Hank and Duncan had started an underwater-welding business together, and they worked freelance on hydroelectric dams. In the last week of July, they went down to look for earthquake damage on the Hansen Dam, but it seemed fine. They kept looking, eighty feet down, where it was so cold Hank’s bones ached, and found nothing. Duncan waved him back to the surface, and Hank peeled off his wet suit on the gravel bank, getting the sun on his goose-bumped skin. He stashed all his gear in the VW bus and started making notes for the report, but Duncan didn’t come up after him. Finally Hank tugged the cold wet suit on and went back down. He found Duncan at the bottom, weighted down by his belt, staring empty-eyed inside his mask. Hank shouted at him, stupidly, bubbles escaping around his regulator and clouding everything, and he looped an arm around Duncan’s chest to drag him to the surface. On the bank he pumped his friend’s sternum so hard he felt a rib crack, and forced his own air into the sodden lungs. He kept trying long after he knew Duncan was dead.

They were miles from any town, and Hank didn’t know what to do. It was too late for an ambulance. He didn’t know if you were supposed to move a body, or where he would take it. He finally left Duncan there, and called the cops from a bait-and-beer store on the highway. His hands were shaking and blue, and the woman at the counter eyed him. He didn’t know what to say to his wife, and he couldn’t call Kay. The woman at the counter kept watching him, so he left, driving north to Duncan and Kay’s cabin as the idea that Duncan was dead sank in. He was dead and Hank had left him alone on the lakeshore, after leaving him alone down below, but now getting to Kay seemed as important as getting back to Duncan.

He found her alone at the cabin, hanging laundry on the line. Their four-year-old, Annie, wasn’t there, and Hank was glad. Watching Kay hang the clothes, with the blue mountains in the distance, he felt weirdly calm, as if everything had settled down into a space Duncan didn’t occupy anymore, a space that would never be any different than it was now.

Kay didn’t cry right away; he had never seen her cry. Duncan used to say Kay’s father was the strongest small man he’d ever known, and had never said more than eight words together. Kay was her father’s daughter: she hung the last pair of Duncan’s jeans, then went inside to call her brother, to ask him to keep Annie for the night.