Lila leaned back from him. “Well?”

“Well?”

“Make him stop,” she said.

Luther looked at this little creature sitting in the grass and wailing, his eyes red, his nose running. He reached down and lifted him to his shoulder. He was warm. Warm as a kettle wrapped in a towel. Luther had never known a body could give off such heat.

“He okay?” he asked Lila. “He feels hot.”

“He’s fine,” she said. “He’s a baby been setting in the sun.”

Luther held him out in front of him. He saw some Lila in the eyes and some Luther in the nose. Saw his own mother in the jaw, his father in the ears. He kissed his head. He kissed his nose. The child continued to wail.

“Desmond,” he said and kissed his son on the lips. “Desmond, it’s your daddy.”

Desmond wasn’t having any of it. He wailed and shrieked and wept like the world was ending. Luther brought him back to his shoulder and held him tight. He rubbed his back. He cooed in his ear. He kissed him so many times he lost count.

Lila ran a hand over Luther’s head and leaned in for a kiss of her own.

And Luther finally found the word for this day…

Whole.

He could stop running. He could stop looking for anything else. Wasn’t anything else he wanted. This right here was the full measure of every hope he’d harbored since birth.

Desmond’s wails stopped, just snuffed out like a match in the wind. Luther looked at the basket at his feet, still half full with damp clothing.

“Let’s get those clothes hung,” he said.

Lila lifted a shirt off the pile. “Oh, you gonna help, uh?”

“You give me a couple of those clothespins, I will.”

She passed a handful of them to him and he hoisted Desmond onto his hip and helped his wife hang laundry. The moist air hummed with cicadas. The sky was low and flat and bright. Luther chuckled.

“What you laughing at?” Lila asked.

“Everything,” he said.

Danny’s first night in the hospital, he spent nine hours on the operating table. The knife in his leg had nicked the femoral artery. The bullet in his chest had hit bone, and some of the bone chips had sprayed his right lung. The bullet in his left hand had entered through the palm and the fingers were, for the time being anyway, useless. He’d had less than two pints of blood in his body by the time they got him out of the ambulance.

He woke from a coma on the sixth day and was awake half an hour when he felt the left side of his brain catch fire. He lost the vision in his left eye and tried to tell the doctor something was happening to him, something odd, like maybe his hair was on fire, and his body began to shake. It was quite beyond his control, this violent shaking. He vomited. The orderlies held him down and shoved something leather into his mouth, and the bandages on his chest tore and blood leaked from him all over again. By this time, the fire had raged all the way across his skull. He vomited again, and they pulled the leather out of his mouth and rolled him onto his side before he choked.