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“I know.”

“But it was something.” She looked up at him. “I’ve watched men in front of cameras for six years. I know when one’s being watched and I know when one isn’t. Nobody was watching you. You didn’t do it for anybody. You just stood there and took whatever she gave you and gave her something back, and then you came and carried a pan.” She took her hand off his chest and put it on his face. “That’s all. I’m not saying anything about it.”

“You’ve said a good deal about it.”

“I’m saying it’s not in the terms, and I’m saying it anyway, and you’re going to let me, and then we’re going to not talk.” She got her T-shirt off. “Lamp off.”

He put the lamp off. It was slow, that night. She got the rest of her clothes off and his, in the dark and climbed over him and took him inside her an inch at a time with her hands flat on his chest and her hair down around both their faces. She didn’t hurry. He put his hands on her hips and let her set it, and she rocked on him, slow, and slower, till he had to bite the inside of his cheek, and when she went over it was quiet, her face in his neck and his name said into it, and he went after her with his arms around her back and her whole weight on him. He held her there after. Both arms. Neither of them said one word about liking, and it was the closest thing to it either of them had ever done.

She went at twelve-thirty. Twenty feet of hall. He heard her door.

Sunday he drove to Clay’s for the readings, because Houston wanted Sundays too, and drove home at dark, and came up the drive past the kitchen window, where the light was on.

She was in it. At the counter, with the laptop, running four hundred thousand strangers from his father’s kitchen with her feet bare and her hair up, and she didn’t look up at the truck, because she’d learned the sound of it, and she’d told him once, in the dark, that she didn’t need to look anymore to know it was him.

Nothing else. She’d written it at a tailgate and he’d shaken on it and Earl had chalked it, and it had held for a month, and it was holding now, with her in a lit window and him in a dark yard.

He sat in the truck a minute with the engine off.

Nothing else. He was starting to hate that phrase with a purity he usually kept for airports.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“I’m thirty-three weeks,” Lara said, “and I’m bored, and I’ve got a list.”

“You’ve always got a list.”

“This one’s yours.” She had it on the arm of the porch chair, in the handwriting she used for the ledger, and she held it out without getting up, because getting up had become a project. “Elena wants the blood pressure log. The pharmacy’s got my iron. Earl’s got a part for Dean that’s been in since Tuesday and Dean keeps forgetting because Dean’s got eight thousand head and one brain. And there’s a swimming hole on the far side of the north section that I’ve been told about for a year and never seen, and it’s the last Saturday in September and ninety-one degrees, and I’d like somebody to go look at it and tell me it exists.”

Sunny took the list. It said, in Lara’s hand: Elena. Pharmacy. Earl. Swimming hole (Brody knows).

“Lara.”

“What.”

“This is not a list. This is you sending me somewhere with your brother-in-law.”

“It’s a list. It’s got errands on it. Three of them are real.” Lara put her hand on the front of her and looked at the yard, where Brody was doing something to a gate that didn’t need it. “And I’m thirty-three weeks, Sunny, and I’ve got a husband who thinks I’m made of glass and a father-in-law who counts trucks and two kids who think a Saturday is for asking questions, and I have watched you two pass a coffee pot forty mornings running like it’s a bomb, and I’d like one afternoon where I don’t have to. Go look at the swimming hole. Take him. He’s been fixing that gate for an hour and there’s nothing wrong with it.”

“Everybody’s going to —”

“Everybody already is. Earl’s been keeping score since June.” Lara looked at her. “I’m not asking, honey. I’ve never asked. Go have a good day. You’re owed one.”

He drove. She had the list on her knee and the iron on the seat between them and the blood pressure log in Elena’s hand by ten, and Earl’s part by ten-thirty, and Earl had looked at the two of them in his store together on a Saturday and said nothing at all, which from Earl was a speech.

“You said August,” she said, at the cattle guard.

“What?”

“The swimming hole. The first day. You stood in my kitchen doorway and told me there was a swimming hole I’d want to know about come August, and it’s the twenty-fifth of September, and I’ve never seen it.”

“You told me you’d come find me when you needed it.”

“I did say that.”

“You said I wouldn’t be hard to hear.” He turned off the county road onto a track she’d never been down, two ruts through grass, north. “You never came and found me.”

“I was busy.”