PREACHER

A year after Wren Callahan came home to bury her father, she is reading his third notebook in the shed on the back of his property when she finds a page that wasn't there last week. A name. A date thirty-six years old. A hand older than the surrounding entries - her father's, but younger.

The name belongs to a boy whose face has been on a plaque on the clubhouse wall since 1991. The boy's sister, a documentary podcaster, has been circling the same question from a distance for eight years. She arrives in town three weeks before the thirty-sixth annual memorial.

What Wren and the man her father got sober in 1996 - Sam "Preacher" Hollis, Secretary of the Iron Saints, thirty years clean - will have to learn, separately and then together, is that the moral architecture of the institution they have spent their adult lives inside was built on a body, and that the body was put there by a man both of them loved. The plaque has held for thirty-six years. The page has been waiting longer.

A story keeps a man sober. A man's sobriety keeps a story alive. And the story was a lie.