Once across the valley, we stopped at the lake we'd spied from the mountaintop. Mist rose off its surface as the sun struck it. We had to pay a ranger to park and got a brochure with a map showing the campgrounds and the toilets in return. It was cooler at the edge of the lake. We walked slowly, quietly. Ahead of us frogs jumped into the water with tiny squeaks of alarm, disappearing magically into the mud as we neared.

Slogan called out the names of the ducks gaggled out toward the middle.

"Those gray ones are Gadwalls. Over there? American Widgeon. We used to call them Baldpate back when I was your age. Common Goldeneye, right next to them. The one flashing the white patch on his head? Bufflehead. When I was a boy, back in Tennessee, there were lots more of these guys, millions of 'em." He was always talking about when he was a boy and you had to admit it sounded quite a bit better than my situation.

"Where'd they go?" I said.

"They didn't go anywhere," he said, "They were shot-out."

We walked along a gravel bank where canoes and small sailboats lay beached.

A long-legged bird dashed helter-skelter ahead of us in short, worried bursts, keeping itself always about fifteen feet distant.

"That's a Killdeer. See how her wing doesn't look right? How she keeps flashing that white patch at us? That's to fool predators—in this mistaken case, us—into thinking she has a broken wing. She's trying to draw us off, distract us. If you get too close she'll fly away, there's nothing wrong with her at all. She probably has a nest nearby, probably in the opposite direction from where she's running."

We stopped to watch the bird until finally it flew away.

"I suppose the idea of you going with Eva and me to Memphis for a spell has gone by the boards?"

Slogan and Eva, mostly Slogan, had come up with this plan to take me home with them if and when they finally did get around to leaving. Home to Memphis where they would have me stay with them for a year or so. I'd already spent six weeks of the previous summer with my grandmother in Fort Lauderdale, so it didn't sound all that far-fetched to me.

He'd explained it to me a couple of weeks before, "Think how much good it would do you to get away from this whole mess, the whole fouled-up term at school? All I'm proposing to you is you take a break, come back to Memphis with us. For a year. We'll put you in school so you can keep up, you don't fall behind.

"I grew up in Memphis. It's a wonderful place to be a boy. There's lots of other boys there, too, to grow up with. A place on a bit of land. It was my father's. We'd have a barn. It's warmer there by about ten degrees, but otherwise it's like here."

But my father and mother, mostly my mother, weren't buying; in fact she went nearly bananas at the prospect, calling it a cockamamie plan, and saying, "I'm not gonna let those two kidnap my son," which everyone else thought was a pretty extreme interpretation of the situation but nobody said anything. Lots of screaming and crying.

"Yeah, it's complicated," I said.

"I get it," he said, "I knew it was a longshot, but I've always liked a longshot."

"Still..."

"Let's head back to the car," he said, and we turned around.

"People lose their way all the time," he said, and I was pretty sure he wasn't talking about getting back to the car. "And you have to forgive them even if you can't help them find their way again."

I said, "I already told them I wasn't going."

"Is that what you really want or are you only doing it because they wouldn't let you even if you did want to go?"

I thought about it for a minute while we walked.

"It's the only way I can get it to all fit together," I said, "make everybody happy."

"Making everybody happy is not your job," he said, "which I reckon is part of the problem." I hadn't thought there was a problem. It was just the way things were. Life.

We walked past the ranger's booth not saying anything, as if we were afraid he was eavesdropping.

"Look, I gotta tell you, we're leaving in the morning, me and Eva. Going back to Memphis. We decided this morning."

I stared at him.

"I was planning to stick around until I could finish up some business with your pop," he said, "But..."

The parking lot gravel crunched and crackled under his feet.

"...after that whole ruckus last night and all…all the shit between your mama and Davey…?" He left the thought hanging.

Then he said, "You don't have to be Sigmund Freud to see your mama's tirades aren't about Davey. Or at least not all about him. He's just the catalyst. They're about your pop, they're about you. They're about me and Eva, too. So that's one of the reasons we're gonna skedaddle, maybe take some of the pressure off your mama."