Saints at the River

After the meeting, Maggie drops Allen off at a hotel and reluctantly drives home to stay the night with her father. The reunion is awkward. The two have not really talked for years. She is relieved that it is too late for conversation. Rather, Maggie walks back to her old bedroom and thinks about when her mother died during her junior year in college. She alludes again to some memory about her brother, a memory too painful to face.

In the morning, before her father wakes, she Googles Allen Hemphill. To her astonishment, she finds an article dated a year and half earlier about the deaths of Allen’s wife and his nine-year-old daughter in a car crash during a heavy rainstorm in northern Virginia. When her father joins her for coffee, she notices the effects of the chemotherapy. He has lost weight; his face is pale. He dribbles from his coffee cup. The father mentions Luke, and Maggie remembers years earlier when her father kicked her out of the house for spending the night with Luke. Before Maggie leaves for the community meeting at the river, her father tells her about a dream he had right after the girl died in the river.