"It wasn't just yours."

"I know." She wipes her cheeks with the back of her hand, leaving a faint dark smudge under each eye. She looks at him very oddly. "We might have another one. Loyd and I. I don't know. There's time to see."

"Yes."

"Did you know I'm a good science teacher? The kids and the teachers all voted. They say I'm spirited. How do you like that?"

"It's what I would expect."

"I'm teaching them how to have a cultural memory." She looks at her hands, and laughs, but looks sad. "I want them to be custodians of the earth," she says.

He also looks at her hands. They remind him of something. Whose hands?

"You really can't approve of me staying, can you?" she demands, suddenly angry. "You raised me to turn my back on this place. That worked for you, but the difference is you knew it was really your home. You knew you had one. So you had a choice."

"That's all very well and good," he says, "but you still might want a garden. These artichoke bushes still produce. Every summer they bloom as if their hearts depended on it. Never mind that there was nobody taking in the harvest." He takes the tip of a silvery leaf between his fingers. It looks knifelike, but is yielding and soft.

She looks at him for quite a long time, smiling, and then she looks down at the bundle. "It's all right to bury this here," she says. "There are no human remains."

No human remains. No. Human. Remains. The three words chime in his head like large, old bells, three descending notes that ring and ring, speeding up in tempo until they clang against one another.

"How true," he says finally.

She shaves out the edges of the hole so it is neat and square, and then drops the bundle in. She throws a handful of dirt on top of it and stands there looking down.

"We're a pair of scarred old souls, aren't we, Codi?"

"I don't know what we are. I'm trying to figure out what I hope for."

"It's a most dangerous thing, hope."

Her eyes flash with something bright. Love or anger. But she doesn't speak.

"Hope involves giving a great deal of yourself away," he tells her.

"That's a pitiful excuse."

"Oh, it's pitiful all right, but there you have it. It's hard to give much away when you're the subject of widespread disapproval and your heart is leaking from puncture wounds."

"That's true. We got punctured pretty bad. But we still gave the world a lot, Pop. We gave it Hallie."

"We did. We surely did."

She begins shoveling dirt back into the grave. He thinks about the fact that all these particles of dirt have now been rearranged. No fixed strata. Alice was the gardener. When she has finished she moves to his side and he takes her elbow. They stand side by side in their small garden of sand and buried children. The bones in his wife's arm are as thin as whistles. "Do you have any idea how much I love you?" he asks her.

She stares at him, then squeezes his hand. "Hallie was a protagonist of history," she says.

"She wanted to save the world."

"No, Pop, that's not true. She wanted to save herself. Just like we all do."

He looks at the tall, living daughter his wife has suddenly become. He is no longer angry about these changes. "Save herself from what?"

"From despair. From the feeling of being useless. I've about decided that's the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you're a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench."

He asks, "Are we the other people?" He is curious.

"You're not useless. You gave yourself to this town for forty years. Scarred soul or not."

"Yes. But I gave for the wrong reasons. As you have pointed out."

She laughs. "I did, didn't I? Damn!" She pulls at the end of a silver artichoke leaf. "I was scared to death I was going to grow up to be just like you." She looks at him, and laughs again. She says: "God, I could never be just like you."

They are standing in the garden, in a dwarf forest of artichokes. She has just dug a hole and buried God knows what and now has made a confession of either contempt or admiration. He waits to see what will happen next.

"Maybe the reason you gave yourself to this town doesn't matter that much. Maybe what matters is just that you did it. Maybe that makes you a good man. You know what Loyd told me one time?"

"No."