“I’ll show you how.” I dug my feet into the soft, wet sand, and so did Terrence. His eyes lit with mirth. “But they’ll only nibble a little. Then you have to find new ones. See?”

“And there’s an endless supply?”

“Endless.”

As we meandered past great beds of bronzy kelp that had washed up on the beach, I said, “I always think there must be whole tribes of mermaids somewhere, and these are their braids. When they cut their hair, their braids are carried away by the currents.”

He stopped and regarded me quizzically. “You are the living end, girl! Who would ever think of that?” Bruno brought the stick back and laid it proudly at his feet. “Good boy, Bruno!” Terrence flung it again, and the dog dashed off.

On this sunny May afternoon, those few people who saw us or passed us, white people, of course, all of them, gave us odd, disparaging looks as we ran barefoot on the shoreline and played with the dog. We wandered perhaps a mile up the beach before turning back and ambled south, a sense of connection between us as vivid as if that deer still somehow leapt, poised overhead. Our conversation roamed aimlessly over our respective pasts. He told three different stories as to how he’d come by the gold tooth, each one more outlandish than the last. Then he just laughed and said the truth was so dull, it wasn’t worth telling, like using your grocery list for the page one headline. As we walked back we marveled that Julia’s death had brought us obliquely together two years ago, and that Clarence, who had so loomed over my young life, had been a rock of Terrence’s childhood.

“When he’d get angry with me and Booker, Clarence would say, ‘You two are nothing but a handful of gimme and a mouthful of much-obliged, just like your daddy.’”

“He didn’t like your father?”

“Nobody liked my father. Not even my mother.”

“Did you like him?”

“I don’t hardly remember him. I was just little, six or so, when he died. Clarence did his best with me and Booker, but he had these standards that made us crazy. Still, he kept us in line for the most part. We had a couple of scrapes, of course—nothing too serious. Kid stuff. Then.”

This seemed an odd addition. “And since?”