He took it with bated breath, bending low so his chin rested on the table for optimal view. It was quite a lean for such a tall man. “Be gold, be gold,” he muttered. “Or pearls? Or at least not something poisonous.”

  It felt like a warm roof had settled over her. He smelled like he’d been out on the lake all day, muddy and green. She took a deep breath, and the cork finally budged a little, then a little more, then—then it shot across the floor, Smoky on its tail, claws scrabbling madly. Mud pooled out, bubbly and black with age.

  Mitch winced at the foul smell of the bog forming in a dark ooze around the piggy bank. He grabbed the nearest dried herb to prod at it. “Sick. This sludge must be almost a century old.”

  From the depths, she pulled several things, one lumpy shape, one very rusted key that wouldn’t fit anything larger than a diary, and a hard knob the size of a spitball. With one of the old dishrags, she wiped them off. The bits were two very old green pennies. The lump turned out to be an ancient toy soldier. “How about copper, instead of gold?” She bit at the pearl. “This is fake.”

  Mitch groaned, forehead hitting the table. “That—don’t—in your mouth.”

  “It’s just how you test if they’re real. It’s too smooth to be natural.” She pushed the coins across the desk. “But the pennies were made with real copper back then. They’re worth more than a penny each.”

  Mitch caressed each penny with a large fingertip, just as he had with things he admired in the shop as a boy. “Hey…” He smiled at her, his shy, particular smile, one not everyone saw; he didn’t like exposing the charming little gap in his teeth. “I’ll put one penny in my pocket, and you put the other in yours. Luck to share.”

  It was a sweet idea, so Cassie couldn’t help but stop her tinkering to smile up at him and open her palm. He plopped one penny in her hand, then straightened up with a sigh. “I need to go back and help Mom fight off the disgruntled customers…”

  “Here,” Cassie said, screeching her chair back and darting for the front. Dark or light? No. Honeycomb for complexity. She found the best jar, with the biggest comb floating in its heart, and brought it to him. “For you and Valerie, if she needs the strength.”

  Mitch’s whole face opened, light catching in his eyes like sun through the honey. It was his first jar of the season. “Thanks, Cassie,” he rumbled. “Looks like honey pie is back on the menu.” Cassie was submerged in a hug she felt all over. Then, humming, he backed out through her shop door.

  The penny was up on heads. Cassie slipped it into her pocket and went to the window as Mitch jogged to his car and waved before he drove onto the road. Warm, Cassie waved back.

  Smoky appeared again, wafting through her legs, and deposited the mangled cork at her feet.

  * * *

  There was no place on earth as depressing as the belly of a Greyhound bus. It was the wrong side of midnight, when time halted and the road blurred. June was never able to sleep in transit. The movement of the wheels, the hiss whenever the bus stopped, the bump of her temple against the window all night long, her need to use the bathroom for fifty miles coupled with absolute refusal to use the dingy one on the bus: she was in a traveling purgatory. And out the window, rain fell so heavy that the panes were too slick and fogged to know if the rest of the world was still there at all.

  The temperature was never right. She felt like a badly cooked casserole: half-freezing, too cold to take off her jacket; half-burning, the back of her neck all sweaty under her hair. She’d woken up with it long and wild, rebelling after a year of being cooped up under the paper triangle hats All Night Diner had made every employee wear. The one bright spot was remembering she would never return to All Night Diner, or Chicago, again.

  As far as themed nightclubs went, All Night Diner—with its seersucker shorts, red plastic stools, ironic suspenders, and Signature Short Order Martinis—was among the worst. June had lasted almost a year there trying to find her post-college path, mostly providing table service in the VIP section. But there had been problems. Every night she’d worked, the faux-wholesome atmosphere had become full moon at a biker bar. The other servers had jokingly called it the June Curse. But a week ago, a few of the regulars had smashed up the bar after she served them a round of Jell-O Salad Shots, and Jasmine, the owner, decided enough was finally enough. It wasn’t her fault, June had argued. She hadn’t overserved, and she’d barely spoken to them. But that dead-end job wasn’t worth the fight, so she’d handed in her clip-on bow tie and HI, MY NAME IS JUNE! name tag. She wouldn’t miss serving up Burger and Ryes or Ketchup Collins. Lemon Pie Limoncellos. Jukebox Mojitos. Grease Trap Margaritas.

  Hurricane June, Mom had called her sometimes. Hurricane June blowing through.

  June folded her feet up onto the seat and rested her cheek on her knees as the endless nowhere flashed by. She was running out of somewhere elses to go—and that wasn’t a pleasant thought. But she only needed a couple of weeks, maybe a month. Just until her part of the lease on that stupid two-bedroom in Hyde Park ran out. Just until she caught her breath. Then she’d know what to do again. She’d formulate a plan of action. She’d settle somewhere entirely new and make a real go of it. A better go of it. One that included no cocktails named after condiments.

  Her nail polish had worn off from being picked at, maroon flecks drifting down, catching in her shoelaces, by the time the bus wheezed to a halt. “Hey. Seat five,” the bus driver snapped after a moment of silence. “Sweetheart.”

  No one replied. A man in ragged fatigues had been sleeping on one of the benches since Tunica. They were the only two left. Wait a second. Surely he didn’t—June lifted her head. “Do you mean me?”

  “Yeah, you, señorita.” June would never understand how people saw her, a product of a Black mother and white father, and decided Latina. He sat back, scratching at his stubble. “You said that church with the lady pastor, right? You’re about half a mile down this side road. I can’t go any farther off route, unless you’ve got a few more bucks on you.”

  “It’s pouring rain,” June pointed out.

  “I’ll drive you to the doorstep for a hundred bucks.”

  “Fine. Fine,” June said before scooping up her backpack and dashing into the deluge. Rain fell in a silver curtain, catching in her hair, running grooves down her jacket like the little rivers on either side of the road, and it rained so thick that she could barely make them out. The trees stood sentry, blind giants along the one-way street.

  Her walk quickly became a stagger. Distantly, she heard the rain hitting water, flat and hollow, and wind whipping up waves. The downpour tasted like salt water. There was a lake here, and as she walked, she couldn’t shake the sensation that she was about to walk straight into it, led there blindly by the screaming wind. This was no cultivated paradise. It wouldn’t be the sedate body of water hemmed in by glossy Spanish villas where movie stars made their summer homes. No, this is a wild lake, the rain seemed to say.

  What was this place anyway? June had stolen the address off an Easter card, but she hadn’t imagined it would be like this—anti-civilization, solitary houses buried so far from the road, they were invisible except for glints of yellow light from windows, like the eyes of wild and lonely beasts. Even so, she didn’t want to go to distant California, where Dad and his new wife, a breeder of Persian cats, now lived. Mom would never turn her away, but her apartment was so small, and she’d let June intrude forever out of love, even if it was too much. Instead, there was Aunt Eliza, loving and kind enough to take in a wayward niece on the fly, with a guest room in the historic house that came with her job. Assuming June didn’t get lost in the woods on the way there.

  June felt Chicago being washed off her, water sluicing down to her bones, but it was a relief because even that was better than the horrendous, consuming boredom that had gripped her before.

  That boredom. That restless, anxious twitch that came from too long spent standing still, too long without change. The feeling always found her. It ruined the tiny, stuffy apartment she had so recently shared with Delilah. The place had been a creaking shoebox, but her true home had been the soles of Delilah’s feet poking out from blankets, how cool her eyes could be in the evenings, the way her hair—originally dyed platinum—had faded into dirty gold, dry and split at the ends: an elderly lion’s mane. They had been isolated too, in their cubic space, suspended in the clouds above Chicago, the noise of the L train far below, and June had thought maybe this time she could find peace.

  But June had spun against the walls. No number of nights out or spontaneous road trips had put off the inevitable. “Let’s go,” she’d begged on too many nights. She lived nocturnally, on a stray cat’s schedule. “Let’s just go.”

  “Go where?” Delilah finally asked at the end. “Why do you always want to go? Can’t you ever just—”

  “What?” June coaxed, draping her arms around her neck in the way that usually got her to soften.

  “Stop,” Delilah replied. “Just stop.”

  Later, she told June through pursed lips and teary eyes that the lease was under Delilah’s name and that she cared for June but couldn’t live with her, not an hour before June went in for her final shift at the All Night Diner.

  Her hands shook, so pent up that the cocktails all shivered, splashing grenadine and vodka onto the tables. Then the punches had been thrown around her, the liquor shelves had shattered like applause, and frankly, June had known she would be fired for it because when the universe gave June signs it was time to move on, it wasn’t exactly subtle.

  June’s jeans were muddy, calves burning, when the church appeared like a lighthouse out of the gloom. It was a white craftsman-style building surrounded by flower beds. It was no Saint Peter’s Basilica, no grand bells or marble columns that could reach heaven. Here, apparently, God’s house was much like anyone else’s, only with a steeple. June had never seen the church in person.

  It took two bobby pins and the better part of five minutes before the locked door clicked open for her, and she dripped into the church. When the door closed behind her, the rain quieted.

  In the gray darkness, just in front of her, a table was stacked high with welcome brochures and some orchids, robbed of all color. Then came a few long pews, fewer than twenty, each lined with red faux velvet and identical black King James Bibles placed at regular intervals. A weathered but kindly piano sat on the stage to the left of the pulpit, dinged up but polished all the same. In an alcove above the pulpit, and the bleachers where the dinky Sunday choir must have gathered earlier that day, was a single large stained glass window bearing the image of the cross against a brilliant sunrise.

  June wandered down the aisle aimlessly before picking a pew at random. She pushed the Bibles out of their order, dropped her bag at the end of it, and flopped over the armrest, letting her muddy feet dangle. She kicked off one shoe, and it took a bedraggled sock with it.

  She was asleep before she managed the second.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A voice reached June fuzzily in sleep, and though she jerked awake, the pew under her and the face above her were incomprehensible at first. Her neck was sore after sleeping on her leather jacket—its old rock star smell comforting, if not particularly pillowy—and her hair had the mussed feeling that came from air-drying, her mouth ashy with dehydration. She had the colorless, driftless feeling of someone who’d been traveling too long, until she was strung out on miles: a junkie for a diesel and gas fix.

  “June? Honey?” Now the face above her resolved itself into Aunt Eliza, shocked with an amused twist. She held June’s squashed backpack in one hand and one of her beat-up sneakers with once-white laces and Sharpie sketches in the other. Every square inch of the shoe—and June herself—was caked in dried mud.

  June had vague toddler memories of a teenage Aunt Eliza, a kind of second mom who had taken her trick-or-treating dressed as a pumpkin and held her in vain during her inconsolable moods. June had been a lively kid, from the terrible twos all the way into her fours. But Aunt Eliza had always been patient with her before leaving for college. She’d loved singing hymns to June, sitting with her at the tiny electric organ Eliza practiced on at home while June hammered all the keys at once and Mom hummed.

  Eliza had always been a bit of a dork about church. Apparently they’d had a preacher in the family a few generations ago. In the old house in Texarkana, Eliza kept a framed picture of him on the organ, one of the very few tattered relics they had of family history: a tall dark-skinned man, his Sunday best almost lost in the muddy shades of the ancient photo, the thick stem of a sunflower the size of a hubcap in his hands.

  When Mom had heard Eliza was going to some random church in the middle of nowhere, serving a handful of broken-down old locals plus whatever tourist poked their head in, she cried first, then laughed and said, “Good luck.”

  But Aunt Eliza had simply ignored the sarcasm and smiled. “You know we have roots there, right? Great-Granddaddy’s church is somewhere under that lake. Nobody else wants that appointment. Most everybody moved away, but—that’s his flock.”

  Now June smiled at her from the pew. “Hi, Aunt Eliza. Nice church you’ve got here. I like the…” She gestured vaguely at nothing.

  “Why in the world didn’t you knock on the rectory door? Come here. It’s so good to see you.” Aunt Eliza pulled her up into a hasty hug. Aunt Eliza was a particularly tall, stately woman with very dark skin, and she was grounded in a way June could admire. She was wearing neon running shoes and looked more like a college professor on her day off than a pastor. She smelled like cinnamon and soft earth, a hint of hard work. June only came up to her cheek.

  “Is that where you live? The rectory?” June asked. “Sounds like the back end of something. No thanks.”

  “Well, girl, you look like the back end of something.” Eliza chuckled, swaying them a moment before letting go. Her gaze was so fully on June’s face that June was tempted to slide on her sunglasses. “Come on. What are you doing here?”

  “Vacation,” June said and sniffed her shirt. “Most urgently, shower?”

  “Seems like you’ve already been through one,” Eliza said mildly, glancing at the mud.

  “Oh, this? Mud bath. Supposed to be very healthy.” She wiggled dusty fingers. “Good for the skin.” It had been years since she had seen Aunt Eliza. Too many years for this to be normal, showing up out of the thin air, sleeping in a pew like a girl without a home. “I wondered if I could crash here for a bit. A couple of weeks, maybe.”

  “Of course you can,” Eliza said, without a blink, without a thought, and June relaxed out of the defensive stance she’d unknowingly taken. “I’ve got plenty of room for you here.” There might’ve been a hint of a challenge in her voice. You can’t shock me, girl. I’ve seen everything.

  She offered June her backpack and shoe, and June took her few possessions, which were still damp from the rain. “Cool. Show me to the rectum.”

  Eliza hooked an arm around her. “Right this way.”

  * * *

  Fairchild’s was quiet around Cassie as she spread out a blue-and-white-striped swimsuit on the worktable. It looked just like Catfish’s. It had come from an estate sale, one piece of many locked in an old steamer trunk. Cassie had pulled it out, and instantly, she was five again, swimming near the dock in Catfish’s care.

  When Cassie was a little girl, long before Bolt was born, she would have lived in the water if Mom let her. She’d play at the shallow, muddy shore all day, the lemon-pie sun smiling above her, Mom opining on the phone from the porch while her painted toenails dried in the summer breeze, both waiting to hear Grandad’s car rumble up the road so they could walk down to Valerie’s for dinner. Cassie was never supposed to go past the dock, but that was where the water glittered the bluest. Blueberry blue.

  The first time she met Catfish, she felt a spray of water hit her on the back of the head, and she turned around. And there was a girl in her faded blue-and-white suit, treading water like it was air, wet ringlets framing her face. She was a teenager, maybe one of the beautiful ones who sunbathed on boats, mature enough to no longer need life jackets.

  “Hi,” she said. She was almost under the dock, paddling in its shadow. “I hope you’re not swimming alone. Are you lost?”

  “No.” Cassie kicked a bit closer. “I live here.”

  Some of the concern in the girl’s expression soothed, and she glided closer, into the sun. “Good. It’s easy to swim too far, especially on a day this lovely.”

  In the face of this girl’s wiry arms, Cassie wished she could hide her yellow water wings. But Mom wouldn’t let her swim without them, just like how Cassie couldn’t go past the dock and had to stay where she could see Mom and Mom could see her. Cassie was too young. Other people lived on the lake, and a lot of kids were near the marina. But the marina was a whole world away. The girl must have swum far to get there. She must be a very good swimmer.

  “What’s your name, honey?” she asked, flipping onto her back and looking at Cassie upside down. The girl made a silly face, and Cassie laughed.

  “Cassandra—but Grandad says it’s too big a name for me, so he calls me ‘Cassie.’”

  “Catfish,” she replied, tapping her chest. “That’s what my dad calls me.”

  “That’s a funny name.”

  “Isn’t it?” Catfish smiled, indulgent. “It’s because I can swim really far underwater without taking a breath. Want me to show you?” When Cassie nodded, Catfish dove before pushing through murky water to the other side of the dock and popping up in the vague blue distance. She waved and then dipped back. When she reappeared, panting hard, Cassie could only smile at her, too shy and starstruck to know what to say.

  “Where’s your mommy?” Catfish asked gently. Cassie pointed to the house, where she could see Mom’s feet propped up on the patio table. Catfish nodded. “That’s okay. I can watch you for a while.”