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Black sheep. Five letters.

He counted them on the ceiling. B. R. O. D. Y.

He laughed. One bark of it, out loud, flat on his back in his father’s house with two brothers asleep down the hall. He couldn’t have stopped it if he’d tried. It went straight through him and came out the other side as something that wasn’t a laugh, and he lay there with his hand over his eyes and the phone on his chest for a while.

He didn’t answer. There wasn’t an answer. She hadn’t asked him anything.

He typed five and deleted it. He typed how’d you know and deleted that. He typed you’re a hard woman and looked at it a long time and deleted that too, and put the phone face down, and turned it back over, and read it again, and it still said what it said.

He was in the south field at ten to five with the baler lights on and the stars still up.

He hadn’t set an alarm. He’d come down the dark house past her door without stopping, across the yard, into the barn, and driven the baler down to the end of Chase’s last row and sat there with the engine going. The crew was at Clay’s at six. Clay’s was twenty minutes. He could give the field an hour.

At five past five, Dean’s truck came down the track with its lights off and stopped at the gate.

Dean got out. He stood there in the dark looking at a baler with its lights on in the middle of his hay. Then he walked across to the rake and climbed up and started it and pulled out ahead, and Brody put the baler in gear and followed, and they did four rows before the sun came up and didn’t say one word, and at six Brody stopped at the gate and got down and Dean kept going.

He drove to Clay’s with hay in his hair.

The Lubbock crew were good and slow and didn’t want him there, and he stood over a hole going into the ground a foot at a time in the sun all day, and came home at six, and the kitchen was empty except for her.

“You’re late. It’s in the warmer.”

“Thank you.”

He got the plate. He sat at the table, at the old man’s end because nobody else was there, and ate, and she typed, and the fan turned, and neither of them said a word about it for four minutes by the clock over the door.

“Five letters,” he said.

The typing stopped.

“I know how many letters.”

“You could’ve put a name on it.”

“You knew who it was from.” She still hadn’t looked up. “You’re the only one in this house who’d have laughed.”

“How’d you know I laughed.”

“The walls in this house are thin, Brody. I heard your brother eat a plate of chicken standing up at nine o’clock, and I heard you laugh at midnight, and one of those was a good deal worse to listen to than the other.” She shut the laptop. Now she looked at him. “I’m not going to say anything about the barn. It’s not mine. But I heard it. And I put two plates in that warmer, and I’d do it again, and that’s all you’re getting.”

“That’s all I’m getting?”

“That’s all you’re getting.”

He looked at her across his father’s table with the fork in his hand. Flushed. Chin up. She’d told him twice to go admire something and once that she wasn’t interested. She’d put his hand on her back in front of the county. She’d sent him five letters at midnight so he’d laugh. He’d have gotten up and gone around that table and put his mouth on hers right then if she’d given him one inch. She didn’t. He stayed put.

“It was a good clue,” he said.

“It was an easy clue.” She picked up the laptop. “Wash your plate.”

“I always wash my plate.”

“You’ve washed a plate twice in this house and I’ve watched you do it both times.”

“Then I’m two for two.”

“Don’t let it go to your head,” she said, and went, and he heard her on the stairs, and he washed his plate.