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“So nothing.”
“She handed you a mop.”
“She handed me a mop and I mopped. Ask Levi. There was lizard.”
“You went in that pantry with a screwdriver like a man going in to propose.” She leaned on his fender. “Since February I haven’t seen you in that kitchen once between meals. This week you’ve been in it at breakfast, you did the dishes, and you fixed a shelf that’s been loose since I was in high school.”
“Shelf was loose.”
“Shelf’s been loose since I was in high school.”
“Then it was time.”
“Brody.” She said it nice. She was the only one of the five of them who’d gotten their mother’s way of saying a name so that you heard everything she wasn’t saying under it. “It’s a small county. She’s pretty, and she’s got that mouth on her, and she’s rude to exactly one man in the whole of it, and it’s you, and you’ve noticed. I’m not going to say anything to anybody. I’m just saying I’ve noticed you noticing.”
“She’s the housekeeper.”
“She’s the housekeeper and she’s thirty and she’s got a laugh on her you can hear from the barn.”
“I hadn’t noticed the laugh.”
Remi looked at him.
“I hadn’t.” He shut the truck door. “She’s nothing to look at, Rem. She’s a girl in a kitchen. She’s here till Thanksgiving and then Helen’s back and I’ll have forgot her name.”
Remi let that sit.
“Okay,” Remi said.
“Good.”
“Just so I’ve got it.” She got her phone out. She typed something on it with her thumb, and turned it around so he could see, and it said WED 30 JUN, and under it, NOTHING TO LOOK AT, and she put it back in her pocket. “For later.”
“Remi.”
“For when you’re standing up in a suit somewhere with a ring in your pocket,” she said, “and I want to be able to say the date,” and she went in, and the screen door slapped, and the kitchen light was on, and he stood in the yard by his own truck and looked at it a while, and then he went in through the front so he wouldn’t have to walk through the kitchen.
Stephanie’s schoolteacher was named Dana. She taught second grade in Midland, and she was very nice, and by the time the salad came around Brody knew he was being set up, and so did she, and so did everybody at the table except Clay, who’d asked the girl twice how she liked the drive out.
The Wainwright dining room sat sixteen and had nine in it: his aunt and uncle, Knox and Ainsley, Mason and Lauren twelve days married and sitting so close there was a chair going spare, himself, the teacher, and an empty place where Jace would have been if Jace hadn’t found a reason to be in Midland. Owen wasn’t there, and nobody said why.
“Brody’s a geologist,” Stephanie told Dana. “He reads rocks and water. Clay’s got him on the west line, and I said to Clay, that boy needs feeding.”
“I do need feeding,” Brody said. “It’s true.”
The teacher laughed, which was kind of her. She was pretty and she had good manners and she was doing exactly what he was doing, being nice to a woman who’d gone to trouble. Across the table Ainsley had her chin in her hand and Knox kicked her under the cloth.
“So what’s it like,” Dana said, “reading water?”
“Wet.”
“He’s very funny,” Stephanie said, and cut her meat. “Kelly-Anne always said so.”
He’d have liked her not to say his mother’s name. It came and went. Lauren looked at her plate, and then at him, one look, and said something to Ainsley about the mare, and the table went that way.
Somewhere in the pie Knox started on horses. It turned out Dana had had one as a girl, in Odessa, a paint. By the time the coffee came she and Knox were three counties deep in it and hadn’t looked at Brody in ten minutes, and Stephanie, who missed nothing, put her cup down and looked at her third son the way she’d have looked at a horse she’d priced wrong. Ainsley laughed out loud. Clay asked the girl how she’d found the drive.
Brody sat at his uncle’s table with a good cup of coffee and a nice girl he’d been meant to want, who wanted his cousin’s stories about a one-eyed gelding instead. He thought about a woman with a dish towel over her shoulder who’d told him he was standing on her system. I’m in trouble, he thought, and ate his pie.
