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said, “It seemed like it took forever to get my bunch back home. If Dr. Hsiao hadn’t delivered half of them for me, I don’t believe I could have stood the time it took. I kept thinking how Paul was needing a man to talk to.”
    Mrs. Herald shook her head at her husband’s words. “She’s wanting to hear he’s okay,” she said.
    Her husband nodded. “He’s going to be fine,” he said into the receiver.
    *   *   *
    Alan sipped his coffee and glanced through the window once again. Then he looked toward Carolyn, speaking on the telephone at the bookcase across the living room.
    “What, Daddy?” she said. With her question, her voice rose a little from the soft tone she had been using. “What did he say about it?” she asked.
    She listened a moment. “I know, Daddy, but what did Paul say?”
    As she listened this time, Alan saw her eyes turn toward his. She held her gaze on his for a moment, then turned back to the phone as she said, “In the morning, Mother and I’ll take him somewhere he likes—try to get his mind on something else for a little while anyway.” She smiled a little. “The bumper cars—he can drive them better than I can.”
    A moment later she said, “’Bye. Love you.”
    As she replaced the receiver, she caught her lip in her teeth. She looked across the living room as the doctor Barry had called stepped inside the house. He spoke to one of the highway patrolmen and followed him toward the hallway. As they disappeared toward the bedrooms, she kept staring in their direction. Then she caught her lip in her teeth again and looked toward the front door. Alan walked toward her.
    “If you need to go on,” he said, “you should.”
    “Julie said she wanted me to stay here for awhile.”
    “She wants all of us to stay here,” he said. “She doesn’t want anything to change. But it already has.”
    Carolyn looked directly into his eyes now. He thought she was going to ask him something, but she didn’t. “Paul’s already asleep,” she said. “I’ll see him in the morning.”
    Then, almost as if the words flowed out of her without her meaning them to, she said, “Dr. Freeman, I feel guilty worrying about my own son. I should be thanking God he’s okay. But I keep wondering how this might affect a six-year-old’s mind. He thought of both of them almost like brothers. Dustin was at the house nearly every day and now he’s not going to be there any…” She took an audible breath. “I’m sorry. A mother worrying about—”
    “That’s normal,” he said.
    She looked strangely at him. “That’s what Daddy said.”
    She stared at him a moment longer and then said, “Dustin gave Paul a pack of gum just before he went into the water. Daddy saw it when Paul took it out of his jeans before he climbed in bed—he went to sleep holding it.”
    She waited now. Waiting for him to respond to her worry, as if she had nobody else to talk to. He looked at her wedding ring. He wondered where her husband was.
    She still stared.
    “He’ll be okay,” he said.
    *   *   *
    Eddie Fuller stared at his cork floating in the water, turning dark as a cloud passed across the face of the moon. He turned his face toward the beaver dam a couple of hundred feet around the curving arc of the slough. A tendril of steam curled off the water nearest the dam. The light grew dimmer. He had watched the late movies on TV the night before. Bertha had warned him what that did to his mind. He remembered the character in Friday the 13th slinking through the trees. He didn’t want to, but nobody was around to see him, so he glanced back across his shoulder into the dark trees behind him. Then he looked toward the dam again. His tongue washed his upper lip.
    “Hey, Luke, caught any big’uns yet?”
    He waited a few seconds, then raised his voice higher. “Hey, Luke, buddy, caught anything yet?”
    Seconds passing and still no answer.
    “Luke, you deaf or something?”
    Still no answer.
    “Luke,