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glazed doughnut, the only color on a dark day.
    â€œWho’s that?” Roy said.
    â€œThe boyfriend,” said Skippy. “The new one.”
    The new boyfriend had a bushy white mustache. Roy parked beside the van. Everybody looked at everybody but no one made a move. The new boyfriend also had strong jaw muscles. They bulged as he chewed on the doughnut. Roy got out of the pickup, walked over to Skippy’s mom’s door.
    Her window slid down, about halfway. Roy could see nothing of Skippy in her face. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Roy.”
    â€œUh-huh,” said Skippy’s mom.
    â€œI’ll be away on business for a few days,” Roy said. “It’ll be a big help if Skippy could stay at my place, take care of things.”
    Skippy’s mom glanced at the boyfriend. Some sort of silent communication passed between them. Skippy’s mom turned back to Roy. “You payin’ him?” she said.
    â€œYes.”
    She thought about that. The boyfriend’s jaw muscles bulged. “How much?” Skippy’s mom said.
    â€œThat’s up to Skippy to tell you,” Roy said.
    â€œHuh?” said the boyfriend.
    Skippy’s mom looked past Roy at Skippy, sitting in the pickup. He had earphones on, was gazing straight ahead, eyes blank.
    â€œYeah, okay,” said Skippy’s mom. She gave Roy a hard stare. “But when he screws up don’t come cryin’ to me.”
    The boyfriend polished off the rest of the doughnut.
    â€œLike damages and so forth,” Skippy’s mom added, but Roy was already walking away.
    She raised her voice. “It’s on you.”
    Skippy heard that and slumped a little more.
    Â 
    Delia lay in the cemetery behind the Congregational church. It was a place Roy never went, but he did before setting out for Baltimore. Some of the gravestones, closest to the church, dated from the 1600s. The newer ones stood on a slope rising toward the forest, Delia in the last row, next to the trees. She had a plain granite stone, dark gray, with nothing on it but her name and dates.
    Roy found the stone covered with snow almost to the top. He remembered one winter as a kid in Maine when a snow fort had collapsed on him, and the buried-alive feeling that followed. Roy cleared the snow away—one-handed—down to the frozen turf. Some people in his position might have thought about being back together in the not-too-distant future. Four months to a year . But Roy just didn’t believe it; not only that, he didn’t think anyone else believed it either, not in their deepest parts. If you really believed a rosy afterlife with lovers and families back together was in the offing, believed it as fact, then what would be the point of getting so worked up about death? But everybody did, the fear of death somewhere in their minds from the moment they first found out about it, and the death of someone close was the worst thing that could ever happen.
    â€œOr am I missing something?” Roy said aloud.
    Had he and Delia ever discussed this? Not really. He tried to imagine what she’d say now, and couldn’t.
    â€œI looked up Dr. Chu on the Internet,” Roy said. A brilliant guy, with degrees from the best schools and scientific prizes from three countries.
    Brilliant guys are a dime a dozen. The question is—can he do it?
    That thought came to him in Delia’s voice, so clear she might have said it aloud. In fact, he couldn’t swear she hadn’t said it aloud, not on any sensory basis. It stunned him. Roy crouched in front of the gravestone, a wind rising in the trees.
    Â 
    He got through the funeral all right: hearing the news—everything about that call from Tom Parish still completely unfaded in his mind—had been the big blow. The Institute flew the body back from Venezuela, in an ornate white coffin she would have hated. Lots of people came to the service—old college friends,