Hank shut the door and left her there. She’d been singing to herself on the drive up, a song that started “All in green went my love riding.” Demeter had a voice on her, but this wasn’t one of her songs. Her songs were Texas trail songs, Lone Star laments. The drive to the cemetery had taken a good forty-five minutes, and the whole way she sang, “Four lean hounds crouched low and smiling, the merry deer ran before.” She was singing in her low voice; Demeter’s low voice meant trouble when she talked, and Hank didn’t like hearing her sing in it. But there was no telling Demeter to stop. The song went on and on, and when she seemed to finish she would start over, as if it were all one long song.

Hank thought if Demeter could get her head on straight, she’d be all anyone could want. Long ashy hair, freckled shoulders, Texas in her voice. Her rancher father had named her for the harvest goddess, and stressed the first syllable, like Demerol. She was the first girl who kept Hank’s mind from wandering, so he’d tried to keep hers from wandering, too. But lately Demeter had a look in her eye like he’d failed.

Hank opened the tailgate of the pickup, and Duncan’s yellow dog Blue jumped in, circled around next to the long pine box and whined a little. More people had arrived from town, and Kay’s two brothers helped Hank pull the box off the truck and carry it to the hole in the field, near a low iron fence with grass fields beyond. The box rocked with their different gaits. Kay trailed behind, in jeans and a red rain poncho, with dark-headed Annie in tow.

The coroner had said Duncan’s heart had stopped, and he had drowned as a result. He said Hank wasn’t to blame, but Hank blamed himself. Kay had always wanted Duncan to stop diving and do something else: take a state job, run for office, raise sheep in their pasture. Sometimes she’d been teasing but mostly she hadn’t. The night they saw Duncan dead, she told Hank she couldn’t believe it had happened, because she’d worried about it so much; you worried so a thing wouldn’t happen, and then it did.

Demeter managed to get her shoes on, and made her way across the cemetery. Her cotton dress was slipping off her shoulders, and she wore no jacket in the wind. She picked up Annie at the edge of the grave, hugged her to her hip and pushed the girl’s dark hair from her eyes. “You look like your daddy,” she said.

“Jesus, don’t say that,” Hank said.