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Helen’s list said the coffee came from Earl’s, and Sunny had assumed, for four days, that Earl’s was a grocery store.

It was a feed store. It had a hitching rail out front that somebody still used, a bell on the door, and a smell of grain and leather with something chemical under it she’d rather not think about. Along the left-hand wall, past the halters and the wormer and a bin of horseshoes sold by the pound, there was one shelf of groceries. The coffee was on it, between the pickles and the motor oil. Two-pound cans. Red. Helen had underlined the brand twice and written DON’T LET EARL SELL YOU THE OTHER ONE, and Sunny stood there with Levi’s hand in hers and a can under her arm and understood that she’d been in the county four days and had already been given a side in something.

“You’re John’s fill-in housekeeper,” Earl said, from the counter.

He was seventy if he was a day, with a face that had been left out in the sun on purpose, and a slate behind him on the wall with something chalked on it she couldn’t read from the door. He didn’t get up.

“Sunny Tyler.”

“Sunny.” He turned it over, the way they all did, and she rolled her eyes, the way she’d started doing on Tuesday, and he saw her do it and something in the sun-cured face moved a quarter inch, which she thought might be a smile. “Helen send you for that?”

“She sent me a list.”

“That’s the right one. I’ve got a better one, but that’s the right one.” He called it up. “You tell her Earl said the other one’s on sale.”

“She’s at her sister’s.”

“I know where she is. You tell her anyway. She’ll hear it.” He put the can in a paper sack and looked at Levi. “Boy. You keeping that lizard?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good man.”

Outside, in the truck, Levi said, “How does he know about the lizard?”

“I’ve been asking myself that all week.”

“Pearl,” Levi said, with the flat certainty of a boy who’d grown up in it, and she started the engine and laughed. It was the first time she’d laughed alone in a car since April. She noticed, and didn’t let herself make anything of it.

She’d driven herself in.

Lara had offered the blue truck and Levi in the same breath.

“He’ll get you a table at Pearl’s faster than your name will. And a seven-year-old with chocolate chip pancakes in front of him is the best cover in West Texas for a woman who wants to look at a room without being looked at. Take him. He’s yours till two.”

Sunny had taken both. She’d left the house at ten with Helen’s list and John’s coffee money and the boy in the passenger seat telling her about hyenas, and for the twenty minutes of road between the ranch and the one traffic light she’d felt normal, which she hadn’t in some time.

Brody had been gone since before seven. She’d heard his truck go from the kitchen and had not gone to the window. She’d stood at the sink with a hand on the faucet and listened to it get smaller down the drive with her whole body, and by the time it was gone she’d been so angry with herself that she’d cleaned the oven.

Fine. His leg had brushed her ankle last night going past. She’d sat there with her pen not moving and her whole body turned toward it, and it had been him for one second and her for the rest of the night. Not him. Her. She’d driven two days to be somewhere no man got within an arm’s length of her, and she’d gotten a cowboy who walked past her chair on purpose and a body that had voted before she’d been consulted. She was going to eat pancakes.

Pearl’s Diner was next to the only gas pump in Soluno, and it was full at ten-thirty on a Friday, which Sunny would learn was full at every hour it was open, and every head in it turned when the bell rang.

She’d worked press rooms for six years. She knew what a room did when it turned to look at something and she knew how to walk into one, and she did it now. Chin level. Levi’s hand. No hurry. She let the room take its look, and it took a long one. Red vinyl. A counter with stools, all of them full. A pass-through to the kitchen with a bell over it, and a woman in the pass-through with flour to the elbow who looked at Sunny once, all the way through, and went back to a pie. And coming down the counter with a coffee pot in one hand and a pencil in her hair was a woman in her sixties with a gray bun and a face that had already decided several things about Sunny Tyler and was working on the rest.

“Well,” Pearl Whittaker said. “Look who Lara sent me.”

“Ma’am.”

“Don’t ma’am me, honey, I’m Pearl. Sit down. Levi, baby, your stool’s where it always is. Marge!” She didn’t turn around. “Chocolate chip.” The bell over the pass-through didn’t call, and nobody looked up at it, and a plate appeared in the window anyway within a time Sunny would have said was impossible, and the woman with the flour had already gone.

Sunny sat at the counter. Pearl filled her cup without asking and stood there with the pot and looked at her.

“Sunny.”

Here it came. She’d had it from Earl, and from Lara, and from a man in a yard on Monday, and she’d rolled her eyes at every one of them and was ready to do it again.

“That’s a name you either grow into or you don’t,” Pearl said, “and I’ve had a good look, and you have. So we’ll keep that.” She set the pot down. “Now. Where’s it from?”