Ellen stood like a marble monument next to Mike, trying to send strength to Tiffany through their clasped hands.

Carla shivered on the other side of Mike. Thea, wrapped for a moon landing, clung blue-lipped to her mother's hand.

The three would return to the Bahamas the following day, and Ellen would follow in two more days, when she'd taken care of Sean's affairs.

Now, to keep herself from breaking down, she kept her eyes on the Brody headstone, squarely on Marty's name: Martin M. Brody, b: Aug. 10, 1942 d: May 22, 1986. Beloved of Ellen, Michael, and Sean.

The whole town was at the graveside. Next week, or the week after, the stonecutter from Amagansett would be here for Sean's inscription, long after she was gone.

A gust rattled the dried boughs of the elm above them. An eddy whipped around its mottled trunk, and a faded pink handbill for Lautzhauser's Men's Store's annual bankruptcy sale fluttered into the open grave.

No one wanted the handbill to rest through eternity with Sean, but Mike, lost in thought, did not seem to see it, and no one else wanted to climb down and get it. They were burying the only man in town who would have stepped forth and volunteered.

Reverend McCloud's cheerful voice brought no balm at all. He was a red-bearded giant, ex-high school tackle, bursting with health, and as stupid a man as Ellen had ever known. He had mouthed the same stale passages at Brody's funeral just the previous year, and it had done no good.

"A time to weep and a time to laugh..."

She could hear Tiffany fighting tears beside her. She was young and unused to loss. If you'd romped free in pastures all your life, the first wall you encountered seemed immense.

Tiff probably thought she would never stop weeping in the night, but that was because she had never truly wept before. Ellen had wept for Marty and knew that the tears would pass but that the ache would never leave.

"A time to mourn and a time to dance..."

He loved it, McCloud did. It had made his day, though at first he was aghast at what she wanted: no funeral in church, only a graveside service.

"Now, Ellen, are you sure?" he'd protested at first.

"I'm sure."

"But there's cathartic effect in church, even if the casket's closed," McCloud said dubiously.

"The casket will be at the grave," she said, choking. "It's not Sean in it, anyway; there's nothing there to see. No one's seen him since he left me but that awful goddamn shark!"

"And God, Ellen," McCloud said, chiding her and ignoring her language. "We must never forget Him."

"Why not?" she demanded. "Did God remember him?"

McCloud, jolted, had recovered from the sacrilege. In his own eyes, at least, he was rising nobly to his task, exhorting everyone to remember that there was a time to live and a time to die.