There are only a handful of people there so early in the gray morning. Asher sits on a picnic table overlooking the confluence of the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic, trying to think what they might do next. He breathes in the scent of the pines, a balm. He feels like a sleepwalker, awake but not awake, caught beneath some veil that won’t let him function properly. Justin walks down the beach, gathering shells and rocks for his nature collection.

Asher thinks and thinks and thinks, not figuring out anything, his mind going in circles. There is no way out of this. He is going to jail and he knows it. Justin will be sent back to Lydia. She’ll put him on those pills and wipe that extra-goodness out of him and he’ll be like everybody else in the whole boring cynical world, missing the wonder of everything.

Asher can’t stand the thoughts, but there is no avoiding them.

But maybe Justin is stronger now.

Maybe this trip will have taught him something about defiance. About taking chances.

Eventually Justin comes back and slumps against Asher, drained from his grief. Asher puts his arm around his son’s shoulder and the boy leans into him. Small, real, alive, here, now.

Cherish this, Asher thinks, and he does, he does, he does. He memorizes this moment as if it is his last. The feel of Justin’s shoulder beneath his hand, the way his hair moves light as dandelion fluff in the breeze coming in off the mixture of the Gulf and the Atlantic. Asher draws in his son’s scent. He catches the pines, and the salt air, seaweed and sand. But most of all there is Justin, that smell of his that is always there, unchanging since he was a baby. Warm, sweet, musky. The smell of Tennessee riverbanks and long summer evenings lying in a field, the scent of home.

Surely there is a light in that boy that will never go out, no matter what he has to face along the way. That’s all a father can hope for his child, that a little fire will burn in them to keep them going, to keep them strong.

They stay there for hours. The sun comes out and with it the tourists. Beach towels are spread, flapping on the ocean breeze. Golden bodies lather themselves in oil, children laugh, gulls gather close to the foolish people who feed them Cheetos.

Asher rents them two chairs and an umbrella where they can doze, worn out from grief and fear. They awake and Asher buys thick Cuban sandwiches and thin fried plantains from the beach café. Asher wolfs down his food, wiping up sour cream with his last plantain but Justin simply stares at his sandwich.

“Eat, Justin. You’ll be starving later.”