Page 24

“Brody,” Chase said. “You’re on the baler.”

“I heard.”

“Then eat something, you look like you’ve been hit.”

They cut the south field because the weather said Wednesday, and by ten the cab of the baler was a hundred and ten degrees and Brody was happier than he’d been in five months.

He’d forgotten this. Three brothers in a line, Chase up front on the swather, Dean behind on the rake, the old man at the gate in his truck with a thermos, not helping and not leaving. Nobody talking. You didn’t need to; the hay said it. Up the field. Turn. Back down. Bales dropping off behind him in a row that Dean would count from the gate tonight, because Dean counted everything. He drove. He sweated. He didn’t think about Clay’s wells or Houston or a desk with no window. When Levi came down the field at eleven on foot with a water jug, he stopped the baler and got down for it.

“Sunny says,” Levi said, and stopped to get it right. “Sunny says if any of you come in for dinner smelling like that, you’re eating on the porch.”

“She said that?”

“She said it to Grandpa.”

“What’d Grandpa say?”

“He laughed,” Levi said, and Brody stood in the stubble with the jug halfway to his mouth, because he hadn’t heard the old man laugh since February, and a woman who’d been in the house six days had gotten one out of him over a plate of chicken.

“Did he now?”

“He said she’ll do.” Levi took the jug back. “He said it twice.”

They came up at noon and she’d meant it.

The three of them got down in the yard and Chase went for the hose, and Brody put his head under the yard spigot and then his shirt, and stood there with the water going down his back and his shirt in his fist, and looked up at the house, and she was at the kitchen window.

She wasn’t doing anything. A dish in her hands, the water off, looking out at the yard at him. She’d been looking a while before he’d caught her, and when he caught her she didn’t stop. She stood there and looked at him wet to the waist in his father’s yard, and he stood there and let her, and it went on.

“You’re dripping on my boots,” Chase said.

“Move your boots.”

“You move. You’re the one standing there like a —” Chase looked where Brody was looking. “Oh. Right.” He turned the hose off. “You want me to go in the barn a minute? Give you two the yard?”

“Shut up.”

“I’ll be in the barn.”

He didn’t go in the barn. He stood there with the hose and enjoyed it, and at the window she put the dish down without looking at where she put it and turned to the stove, and Brody would’ve paid a month’s wages to know what her face had done on the way around.

They ate on the porch. She brought it out on a tray, set it on the rail, and went back in without a word, and the old man laughed for the second time in a day and said, “Well, boys, that’s the porch,” and Levi said, “Is she mad?” and Chase said, “No, son. That’s just how she is.” And Brody ate cold chicken with his hair wet and thought: she looked. She didn’t stop when I caught her.

His phone rang at twelve-thirty, on the dash, and he saw the name and stopped the baler in the middle of a row, which you didn’t do.

“Brody Royston.”

“Mr. Royston, this is Carla in Mr. Burchall’s office in Houston.” A voice that had never been in a field. “I’m calling about the revised west-line schedule. The Lubbock crew will be on site at six tomorrow morning to begin the first monitoring well, and Mr. Burchall would like the liaison present for the duration.”

“The duration.”

“All week. Through Friday. You should have received —”

“I didn’t receive.”

“I’ll resend it. Mr. Burchall wanted me to say he appreciates your flexibility.”

“He’s said.” He looked in the mirror. Dean had come up behind on the rake and stopped, and was sitting there with his hat pushed back, watching his brother take a call from Burchall Resources in the middle of his father’s hay. “Tell Mr. Burchall I’m flexible, Carla. Tell him I’m the most flexible man he’s got.”