has ever known back in Tennessee. A fierceness of heat.

He watches Justin, and the Cuban grandmother, and the ignorant, spoiled kids with their tight gym abs and long brown legs, an old woman with sagging breasts, the flat-rumped man as he strolls in the distance down the beach. As far down the strip of sand as he can see, there are people, each of them with their own stories and hurts and joys. And he loves every one of them.

At long last he believes he understands the poem he has been saying to himself ever since Luke’s postcard made him look it up: the poem about a sandpiper wandering the beach, taking note of every little thing, naming things specifically. That was the way back to believing: being conscious, seeing the God in everything and not just the Bible or the Church. That was the way back. He had to be like the sandpiper, running to the south—as far as he could drive—to find out the answers, and the way back.

He keeps his eyes on the people down the beach and he knows there is something living in each of them. Some people might call it God. Some might not have a name for it. What he knows is that they all have the good and the bad in them. He does, too. But that’s where the God of his understanding lives—not just in the goodness and not in the badness, but in the shimmering knot of the two.

Asher thinks of

Lydia

Zelda

Jimmy

Stephen

Kathi

Cherry

Caleb Carey

Rosalee Carey

The girl who filmed him

The congregation, watching him

Jane Fisher

Adalia, the cashier at the Git ’n Go

The man who thanked him in Georgia

The Cherokee girl at the truck stop

The cashier who said a prayer for him

The hungry people on the side of the road along the way

Shady

Bell

Evona

And first and last is Justin. Always, there is Justin for him.