He told Tevet the story of the twelve foot quilt that Lee was making. (He addressed his daughter as Beth, using the name she preferred because it seemed right for a story of what flows. They were still driving in the blue mountains.)

"But who would ever use it?" Beth asked.

"I don't know that she has thought of that," Javier said, "To her it is a place. Like these mountains..."

He gestured along the windshield indicating the panorama before them. Sometimes, Beth thought, he was a man of grand gestures.

"It is the river," he said.

"So it's not for using, it's for flowing," Beth said.

(Such a coincidence. Still not unusual.)

"I suppose," Javier said. She was a good daughter, a poet.

They flowed through this time together and he felt they touched upon something central between them, some fundamental link, the antithesis of water.