A placard greeted him on the opposite wall: AMERICAN LEGION POST 638. He felt a gust of familiarity, instinctively tried to remember if he had any weed on him that might get confiscated. The building branched, and in the lobby, or the foyer, or anyway at the building’s joint, he peeled off his sweaty hoodie, the sleeve stiff with drying blood. The smell—gas and blood and sweat—hit him in a wave and made him gag; he coughed and spit a wad of something vile into the trash bin, and stuffed the hoodie in deep after it. The relief was immediate. He gingerly slid his arms into the new sweatshirt, the one he’d been given, and zipped it up, concealed again. He turned back to offer some version of his thanks, to test out the name, but the driver had gone.

He turned left, because that hallway went deeper, because he knew he was winding down and whenever the trail stopped, he, too, would stop. He passed a line of closed doors. GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN: that was what the placard over the stage at the VFW had said. He dragged a finger along the wall, tracing his path in red: ironic, he thought, nothing more basic than blood. Was that what made something holy, its irreducibility? His footsteps echoed on the tile—it was a reminder of his erratic pace, lacking in precision—and then when he hit carpet, the echo stopped. It dawned on him: of course—for years as a kid, he had gone to church every Sunday morning. He passed through another set of double doors, and emerged into an empty multipurpose room, a circle of metal folding chairs set out in the center. The lights above were all on, in expectation. Tyler found his way to an open chair. He sat down to listen.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to my parents, Martha Moody and Martin Jacobs, who are very much part of my story, and to my brothers, Eli, Michael, and Jack (in order of age), for being the best siblings.

Thank you to my wife, Sam Skurdahl, for her love, her encouragement, her persistence, and her patience. Despite my best efforts, she is still funnier than I am.

Thank you to the other earliest readers of this book (2017!), who helped me “light the lamps,” as Jeanne might say, to see what else was possible: Alyssa Bluhm (whose four-year-old notes I still refer to), Joey Holloway, Jeanne Thornton, and Ross “the Vacuous Spider” Wagenhofer. Thank you to Graham Nissen, intellectual and artistic lodestar and wise, wise man. Thank you to Ben Kopel and Brandi Wells. Thank you to John Baren.