Edna Akin and Parker Ford married young. For fifteen years they traveled the American south of the 1930s as Parker went about his work as a traveling salesman, selling laundry starch. Life was hotels rooms, roadside bars and always each other. Then a single child was born to them, and a life went a new way. Blending his parents' lives, drawing on memory, history, anecdote, Richard Ford's Between Them is a stirring contemplation of love's mystery and of loss.