“These are things made for thinking on slowly,” he would have told the children if he had known how. “Things to be thought on at length, while the hands do their work and the coffee sits in a solid china mug nearby. They are questions of Reach, maybe: do the dead sing? And do they love the living?” On the nights after Lona and Hal had gone back with their parents to the mainland in Al Curry’s boat, the children standing astern and waving good-bye, Alden considered that question, and others, and the matter of his father’s cap.
Do the dead sing? Do they love?
On those long nights alone, with his mother Stella Flanders at long last in her grave, it often seemed to Alden that they did both.