A woman turns from the deli with a plastic bowl in hand and beams down at Justin. “Hey,” she says, a clipped little voice like a bird, her small lipsticked mouth pinching together in a small smile.

“Hidy,” Justin says. As she clicks away on kitten heels Justin looks up at Asher. “I like this place,” he says.

The cashier has purple nails—so long that Asher watches in amazement as she taps at the register keys—and eye shadow to match her polish, bleached curls, and enough wrinkles to show a lifetime of drinking, smoking, and sun. Her voice sounds out each word as a hoarse scratch.

“Where y’all visiting from?” she rasps.

“Tennessee. We—” Justin stops, interpreting Asher’s finger pressing into his back. They will have to talk about this, about how much to say to people. But he doesn’t know what to tell his son. Asher doesn’t like the idea of Justin lying, but he ought to have thought about that before kidnapping the boy. Too late now. Turns out that kidnapping a child is a lot like having one, period: you have to figure it out as you go along.

“I’ve been there,” the cashier says. “It’s pretty country.”

“Yeah, I like it,” Justin says, causing the cashier to look up at Asher and smile, her whole craggy face becoming twice as wrinkled in the doing.

Then:

The low buzz of the scooter.

The island changing with the deepening of light, preparing for evening. Tourists, leaving the Hemingway House, waddling toward Duval Street wearing white visors and white socks with white tennis shoes.

Justin leaning against his father’s back as the Vespa slices down the street.

The smell of the ocean.

Asher lets Justin play with Shady on the porch while he carries the groceries into Bell’s cottage. Bell leaves only the screen door closed behind them, and Asher can hear Justin chattering to the dog.

Bell’s house has white walls and orange-brown tiled floors like glazed terra-cotta pots. Large, healthy plants stand near all the windows. There are lots of colorful paintings that don’t make any sense but are still nice to look at, framed photographs here and there. Asher tries to study them without appearing to be nosey. A black-and-white picture of a tough-looking woman, a younger Bell, with one foot propped up on the bumper of a truck, a cigarette planted in her mouth; a baby in a just-born hospital picture, the color of the early 1970s; several children sitting on the ground around a worn-out-looking woman in a kitchen chair that had been brought out onto a dusty front yard. A beautiful black woman in a red dress, blowing a kiss toward the camera; a magnolia blossom is shoved into her hair above her right ear.

In the front room there is an upright piano, rich maple wood, not unlike the one at the Cumberland Valley Church of Life.

“Do you play?”