Page 17

“Clay.”

Clay had his hat on. He’d have known his brother was on that fence line before he’d left the office; the old man rode the north section on Fridays and had for forty years, and Clay had picked two o’clock on a Friday, and Brody, standing between them with a clipboard, understood he’d been brought up here as an exhibit.

“Your boy’s doing good work,” Clay said.

“He’s not my boy on that side of the wire.”

“He’s reading my wells. Every one. Old and new. Weekly, and it goes to the state.” Clay came a step closer to the fence. “You’ve heard about the state file, I expect. Owen’s. I’ve answered it. Four new monitoring wells on the west line, drilled by an outfit out of Lubbock that’s never taken a dollar from me, read by a Burchall man, filed with Austin. Nobody can say I don’t watch my water, John. Nobody.”

“Mick Bateman’s well dropped six feet in five weeks.”

“That’s a dry year.”

“That’s your pumps.”

“That’s an opinion, and my nephew’s got a file open on it, and I’ve answered the file. Your son.”

“My son. Under his own name, to the state, before he’d said one word to me across my own table.” Something went across Clay’s face and was put away. “I’d have shut that line down myself if he’d asked me. I’ve said so. He didn’t ask. So now there’s a file, and I’ve answered it with steel, and I’ve put a Royston on the reading of it so nobody can say the numbers are mine. That’s what I’ve done, John. What have you done. You’ve sat on that porch and counted my trucks.”

“I’ve kept my ground.”

“You’ve kept a fence. The water doesn’t know it’s there.”

Clay’s voice hadn’t gone up. It didn’t need to; the two of them had been having this argument for thirty years and had stopped shouting it about twenty ago. “I put third-party steel in the ground, John. What did you ever put in but a wall.”

The old man looked at him. Then he looked at Brody. A second. Enough.

“Read your wells,” John said, to his son, and got back in his truck, and drove up his own fence line at the speed of a man who had a tank gate to check and nothing else on his mind, and Brody stood on his uncle’s ground with a number on a clipboard and his father’s dust going away from him, and Clay put a hand on his shoulder.

“He’ll come around.”

“He won’t.”

“No,” Clay said, and took the hand off. “He won’t. But it was worth saying. Finish the line.”

He came home at five and the blue truck was in the yard, which meant she was back from town, and he went in the back door with the readings under his arm and she was at the counter, and she looked at him once, and looked at the sink.

“Faucet’s dripping.”

“It’s dripped since 2015.”

“It’s dripping worse.” She went back to whatever she was doing, which was chopping. “Helen’s list says the washer’s in the drawer by the fridge. Second drawer. It’s been in the drawer since 2015 as well, apparently.”

He looked at the faucet. It was dripping. He’d washed his hands under it every day since February and never once heard it, and now she’d said so he couldn’t hear anything else, and he stood in his father’s kitchen with the fence line still on him and a woman not looking at him and thought, I’ll fix the faucet. That’s a normal thing. A man comes home and fixes a faucet.

“I’ll fix it.”

“Fine.”

He got the washer out of the drawer. He got the toolbox out from under the stairs. He got down on his back on the kitchen floor with his head in the cabinet under the sink, in the dark, with the smell of bleach and the pipes six inches off his face, and he’d been under there thirty seconds before he understood what he’d done, which was put himself flat on his back on a floor she was standing on, with her bare feet eighteen inches from his head.

She’d taken her boots off. She was cooking barefoot in his father’s kitchen with her jeans rolled to the ankle, and from under the sink he could see the bones of her ankles and the arch of one foot and the hem of the jeans and nothing else, and it was, he’d have said if you’d asked him yesterday, the least exciting eighteen inches of a woman there was. He lay on his back with a wrench in his hand and looked at her ankle and couldn’t look at anything else, on a kitchen floor, with his father in the next room. He was going to have to have a word with himself. He was going to have to have several.

“Shut-off’s on the left,” she said, from above.

“I know where the shut-off is.”

“You were reaching right.”