“We didn’t have much time this morning. We were up late last night packing. We stopped on the way in to work and got coffee and doughnuts.”

“You fed him coffee and doughnuts for breakfast?”

“I made sure the coffee was cool. Yesterday was better. Yesterday we had orange juice and eggs and whole wheat toast.”

“Doesn’t he ever eat dog food?”

“I bought some for him, but he didn’t like it.”

Daisy ate half of a melon ball. “You ever have a dog when you were a kid?”

He shook his head. “Nope. I never had a pet of any kind until Bob. We lived in a high-rise in Houston for most of my childhood. Very posh. My dad and my mom do lots of traveling. They were never very interested in the hearth-and-home stuff. Home was a place to entertain business associates.”

“You probably had servants.”

“Mmmm.” He gnawed on a chicken leg and tossed it into the cardboard bucket. He glanced at Daisy and thought she looked a little wistful.

“Must have been nice.”

He shrugged. “It was right for my mom and dad. They both came from very poor beginnings. When the oil money started coming in they went uptown. My grandfather Crow was the only member of the family who stayed on the land. I spent a summer with him once and hated it. I must have been nine or ten. I look back on it now and think it might have been the best summer I ever had.”

Daisy curled her legs under her and picked at a biscuit. “What made you change your mind after all those years?”

“I don’t know. Gut feeling. My grandfather Crow lived on a flat piece of cracked red dirt. The house was a small wooden thing patched together with pieces of jerry can and chinked with sun-dried mud. He swept the inside with a broom. He didn’t have a vacuum cleaner. He had electricity but only used it in the winter to run the heater. No electric lights. He said they made the life cycle unnatural. He said when the sun went down a body was supposed to look at the stars for a while and go to sleep. And if you couldn’t fall asleep right off, you hadn’t worked hard enough that day.”