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“I know Earl’s watching.”

“He’s got the chalk out.”

“I know he’s got the chalk out, I can see him, he’s not subtle, he’s got it behind his back like a child.” She looked at the window, and Earl’s face went away from it, and she looked back at Brody, and her mouth did something at one corner. “What’s he going to write?”

“Depends what we do.”

“What are the odds?”

“On what?”

“On us. Don’t tell me he doesn’t have a number, I’ve been in that store twice and he had a number on a cow.”

“Three to one,” Brody said. “Against.”

“Against what?”

“Against you leaving the county.”

She laughed. She didn’t want to, he could see her not want to, and it came out anyway, one short bark of the big one, and she put her hand over her mouth in Earl’s lot the way she’d put it over her mouth on the porch, and Earl’s face came back to the window, and Brody stood there and thought, there it is. That’s the whole of her. She’s laughing and she’s furious and she’s about to hand me a piece of paper with terms on it, and I’d take any of the three.

“Okay,” she said, through her hand. She took it down. “Okay. Here’s what I’ve got.”

“Go on.”

“You want to know what I want. I’ll tell you what I want, and you can say yes or no, and we’re not going to talk about it after.” She’d gone flat and fast again, but it was different now, it had the laugh still in it. “November’s fixed. I’m not staying, and you’re not going to ask me to, and if you do I’ll say no and it’ll ruin the rest of it. Nobody knows. Not Remi, not Lara, not Pearl, God help us, not Earl. Not your father. It’s not a thing, it’s not a start of a thing, it’s not going anywhere, and neither of us is going to pretend otherwise, and if either one of us starts to, the other one says so and it’s done that day. No questions asked. And nobody says anything they’d regret saying in November. Nothing about liking. We don’t like each other. That’s established.”

“Can’t stand you.”

“Can’t stand you too.” She took a breath. “And it’s only after the house is asleep. It’s in your room, because it’s at the end of the hall and mine’s at the top of the stairs and your father’s under it. Nobody’s caught. Nobody’s careful at breakfast, because careful at breakfast is how Remi knows. It’s your door, after dark, and nothing else. Nothing else. That’s the whole of it, and if you laugh I’m walking home.”

He didn’t laugh. He stood at his tailgate in Earl’s lot with a sack with an alternator in it and looked at a woman who’d just laid out the terms of him item by item, the way she’d have laid out a race weekend, and he thought about saying the true thing, which was that he’d never in his life wanted anything the way he wanted her and that he’d take her on any terms she had and she knew it and that was why she got to write them, and he didn’t say it, because she’d said nothing about liking, and she’d meant it, and it was the only way he was going to get her.

“Suits me,” he said.

“Fine.”

“Got it. After dark. Nobody knows. You go in November.” He put his hand out across the tailgate. “Nothing else.”

She looked at the hand. She’d shaken Ryder Davis’s hand in front of Pearl and held on a beat too long so Pearl would see. She put hers in his now, and it was small and hot and it gripped, and they shook, once, the way you’d shake on a heifer.

Then neither of them let go.

He couldn’t have said how long. Long enough that the shake stopped being a shake. Long enough that his thumb had found the inside of her wrist, where her pulse was, and hers was going like his, and she’d looked down at their hands on the tailgate and not taken hers back, and the lot was empty and the sun was on the two of them and somewhere behind him Earl had stopped pretending.

“That’s a long handshake,” she said, to their hands.

“It’s a big deal.”

“It’s not a deal. It’s an arrangement.”

“My kind of arrangement,” he said, let go and got in the truck, she got in the other side, and he backed out of Earl’s lot with Earl at the window with a piece of chalk in his hand, and neither of them looked back at the slate.

She talked the whole way home.

Not about it. About Helen’s list, and the pharmacy, and Delia Voss’s granddaughter at the Lamesa steakhouse, who’d apparently been fired and unfired in the same week, and about the fact that Earl’s had a shelf of motor oil next to the pickles, which she’d never got over. Twenty minutes of it, with her hands going, looking at him now, the whole way, and he drove and listened and said “uh huh” in the right places and thought, she’s nervous. She wrote the terms and shook on them and now she’s nervous, and she talks when she’s nervous, and I never knew that. Three weeks in a kitchen and I never once heard her talk like this.

Then he thought: she doesn’t get nervous. She got a truck to die on her in the dark and she reached for a tire iron. She’s not nervous. She’s happy, and she doesn’t know what to do with it, so she’s talking.