Page 16

“Fuck,” she said, quietly, to the windshield, and Levi didn’t wake up, and the drive-in screen went by in its field, and she turned in at the gate.

Supper was chicken, and John Royston stopped at his second son going around the table and asked him in front of everybody what Clay’s wells had said, and Brody told him, and Sunny stood in the doorway with the second platter through all of it and put it down harder than she’d meant to. Afterward Lara put her feet up on the chair in the office and said, “Well?”

“Well what.”

“That. At the table. Four days you’ve been here and you’ve seen him do it twice, and tonight he didn’t.”

“I noticed.”

“Everybody noticed. Dean’s out in the barn about it.” Lara moved her feet. “Now Pearl. Give me all of it.”

Sunny gave her all of it. The list, laminated. The deputy, the vet tech, Wes Fewell’s nephew, whoever Wes Fewell was. The young man at the Kane place Pearl wasn’t ready to rush. Off men, and Pearl hearing a bet. Elena’s calm. Delia’s pecans. Lauren and the eleven days, which Lara had heard from the other side and had been waiting to hear from this one, and she laughed till she had to hold the front of her and say, “Stop, it’s kicking, stop.”

“And Brody,” Lara said, when she could.

“What about Brody?”

“Delia said you ran into him in the door.”

“Delia’s fast.”

“Delia was in the door. She said he put his hand on your back and you came out of it like a cat off a stove.” Lara looked at her, with the dimple, and Sunny looked back, and it was a fair fight for about four seconds. “I’m not asking. I’m telling you what Delia said. Pearl’s already had it, and Earl, and by tomorrow it’ll be at the church, and I wanted you to hear it from somebody who’s on your side before you hear it from somebody who isn’t.”

“There’s nothing to hear.”

“No,” Lara said. “I said that too, once.” And she picked up the ledger.

Sunny went back to the kitchen and put the coffee away, the right kind, in the right place, and stood a minute with her hand on the pantry door.

Three months. She’d told Pearl that at the counter, in front of everybody, flat, the way you’d give a delivery date. Three months, and then Helen’s back and I go home. Pearl had said “we’ll see,” and had taken out her pad and written something on it, and Sunny had watched her do it and had not been able to read it upside down, which she could usually do.

She had a strong feeling it hadn’t been three months.

CHAPTER FOUR

Jace Royston ran his father’s mining contracts out of an office at the end of the hall with a better chair than Clay’s, and he looked up when Brody came in from Pearl’s and said, “You’re Dad’s favorite this week. Enjoy it. It doesn’t keep.”

“I’m on Burchall’s payroll.”

“You’re on Dad’s map with a red circle around you.” Jace had a stack of paper in front of him with a state seal on the top sheet. “He’s been telling people. He wants you on the north line this afternoon, the old wells. I told him you’d already asked for them.”

“I did.”

“I know. I’m telling you he thinks it was his idea.” Jace went back to his paper. “Take the fence road. Don’t take the county road, you’ll be an hour.”

The fence road ran north from the works along the line where Wainwright ground stopped and Royston ground started, five strands of wire and a hundred and fifty years of two families not crossing it, and Brody drove it at two in the afternoon with the readings on the seat beside him and the window down, and the doorway at Pearl’s went with him the whole way.

He’d said he wouldn’t. He’d meant it. He’d put his hand on a woman’s back in a crowd the way he’d have put it on his sister’s, and she’d come out from under it fast, and he’d stood there with his hand up in front of Delia Voss and felt about as low as he’d felt in a year, and he’d told her he wouldn’t do it again and he wouldn’t. What he’d like to know was what her face had done first. Because he’d been looking at it, and before it had gone hard it had gone somewhere else, for about half a second, and her lips had parted, and if he was any judge of anything she’d wanted his hand exactly where it was. Then she’d stepped out of it hard. One of those was the truth and he didn’t know which, and he wanted it to be the first one so badly it was embarrassing.

Christ. He was thirty. He drove.

The old wells were four steel caps in the grass at half-mile intervals, and he’d read three of them and was on his knees at the fourth when he heard his father’s truck on the other side of the wire.

He knew it by the sound. He’d have known it in a city. He didn’t look up. He got the tape down the well and read the number and wrote it on the sheet, and then he looked up, and John Royston was sitting in his truck twenty feet off on his own side of the fence with the engine running and the window down, looking at his second son on his knees on his brother’s ground with a company’s name on the door behind him.

The old man didn’t say anything. He looked. Then he looked past Brody, at the road, because Clay’s truck was coming up it with the dust behind it, and by the time Clay had pulled in beside Brody and got out John had gotten out too, and the two of them stood there with the wire between them for the first time in Brody’s memory.

“John.”