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“My goodness. Did you pack these?”
    Ruth sighed inwardly. Even though she’d cleared it back in March with Lloyd’s doctor, she still wondered if it was a good idea for them to squeeze in this one last float trip. They’d been making this trip every year since they were a young couple, first running the river backin the 1950s, before the dam was built, when Lloyd was a young doctor working off his medical school debt by volunteering on the Navajo reservation. Ruth had just started painting at the time, and she brought along her watercolors and dabbed splashes of color into her notebook—salmon, mauve, and eggplant, colors she would later reproduce all winter long, wherever she was. Later, they moved to Evanston, Illinois, where they raised their two children, but they returned year after year for two weeks in the canyon. They brought friends. They passed up ski vacations and trips to Mexico to save their money for this particular trip; one year, when both children were in college, they traded Ruth’s paintings in exchange for their fare. Didn’t they get tired of the same old trip? people would ask. Didn’t they want to see other places? The truth was, they both felt a renewal of the soul while on the river, something that their friends in Evanston—churchgoers all—failed to comprehend.
    And then, two years ago, at the age of seventy-four, Lloyd began forgetting things. What he’d had for breakfast. What they’d done last weekend. Examining a patient, he found himself repeating his questions, and then he’d go back to his office and find he couldn’t remember what he’d just diagnosed. Ruth didn’t need a doctor to tell her what was wrong. Last year Lloyd’s condition was not so advanced, and they took their river trip as usual, without worry. This year, however, the increasing memory lapses and confusion had left Ruth debating the wisdom of a river trip. Was it irresponsible to take Lloyd? Alone, she visited Lloyd’s doctor and asked for his advice. He was an old friend and understood the spiritual significance of these trips for Ruth and Lloyd, and he listened to Ruth ticking off the worrisome incidents with a somber but skeptical demeanor. When she finished, he leaned across his desk and clasped her hands.
    “Ruth,” he said, “you’re a cautious, responsible woman. Go. You’ll take good care of him. It will do more for his spirit than keeping him safe in his living room.”
    So she’d signed them up for what she knew, deep in her heart, would be their last trip together. The hardest part was getting themboth packed, because Lloyd kept forgetting that he was going on any trip at all, let alone a two-week journey through the Grand Canyon. Upstairs in their comfortable colonial, Ruth laid out piles of clothes she intended to pack, and Lloyd would wander in and see them there all nice and fresh on the guest room bed and put them on and go out into the garden and stand with his hands on his hips. Ruth bought extra Metamucil biscuits and Lloyd ate them. She bought six tubes of sunscreen, only to have them disappear. At one point she lost her temper, shrieking that she was going to put him in a nursing home and go alone. But Lloyd just replied, “Go where?” and she cried all night, unable to forgive herself.
    The biggest moment of relief had come at six thirty this very morning, when they loaded their bags onto the transport bus back in Flagstaff, climbed in, and took a seat; and the driver shut the door; and there was no longer any chance for Lloyd to open up their carefully packed bags, take something out, and lose it.
    “I’ll bet she’s already diabetic,” Lloyd said now.
    “Don’t you say a word,” Ruth warned.
    “When’s Lava?”
    “Not for another ten days.”
    Lloyd shook his head gravely. “I tell them and I tell them and I tell them,” he said, “and they just keep on smoking.”
    After lunch, as Abo and Dixie scrubbed dishes by the water’s edge, JT called everyone together