People were going to Kay’s cabin, but Hank couldn’t stand to sit around that cable-spool table where the four of them had sat so many nights, eating food they’d shot or caught, smoking the communal stash and singing Texas songs to Demeter’s guitar. He used to go outside with Demeter after those nights, and if it was winter she’d be wrapped in a shearling jacket with the collar up so her hair bunched out of it like corn silk. He’d have kissed Kay good night, on her smooth bony cheek, and Demeter would have kissed Duncan—years of that—and the sky would be so bright with stars, out where there weren’t any lights at all, that it made him dizzy with the bigness of it. Demeter’s breath would hang cloudy in the air, and she’d hug her guitar case and laugh, and Hank had felt so lucky on those nights, especially early on—he didn’t think any man had ever felt luckier. Duncan said he was born lucky, but Hank had come into luck.

Demeter leaned her head against her window and her eyes flickered at the fence posts and telephone poles going by. There was a load of firewood stacked up on a tarp in the back. It had seemed like a good thing to bring to Kay, and splitting it had taken his mind off the accident. He could forget the lawyers and funeral arrangements and think of the next swing of the ax. The wood was hard and dry and split cleanly; he only had to pry a few logs apart with the blade. If they didn’t go to Kay’s, he was stuck with the wood. If he went alone, later, nothing would happen between them. He was only a friend to Kay, and their sad awkwardness in the cabin would prove it.

“Let’s take her the wood and unload it,” Demeter said suddenly, as if she knew what he was thinking. “Then we’ll have been there. We don’t have to go in the house.”

Sometimes the Texas came out in Demeter, not the singing Texas, but the Texas that got things done. At the cabin, three cars were parked in the dirt driveway, and Kay’s old aunt carried a covered dish into the house. Hank backed up to the woodpile under the eaves, and Kay came out, drying her hands on a kitchen towel.

“I didn’t think you two were coming,” she said.

“We brought you some firewood.”

“Oh, that’s too much,” she said. Hank could see her realizing that Duncan wouldn’t be around to cut the wood anymore, and he opened the tailgate so he wouldn’t have to see that fact take hold on her face.