The first thing Ob did when the afterlife antenna came around again was to take him out into May’s empty garden. It was a pitiful sight, the three of us in our overcoats and boots, standing among the dead stalks of winter, hoping for a sign of life from the woman who once had kept everything alive on that soil. Including some of us.

I really didn’t expect May to show up, but Ob’s enthusiasm was so desperate, so sincere in its belief in miracles, that a part of me held out just a little hope that she might fly her soft spirit over us and come gently into our midst. May had never let us down when she was alive, she’d never not shown up when she was supposed to be somewhere, and it was the memory of her reliableness, I guess, that fueled our wide-eyed optimism.

What Cletus thought about it all I can’t imagine. For once he was quiet, let Ob do all the talking and explaining, and like a little child let himself be led among the dead beans and broccoli toward the heart of a woman he never even met.

Ob must have thought that by talking about May there in that place, painting her before Cletus’s ignorant eyes, he could flood the garden with the vibrations needed to draw her to us. Like that old joke of talking about someone till his ears burn.

So there we stood, hands dug deep in our pockets, Ob looking at Cletus, Cletus looking up at the sky, and me looking down at the ground. Ob talked about what a good wife May was and all the sweet things she’d done for him — for us — while she was living. I was kind of surprised at the things Ob picked to talk about. I figured he’d choose the big ones — like her secretly saving up for three years in a row to buy him that expensive plane saw he was coveting over at Sears. Or the year she stayed awake thirty-two hours straight when fever from the chicken pox had me full of delirium, so sick I wanted to die.

But these heroic gestures of hers were ignored, and he chose instead to mention the simpler things: how she had rubbed down his ailing knee with Ben-Gay every single night, not missing a one, so he might be able to stand on that leg when he got out of bed the next morning. The way she had called to me through the window when I was little and playing on the swing set, saying, “Summer honey, you are the best little girl I ever did know,” then going back to whatever she was doing. (I had not remembered this about her until that moment.) And a series of other sweetnesses that Ob had obviously cradled in his memory, looking for some way to bring them to life.

Cletus watched the sky and glanced at Ob now and then, nodding his head to let Ob know he was listening. Cletus was wearing his hat with the fake fur earflaps, and once I got a crazy urge to giggle when I thought of those flaps flapping and Cletus rising up like Charlie Brown’s Snoopy and flying across the garden and away.

But his hat behaved itself, and he stood patiently, allowing Ob to say all he needed to say. It almost felt like a funeral, like we’d just buried some beloved pet in the cold ground of the garden, and in some ways, it was more comfort, more real, to me than May’s true funeral had been. Seems once people bring in outsiders who make a career of bereavement — undertakers, preachers — their grieving gets turned into a kind of system, like the way everybody lines up the same way to go in to a movie or sits the same way in a doctor’s office. All Ob and me wanted to do when we lost May was hold on to each other and wail in that trailer for days and days. But we never got the chance, because just like there are certain ways people expect you to get married, or go to church, or raise kids, there are certain ways people expect you to grieve. When May died, Ob and me had to talk business with the funeral parlor, religion with the preacher, and make small talk with dozens of relatives and people we’d hardly ever seen before. We had to eat their food. We had to let them hug us. We had to see them watching our faces for any sign of a nervous breakdown.

May’s funeral turned Ob and me into temporary sort-of socialites, and we never really got the chance to howl and pull our hair out. People wanted us to grieve proper.

So standing there in that bleak and empty garden listening to Ob make May alive again, that seemed to fix something in me that had needed fixing ever since the funeral. And in the oddest way Cletus became what we’d needed all along from the undertaker and preacher and visiting relatives. He became the perfect consoler, because he listened to every word Ob said and kept his fat mouth shut. Cletus had some gifts — I was learning this bit by bit — and knowing when to talk and when not to was turning out to be one of them.

Ob finally drained his cup of praises to May and grew still. His eyes looked with Cletus’s to the sky, and I couldn’t keep mine from following. Nothing but a black crow passed overhead. And no sound but Ob’s heavy breathing and an occasional snort from Cletus, whose nose had started to run.

Neither Cletus nor I was willing to make a move until Ob did. We watched him turn his head this way and that, like adjusting the dial on a radio. Then finally he gave a great sigh, and we knew May had not come to him. He shook his head wearily and walked away from us toward the empty trailer.

We watched him go over the hill and through the front door. Then we looked at each other and we, too, let out our own sighs of disappointment.

“He’s going to make himself sick or crazy, one,” I said to Cletus, suddenly feeling a big lump in my throat, a wetness in my eyes.

Cletus shrugged his shoulders and gave me one of his strange smiles.

“Least it gives him something to do,” he said. “Gets him out of bed in the mornings.”

I shook my head and remained silent. I didn’t want Cletus to know the pain this caused me, that I wasn’t enough to bring Ob to life each day. That it wasn’t enough he had me left to still love.

Cletus looked at me.

“You don’t really believe he feels her, do you?” he said, almost like he was accusing me of something.

I gave him a sharp look.

“Why? What’s it to you whether I believe it or don’t?”

Cletus shrugged his shoulders.

“Ain’t nothing to me. I just figured you to have more imagination than that, you being a writer and all.”

“I’m not any writer.”

“Oh, the heck you’re not,” Cletus answered with a look of total impatience.

“Cletus, don’t preach at me.” I was beginning to think I might yell or cry and I didn’t want to do either. What I wanted was for him to stop pushing at me.

He looked off toward the woods.

“That’s probably what she gave him,” he said matter-of-factly.

I straightened up.

“What? What did she give him?”

Cletus squatted down to pick at a dry broccoli leaf.

“Well, you know Ob won’t just make a whirligig from something we can understand. He don’t carve out little doggies and kitties. Because he don’t care about things concrete. Ob’s not making yard decorations. He’s making art. I can understand why he never put the ’gigs out in the yard. He never meant to entertain the neighbors.

“I just figure May gave him permission to have some imagination.”

Cletus looked up at my face.

“Ob’s got visions, Summer. Just like you, except you’re always fighting yours off.”

And when Cletus said that, I felt like I couldn’t ever win anymore, I couldn’t ever come out on top of anything in this life. I couldn’t even remember what it was about Cletus I used to hate so much. I couldn’t even stay ahead of him.

I turned and walked away. I felt lost. I might as well have been spinning in a round metal tub, in a twenty-foot wall of water, washing down off that mountain. Just lost forever in Deep Water.