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town won’t be the same without him,” Gus had offered. Was that true, or something one said? Her father had a prominent place in Darwin as president, and then president emeritus. As scholars went, he’d been known; “a populist critic” he’d been called by admirers and detractors alike. His first book, Reader as Understander , tracing the history of how poetry—from Shakespeare to Stevens—was read in its day, sold well, and not just among rivals and graduate students; it won awards and accolades; it had become a book club favorite. At once learned and mass-market. People who did not read poetry had read his book, or at least bought it. Within the confines of the town, her father’s life had been quite public, and so his death had been public. A sudden, public death made people vulnerable, aware of the risks of living. No one liked that kind of awareness, or the people who provided it. Who knew, they might be contagious. Perhaps the town was relieved he was gone, the last of the Dempseys finally purged—though there she was, another one popping up like a rogue mushroom that refuses to be rooted out. Or was all that just narcissism? Again: self-important or self-deprecating? Was the notion of being reviled more palatable than the thought of being, like so much in life, simply tolerated? To most people who had known her father, his death was likely like any other—a cause for sadness, but sadness on the normal scale. The town would be the same for them.
    It had been over a year since she’d returned to Darwin, though weeks ago she’d come close, as far as the hospital outside of town, with her mother, to see the body. She had needed to see him, needed to see that he was really dead. Her nerves jittered, like she didn’t know the etiquette. Hysterics seemed appropriate, but didn’t arrive. As her mother stood beside her, she tried to remember the last time the three of them had been alone in a room together. A long time ago, another life. It was uncomfortable—it had long been—to have the two of them in the same place, and she didn’t like her mother to see her father not looking well. Perverse, but that was her thought. His body, to his neck, was covered with a half-blanket, half-tarp, and his neck and earlobes were ruddy from—the recognition impossible to avoid—freezer burn. But it was her mother who had touched him first, who put her hand on his hair in an affectionate way and said, “Oh, Lew,” as if he’d gone and done something truly unreasonable, and so Flora saw that she could press her mouth to his forehead and feel the terrible coldness of his changing skin and not regret not having done it.
    “Do you want to be alone with him?” her mother had asked, and Flora told her no, and then she asked, “Do you want to cut a piece of his hair?” and the thought of asking the staff for scissors filled Flora with worry, as if they might suspect her of some barbaric act, but it turned out her mother had a tiny pair in her purse, and she cut the hair, which was a soft gray that moved toward a yellowish white, and still wavy—her mother said that, “Still wavy,” and Flora had been thinking the same thing, though why still , why would death have straightened his hair out? And Flora had signed the papers she needed to sign and they had turned back around, back to the city, away from Darwin.
    There was the Darwin College chapel—an imposing stone fortress, its delicate white steeple like an ill-fitting cap—where in a matter of weeks his memorial would be held. The same chapel her parents had brought her to as a child to hear the undergraduate a cappella groups perform their wildly harmonized renditions of “Yesterday” and “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” The same chapel that held the annual holiday Vespers, in which celebration Flora, a self-declared agnostic from the age of six, had once read a short excerpt from the Gospel of Luke. The same chapel where her father had hosted academic