“No,” she said. “But Patrick said it was there. That you built it because you were in love with someone.”

Oisín stopped. He didn’t know where to start. “Is that something he told everyone, or only you?”

“Just me,” she said.

“He’s your grandfather?”

She nodded. “Was he wrong?”

“Well, yes. He’s usually wrong. The Museum of Rain was just a thing. The words occurred to me one day, and then I started filling jars with rain. Then I saw a strange hollow in this big old manzanita. And that became the Museum of Rain.”

“Grandpa Patrick said it was a monument to your tears. Because some girl left you.”

The kids were far ahead of them now.

“We better catch up,” Oisín said. “But listen. Patrick tells a good story. He always has. But it’s entirely false. Not a word of it is true. It is, I admit, more memorable than the truth, which is that one day I just did it.”

“I like that story, too,” she said.

“Sometimes,” Oisín said, “people simply do things. They get an idea and do it, and it’s not tied up with any love or childhood trauma. If we believe there’s a dramatic origin story for every human endeavor, we deprive our species of the ability to simply conjure an idea. To just make stuff and do things.”

“I’m learning the banjo,” she said, and Oisín laughed a long while.

“You are something,” he said, and took her Aussie hat off. He put it on his own head.

“We almost there?” The ankle-tattoo boy had stopped up ahead and was shouting back to them.

Oisín nodded. They were close, he knew, and being closer made him uneasy. He dreaded seeing the Museum, its inevitable and catastrophic decay. Even at its best, it was still just a hippie project, a couple wooden shelves built into a rock, hidden in the overhang of a bigberry manzanita. He and Rebecca had reached the tattoo boy.

“So what, you put some rain in some jars?” the boy asked. “That’s what my dad said.”

“Basically,” Oisín said. And now, he thought, they would be ruinous. Half a century of wind and rot.