Asher watched as his neighbors trod the soaked ground or waded the water, picking among the debris to see if there was anything that held some semblance of Before the Flood, picture albums whose photographs had miraculously not been destroyed, a stuffed animal, a pistol still in its lockbox.

At the water’s edge, he found Roscoe.

The dog’s coat was so matted with mud and dirt that Asher didn’t know him at first—but when Asher put his hand on Roscoe’s head and felt the familiar shape of his skull, he knew.

“Oh, buddy,” Asher said, squatting down. Roscoe’s red collar had been ripped off, but it was certainly him, their good boy who had watched over Justin his whole life. Asher was overcome by a kind of grief he had never felt before, a feeling more like injustice. He carried Roscoe over to a patch of pinewoods and buried him with the shovel he had been using to dig out his neighbor’s belongings and he cried over the dog, over all the loss of today and before.

But again he could not pray and felt no sense of that kind of prayer anywhere in him. He had spent his life finding words to make himself and others feel comforted. Always before the words were right there, without having to think much about them. Perhaps that had been the problem all along.

So Asher kneeled and put his hand on the wet ground. “Roscoe, you were the best old boy that ever was,” he said. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

That was a kind of prayer, he supposed. There were different kinds of prayer and different kinds of belief and he might be able to figure all that out someday, but not yet.

Asher roamed from one neighbor to the next, most of them members of his church. He embraced the ones who needed that, shook the hands of the ones who weren’t ready to be embraced. He helped them search for their belongings or push their vehicles out of the mud or stretch tarpaulins to sleep under. Anything to be near their house-seats. But he did not offer to pray with any of them.