They pass houses the color of beads on a bracelet—pink and turquoise and yellow and orange—behind white fences. An old, black couple sits on their porch stringing beans, children play in a yard, a skinny rooster struts down the sidewalk, flowers open like red or purple promises. A woman does a little dance as she sweeps her porch, in a bikini and white earbuds. A small grayish-yellow Methodist church sitting close to the street.

Asher scans the faces of every person they pass in case he sees Luke, wondering what he would say if he actually saw his brother again. He has a strange dread that he might actually find him while also wanting desperately to find him. How would he feel about seeing Luke holding a man’s hand? The thought makes his stomach roil.

At Whitehead Street they come into more businesses. There is the courthouse and the post office. The salty air settles on their skin. At one of the stoplights Asher glances down to his waist where Justin’s small hands are latched, his fingers laced together and his little thumbs clenched.

The grocery has narrow aisles, small metal buggies, fruit and vegetables priced sky-high. The mangos are a kind of pinkish-red that causes his mouth to water even though he has never tasted one before. He realizes for the first time that he is famished. He made Justin eat some fruit before they left but he’s had nothing.

There is a whole section of key-lime products, all kinds of brands and foods Asher has never seen before.

People crowd in at the glass case in front of the deli and order up chicken salad and olives and something called hummus. An old man glances down at Justin. “Hello there, little man,” he says in a faraway accent. Wisconsin or the Dakotas, maybe. Asher doesn’t know. Justin puts out his hand and the man laughs with surprise, takes it. As a church child Justin has been taught to greet older men this way. “That’s a real gent,” the man says, looking up at Asher with pale, watery eyes. Harmless.

Still, Asher puts his hand on Justin’s shoulder, nods to the old man with a tight grin. For all he knows there are posters of them all up and down the interstates between here and Tennessee. Every person they see might report them if they look into their faces long enough. Asher had momentarily felt safe in not being recognized from the breakdown video because Key West felt so exotic—he had briefly fancied that they might as well be in a foreign country. But they are still in America, and the crowd at the deli is at least half tourists, who could be from anywhere, even back home.