“You must know this, my girls. As I become just this body, as my memory doesn’t serve you or me, you can never doubt my love. I need you to promise me that.”

“I promise, Dad,” they both answered, almost in unison, catching each other’s gazes. They were together in this; finally in this they were together.

He folded his hands in his lap. “It’s time to go back to the pub. I sure can’t miss trivia night.”

“Dad, there’s never a night you can miss.”

“That’s very true.”

•   •   •

They made it back from Jacksonville with Dad snoozing or humming to the radio as if they hadn’t just heard the worst news possible, as if his mind was already sliding toward oblivion in a good-natured way. Of course this wasn’t true—all three of them were hurting, holding the devastating news tight to their own selves like an invisible wound. What was there to say?

This time Hallie drove while Colleen sat in the backseat next to the sticky gummy bears in the side seat and a half-full juice box on the floorboards. She stared out the window, wishing for something perfect to say, something that would anchor them in the right now, but she found nothing but an old memory that rolled in asking to be known.

How old had she been? Maybe six, or even as young as five years old.

She was practicing throwing the net, her small hands around the edges of the nylon, the small silver weights like beads she liked to roll between her fingers. Dad stood behind her and held her arms as she imitated his movements, a slow dance as they threw the net in an arc over the blue-gray water. Together they pulled it out of the water and inside was a pile of squirming shrimp, translucent and thrashing against the constraints of the net.

“Let them go,” Colleen hollered. She released her edge of the net as twenty or more shrimp fell to the dock. Their whiskers, what she called the antennae, tickled her feet and she began to kick them into the water. Her feet slid and the shrimp plunked into the dimpled river, sinking to the depths where she believed they would rejoin their family.

“Lena, love.” Dad took her hands. “What are you doing?”

He didn’t prevent her from throwing them back. He didn’t yell. He just asked.

When one lone shrimp remained, Colleen plucked it from the dock and stared at its small beady eyes before tossing it into the outgoing tide. She turned to her dad. “We can’t take them away from their family. What if the sister is looking for her brother or the little girl looking for her mother?”