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“Yes, sir.”

“All of them?”

“The old line. The new ones aren’t in yet.”

“And what’d they say?”

He’d have liked to have been asked that anywhere else. He’d have liked to have been asked it in the barn, or the yard, or the cab of a truck, anywhere but the head of a table with Dean’s face gone shut and Lara’s hand on Dean’s arm and a boy of seven looking from one man to the other with a roll halfway to his mouth. But he’d said he’d answer when he was asked, and he’d been asked.

“They said the water’s dropping. Same as Owen’s file says. Same as my report said in April. The new wells’ll say it too, once they’re in, and then it’ll be on paper with the state’s name on it instead of mine, and Clay’ll have paid for the paper himself.” He put his fork down. “That’s what I’m for. That’s why I’m on that side of the wire.”

The old man looked at him a long moment. Then he looked at his plate.

“Lara,” he said. “The red heifer.”

“Gary says she’ll go Friday.”

And the table went on, and Brody sat there with his heart going and his hands flat on the table, and down at the kitchen end Sunny, who’d been in the doorway with the second platter the whole time, put it down on the table harder than a platter needed, and went back to the stove.

Jett leaned over, under the noise, with the bread.

“Two years,” he said. “He’s never once asked me what the pumps said.”

“He asked me in front of the kids.”

“He asked you.” Jett put the bread down. “I’d take it. I’d take it and say thank you. You want to know what he says to me about Clay’s? Nothing. I come in that door twice a week smelling of brine and he passes me the potatoes. Two years.” He sat back. “Welcome to the other side of the gate, brother. It’s just the two of us over here and the food’s the same.”

Down the table Remi had heard every word of it and was looking at her plate with a face that said she’d write that one down too.

He heard it from the hall.

He’d gone out to the porch after, to get out of the house, and had come back in through the front for a glass of water, and the mudroom door was open, and his father was in there getting his boots off, and Dean was in there with him, and neither of them knew he was in the hall.

“He answered you,” Dean said.

“He did.”

“You asked him in front of the children.”

“I asked him at my table. Where else was I going to ask him. I’ve not had him anywhere else.” A boot hit the floor. “I looked over that wire today and there was my boy on his knees on Clay’s grass with Burchall’s name on his truck and Clay’s hand on his shoulder. And Jett drives under that gate every day of his life to run his uncle’s pumps. One of them digs for Clay and now one of them maps it for the company.” The second boot. “Your mother’s boys.”

Nobody said anything. Then Dean said, “Dad,” in a voice Brody had never heard him use, and the old man said, “I know it,” and that was all.

In the kitchen Sunny dropped a pan.

A cast-iron skillet on the stove from about a foot up, and it made the noise a cast-iron skillet makes, and the mudroom went quiet, and Brody stood in the hall with an empty glass. She’d been at the sink with the faucet he’d fixed running. She’d heard every word through the wall.

He went out the front. He didn’t get his water.

His truck was where he’d left it. He got in it and shut the door and sat.

The yard was dark. The porch light was on, and the light in his father’s window, and then that went off, at nine, because it always did. Upstairs, Dean and Lara’s, and then that. The kids’. And the kitchen, which stayed on, because she was in it, and he could see her go past the window twice, and then not, and then the light was still on and she wasn’t in it, and it stayed on.

Your mother’s boys. His mother had picked this place. A Dallas girl who’d come out here in 1987 and looked at a ranch with nothing on it and chosen it, and the man, and raised five children on it, and the old man still said the land was how he kept his word to her. Two of the five worked for Clay. Brody sat in a truck in the yard with the keys in the ignition and his hand on them, and thought about Midland, two hours off, and the windowless desk, and a motel by the airport with a bar in it, and how easy it would be to turn that key.

He didn’t turn it.

Chase came across the yard from his cabin at nine-thirty with a flashlight he wasn’t using and stopped at the window.