“So, you think we ought to try to keep this wayfaring fisherman around for a while?” Taylor asked, making a wink.

“Don’t see why not,” Eleanor answered easily.

“You guess that old shack down by the lake’s good enough for him?” Taylor said.

“It could probably use a good cleaning and some more furni-ture,” Eleanor offered.

“It’s fine,” Noah said. There was a sound of embarrassment in his voice.

“I didn’t pay you for the fish,” Eleanor said.

“Didn’t mean for you to,” Noah told her. “I’d say I owe you, much as you fed me the last couple of days.”

“But I ordered them.”

“And I ate a lot of them,” Noah said. “I just thank you for the meal.”

“All right, enough of that,” Taylor said. He tilted his head comically at Eleanor, mugged exasperation. “See what I mean about him? Talks all the time. Can’t hardly get him to slow down.”

Noah grinned, felt a blush on his face.

“Leave him alone, Taylor Bowers,” Eleanor said. “Or next time, you won’t get invited.”

“Next time?” Taylor asked.

“Well, I thought we should do this again before long,” Eleanor replied.

Taylor rocked on the heels of his feet. He nodded thoughtfully, said, “I like the sound of that. I like it a lot.”

The moon, orange-yellow in color, two nights from being full, made its slow crawl against the dome of stars, its light coating the trees of the lake.

Noah rested under the blanket on the porch cot, his head pushed against the pillow. Watched the moon through the rusting screen wire that wrapped the porch. Watched the light sliding off leaves of the beechnut. Listened to the sounds around him. Nightsounds, his mother had called them, making it one word. Nightsounds were the best sounds in the world, his mother had said. So much singing you’d think the grass and the bushes and the flowers and the trees had taken on voices. And maybe it was that, she had added. How many times had anyone ever seen a cicada or a whippoorwill or an owl or a tree frog singing? Never, she had guessed. She hadn’t. Not once. Had spent her life listening to them, but had never seen one at song. A cicada could easily have been a daffodil in hiding, a whippoorwill or an owl the high blossom of a tulip tree. Could have been. The night held many things that could not be seen, only guessed at.

If you listened carefully to nightsounds, you could hear the music that must have been playing when God made the earth and moon and stars and all the other parts of the heavens, his mother had whispered to him.

It was a good memory to Noah. Went far into his childhood, when he was still at his lap-curling age, before the birth of Travis, his brother. He wondered if it was memory from one night, or from many nights. Wondered if his mother had said the same to his brother in the same kind of cuddled moments. There were times when he could feel the warmth of his mother’s breath against his face, could smell the sweet odor of tobacco smoke from his father’s pipe, and he imagined the memory was from nights of sitting on the porch of their home.