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been, reflected there. A page of Sheila’s journal, pressed open on the picnic table, lifts in the wind and then turns over, sagging down on itself. She can see that she is keeping Janet waiting, and so she tells her that she and Tim will see her tonight at the service. And Kristen will be there, too, if we can convince her to come, she says. Janet nods goodbye, and Sheila watches her stop for only a moment as she walks away, fishing a dollar out of her purse for United States Congressman Asa Hutchinson.
    Congressman Hutchinson folds the bill into quarters, tucking it into the change pocket he has sewn into the band of his pants. He can tell by the way the pocket weighs against his gut that he will soon have enough for a drink of liquor. Empty bottles are stacked three deep along the rafter above his bench, and he can hear them clinking whenever a gust of wind shakes the pavilion. Once he made the mistake of telling a woman, a Jehovah’s Witness, that the dollar she had given him was the last he needed for the day and that now he was going to get good and drunk. He had reached out to shake her hand, saying what he always said when his pocket was finally full or he had generated enough warmth beneath his blanket to fall asleep, when, in short, any good thing happened to him, The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, and the woman had demanded her money back. This was in another city, in the winter, when he was traveling. A blue-bird flutters past him and perches on the white railing of the stairs, excavating something from its feathers. It is September now, and he knows he will have to leave soon. Every year from November to April he tends his wife’s grave, combing the leaves from the grass and digging it free of the ice and snow. It is the least he can do for her. The groundskeeper of the cemetery knows him so well that he allows him to borrow his rake and shovel. The congressman’s wife fell sick with cancer in 1989— the same year that Celia was born, the same year the pavilion was built. Before she died, she made him promise to look after her burial plot in the winter. She said that she couldn’t stand the thought of being covered by all that snow. The congressman has groomed the site so many times by now that he has memorized the boundary line, and when he returns the groundskeeper’s rake and shovel to him, he leaves behind a perfect rectangle of yellowing grass. A squirrel crosses the rafters above his head, running first around the periphery and then along one of the spokes. It pauses halfway down a column to leap onto the trunk of an oak tree, scrabbling into the branches. The congressman watches it twist out of sight toward the Quik Stop and the liquor store as he gives his change pocket a protective tap.
    If you are small enough and nimble enough, the trees are like a system of roads, and before half a minute has passed the squirrel has leaped from one tree onto another, and from that tree onto a third, leaving the sour smell of the pavilion far behind. There was a time, not fifty years ago, when you could cross the entire town without ever touching ground. The trees might have fallen, but the houses and strip malls and street-lamps have risen, and the squirrel sometimes races along them for miles, running as though he could never fall. He darts from a rooftop onto a fence, and from there onto a tree and a billboard. When he reaches the west end of town, the interlacing canopies of the trees take him across entire yards, and occasionally two or three branches will even meet above a busy street. He runs through the elm trees behind a row of apartments and crawls to the very tip of a branch that stretches far into the open air, testing the pliancy of the limb with his paw, then jumps onto a windowsill, allowing the spring of the bough to propel him a few extra inches. A few clusters of birds are pecking up bread crumbs from the grass, and when he bounds into the midst