Prologue

The stones felt cool on their old feet. They’d slowly made their way to the River of Life in the early morning fog for their Memorial Day gathering. The sun was just beginning to burn through the moist air and in the next two hours would send the temperature from a pleasant seventy to a sweltering ninety.

They helped each other out of their shoes and across the boundary between the gravel path and the smooth stones of the River. Each picked up a rake and silently went about the motions of drawing in the stones, occasionally stooping to pick up a stick or leaf that had been missed when their kids cleaned the River on Saturday.

No formal ceremony marked their gathering, but the soles of their feet joined with the souls of their lost family and friends. None of them felt so old that they should have friends dying. Some still had living parents themselves. It was too soon to be burying their contemporaries. But it had always been that way. The living gathered and remembered the dead and those they had lost.

Marilyn and Anna slipped up beside Sly and lay a hand on his shoulder as he looked down at the stone that bore the names of his youngest daughter and her mother. Both were cut down way too young. Lily by cancer. Her teenage daughter by a gunman on campus. At the edge of the River, a black walnut tree dipped its roots into the stones. On its trunk was a plaque with Hayden’s name. Scarcely a day had gone by in twenty years that the women didn’t stand before that marker and weep for their lost love.

Dinita Kimes joined them. She’d felt the loss of Hayden almost as deeply as his wives. Angela’s first baby was stillborn and they brought her ashes to the River. Dinita cherished the memory of her granddaughter, even though she never drew breath.

Jim and Jill Swift shared a rake as they thought about their son, Doug. His fight with Hodgson’s ended his life way too soon. In the odd way that such tragedies have, it brought his parents back to Indiana—if not full time, at least enough to become a significant part of their grandchildren’s lives. More significant than they’d been in the lives of their children.

John and Bea Clinton were in the stones with the other parents. They’d not lost anyone directly but had inherited the tribal leadership when Hayden died and Brian began to look to John as a father figure. Once considered the most conservative and religious of the parents, the Clintons had mellowed over the years and had been there to support every step of the development of Corazón, Indiana.

“Shall we go to the bakery and get sweet rolls?” Sly asked. His somewhat expanded girth suggested that he went too frequently to the bakery, but his grandchildren were keeping him active.