“The fertility of the earth,” Coop chimed in.

“I guess.”

“And I’m Jesus,” said the Hispanic man. He was about forty and had a musical voice. “Everyone calls me Zeus.”

“So we have Zeus and Demeter,” Nell said.

Camaraderie. Demeter smiled. This was the real world, out of high school. People were nice. They tried to make you feel included.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Demeter admitted. “I guess Kerry told my dad I might mow?”

No one answered her. Maybe they hadn’t heard. Coop tossed Zeus a set of keys, and Demeter had to worry again about how she was going to squeeze into the back of the truck.

Nell said, “Coop, you sit in the back with me?”

“I’ve been demoted,” Coop said.

Demeter blushed. Coop was too tall to sit in the back, he’d be chewing on his knees, but there was no way Demeter would fit. She took the front passenger seat and moved her seat as far forward as it would go.

“Gods and goddesses in the front,” Nell said.

That was nice.


They drove out Hummock Pond Road. Demeter thought it might cause her to have some kind of flashback. But the road was sunny and green and leafy, and there were families on bicycles headed to the beach. This road had little in common with the nightmare Demeter remembered. When she closed her eyes, she saw only black.

Zeus pulled in to the driveway for number 277 and they meandered through the woods to a clearing on the pond. The house was stunning, new construction, the shingles still sweet-smelling and yellow. There were no cars in the driveway. Demeter’s pulse quickened. Her mouth was cottony from the vodka, and her stomach was starting to complain. She reached into her bag and pulled out a bottle of water.

“Let’s go,” Coop said.

They climbed out of the truck. The house had a dozen hydrangea bushes in full periwinkle bloom, with beds of impatiens surrounding them. There was green lawn up to the woods. There were window boxes on the first-floor windows and geraniums hanging from the porch. The whole place seemed amazing to Demeter. She lived on the island year-round, she had been born here, she went to school here, and all of that gave her a sense of ownership. But there were houses like this one-hundreds of them, or possibly thousands-that were happy, isolated pockets of Nantucket, and which Demeter hadn’t even known existed.

There was a trailer attached to the back of the pickup, and in the trailer was the lawn mower. Coop pulled it out. It was an unwieldy contraption that looked nothing like either the riding mower or the push mower in Al Castle’s garage. Demeter grew anxious. Kerry had told Al that Demeter would be mowing lawns, but the truth was, she didn’t even mow the lawn at home. She had grown up with two brothers who did that chore, and then once Mark and Billy were gone, Al Castle had taken great joy in spending Saturday afternoons on his riding mower. Demeter had only once been allowed to mow just the perimeter of the yard.

She gazed at the machine. “I don’t know how to use that kind,” she confessed.

“No worries,” Coop said. “You won’t mow for weeks, if ever. It’s a privilege you have to earn.”

“It is?” Demeter said. “Kerry told my dad he was hiring me to mow.”

“Ha!” Nell said, though not meanly. “I only got to mow once last summer, and that was because I stuck around after all the kids from Colby went back to school.”

“Oh,” Demeter said. She felt like an idiot. She had actually thought a summer of mowing would be beneath her, but now she’d discovered she wasn’t even good enough to mow.

“I’m mowing,” Coop said. “Zeus will check the window boxes and work on the containers in the back. And you two are going to-”

“Weed,” Nell said.

“Weed,” Demeter repeated. Weed? When she and Al and then Al and Kerry were discussing this job, the word weed had never come up. But what had she thought landscapers did? Mowed the grass, ate their lunches in the sun, put their hands in the dirt.

Demeter trailed Nell to the front beds. Nell handed her a pair of gloves, a five-gallon bucket, and a tool that looked like a larger version of what her dentist used to get plaque off her teeth.

“I’m going to do the back beds, and you do these front beds,” Nell instructed. “Just dig up all the weeds.”

“I don’t see any weeds.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Nell asked.

“No,” Demeter said. The impatiens and zinnias were embedded in rich, dark soil.

“Well, this is a weed here,” Nell said. She pulled on a green stalk that Demeter had thought was a legitimate plant. “And you have to use your trowel to get it out at the roots, okay? Without traumatizing the root systems of the other plants.”

Traumatizing.

“Okay,” Demeter said.

“And then when you’re done with the front beds, you’ll weed the brick walk. You see the green creeping up between the bricks? All of that has to come out.”

Demeter eyed the walkway. Weeds were squeezing through the bricks like the mildew that grew on the grout in the high school locker room showers. How would she ever, ever get all of those tiny weeds out?

“Okay,” Demeter said. She already felt like crying, and she hadn’t even started yet.

“Did you bring music?” Nell asked. She pulled an iPod and headphones out of her back pocket.

“No,” Demeter said.

“Tomorrow, bring music,” Nell said. “It will help.” She smiled at Demeter. “I know it’s a shitty job, and you’re low man on the totem pole. But you’ll grow to like it. I did. If you have any questions, come find me, okay?”

“Okay,” Demeter said.

Nell vanished around the side of the house. Demeter heard the motor of the mower start, and she watched Coop climb up onto the back of the mower and ride it across the yard standing up, like an Eskimo on a dog sled or a person on water skis. Demeter was glad she wasn’t mowing. She was so heavy, she might have broken the mower, or else she might not have been coordinated enough to stay upright as it rocketed forward.

She knelt in the grass and put on her gloves. Her hair felt like a heavy scarf down her back; her neck was sweating. She reached for what looked like a weed and yanked on it, but it offered resistance, so she was obliged to dig at it with her trowel. She tried to get under it the way Nell had done-Nell had made it look effortless-but it was harder than it looked. The top of the weed ripped off in Demeter’s left hand, the root system still lurking underground, where it would simply regenerate so that at this same time next week she would be pulling the very same weed. Like Sisyphus with his goddamned boulder. But that was the story of her life, wasn’t it, and her constant struggle with her weight? She could go for a day or two days or even five days eating only grapes and rice crackers and almonds, but then her hunger would build, it would roll over her, and she would tear open a bag of Fritos and eat them with an entire container of bacon- and-horseradish dip, and then she would eat dinner with her parents: fried chicken, mashed potatoes with gravy, two slices of peach pie with ice cream, and then an extra scoop of ice cream. And she would be right back at the bottom of the mountain with the boulder.

She threw the leaves into her bucket. Her first weed of the summer, her first of thousands, certainly, if she worked forty hours a week for the next eight weeks, three hundred and twenty hours, a hundred weeds an hour, thirty-two thousand weeds. And this was only the first one.

It hurt to kneel like this. The same was true at church; she couldn’t make it through the liturgy on her knees. She had to sit. She sat now with her legs splayed to the side, and she leaned forward to hunt down her next weed. She could hear Coop buzzing around behind her, but she didn’t turn to watch him because she most definitely did not want him watching her.

A half hour passed, then an hour. She had half a bucket of weeds, but she was only now getting the hang of it, how to dig down and extract the hook of the root. It was sort of like pulling her long hairs out of the shower drain. The weeding left divots in the perfect dirt, which Demeter then smoothed over as though she were icing a cake. This image made her hungry. Her banana was in the truck, growing warm and soft.

Demeter scrutinized the front of the house as she crept along the edge of the flower bed. It didn’t seem like anyone was home. But was the house open? And if it was, would she be able to pop inside to, say, use the bathroom? She kind of doubted it. Zeus and Coop most certainly relieved themselves outside, but what about Nell?

She weeded, she weeded. She had to kneel; it was the only effective position. Demeter’s mother had a foam pad that she placed under her knees when she weeded. Tomorrow Demeter would bring it to work with her. And her music-music would make things better. Anything would be better than kneeling in the heat with nothing to occupy her mind but the weeds and their tenacious grip on the earth.

Penny was buried in the earth, in her coffin. The coffin was made of glossy wood and had brass handles. Jake Randolph and Patrick Loom and Anders Peashway and some of Hobby’s other teammates had gripped the brass handles when they lifted Penny’s coffin off of the trestle and loaded it in the back of the hearse. Demeter had swooned at the sight of those handsome young men carrying Penny’s coffin. It might be worth it to die if she could be sure those same boys would carry her to her final resting place. They had all cried for Penny. None of them would cry for Demeter.

Demeter hadn’t focused on it at the time, but Penny was in that coffin. Her D.O.A. body, her corpse. Demeter had taken Penny into the dunes. Demeter had been drunk, but she hadn’t lied or embellished her story. She had told only the truth, and the truth wasn’t her fault.

Demeter had been one of the last people to see Penny alive. Driving down Hummock Pond Road, Penny had pressed the gas pedal to the floorboard. Penny had wanted to die, Demeter understood then. Probably she had been wanting to die for a long time, since long before Demeter took her into the dunes. Penny had carried around a burden as heavy as Demeter’s extra weight, only Penny’s weight was inside of her. Who knew where it came from? Possibly she had been born with it, the way Demeter herself had been born with the predilection to overeat. Penny had driven that car with the intent to kill-it wasn’t a game or a dare, she wasn’t just trying to scare them or thrill them, she was for real, she meant it. She didn’t care if she killed herself. She didn’t care if she killed them all.

Coop had finished mowing and was now edging the yard with a weed whacker.

Demeter needed a drink.

She was nearly done with the beds. She was pleased with herself because even she could see that they looked neater. She could tell the difference between where she had weeded and where she hadn’t.

She stood up and dusted off her knees, which held the imprints of the grass.

She walked around the house. Zeus was watering the containers that surrounded the flagstone patio, and at the edge of the property, closest to the wild grasses that preceded the pond, Nell was still weeding the back beds. She was doing the same work as Demeter, but with a water view.

“Hey,” Nell said, looking up. “You’re not done, are you?”

“I’m almost done with the beds,” Demeter said. Her head was spinning. It hadn’t occurred to her before that Penny had been trying to kill her. “I have to pee.” She paused and widened her eyes. “Badly.”

“Oh,” Nell said.

“Is there protocol?”

“Yeah,” Nell said. “Squat behind a tree. Or hold it.”

“We can’t go in the house?” Demeter asked.

“God, no,” Nell said.

Demeter felt her heart drop an inch. “Not ever?”

“Well,” Nell said. Her voice was a whisper. She glanced at Zeus. “Some houses, yes. Some houses have pool houses or guesthouses or staff houses where we can use the bathroom. Some owners invite us in or have an open-door policy. But in general, no.”

“No one’s home here,” Demeter said. “Can’t I just check to see if the door is open?”

Nell bit her lower lip. She was being nice when she could have been a total bitch. “You can check. But be quick and take your shoes off, okay? And be clean, you know.”

“Of course,” Demeter said. She ran to the side door, which was out of Nell’s view. She should grab her backpack. But there wasn’t time, and Coop might see her. She tried the knob: the door was open. Amazing but not that amazing-Demeter didn’t know a single islander who locked his or her door. However, an open door indicated that the people who owned the house were on the island but just not home at the moment, which meant they might come back any second.