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“When he was being difficult.”
“Uh huh.” He looked back at the sky. “I’m going to have to buy a garden.”
She laughed. She hadn’t known she was going to. It came up out of her on a warm rock with the water going and a man beside her who’d said the exact right nothing, and it was the big one, and it went out over the pool and came back, and he lay there and let it, and she laughed until she cried, a little, and he didn’t say anything about that either.
They drove home in one truck with the windows down and her hair wet on the seat back, and neither of them said much, and the county went by, and at the cattle guard she put her hand on his leg and left it there till the yard.
Lara was on the porch.
She was in the old man’s chair with her feet on the rail and a glass of tea and the ledger closed on the floor beside her, and she’d been there a while, because the tea was gone, and she watched one truck come up the drive with two people in it and stop in the yard, and she watched them get out, and she watched Sunny’s hair, and she didn’t say anything.
She kept not saying anything, for a while. She sat there with her hand on the front of her and the dimple on and watched Sunny cross the yard and come up the steps, and Sunny got to the top of the steps and stopped, and Lara looked up at her, and went on not saying anything, and made it last.
“It exists,” Sunny said.
“Does it?”
“It’s real. It’s cold. Sixty-five degrees, he says, which is a lie. There’s a cottonwood.”
“Is there?”
“Lara.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You’re saying it very loudly.”
“I’m thirty-three weeks, honey, I’m not allowed to say anything, it raises my blood pressure.” Lara picked up the empty glass and looked at it. “Get me some more tea. And Sunny.”
“What?”
“Your shirt’s on inside out,” Lara said, and put her head back, and shut her eyes, and smiled at the roof of the porch.
She lay in her own bed that night, in the T-shirt, with her hair dry and her skin still warm from a rock, and didn’t go down the hall.
She didn’t send him a clue. He’d understand that too. She lay there with her hand on her own stomach and the fan going and thought about a man walking naked around a swimming hole for a condom, and a man saying Rose with his eyes open, and a man saying I’m going to have to buy a garden, which was the kindest thing anybody had said to her since a funeral, and it had been a joke, and that was why it was kind.
She’d told him. Lorna and Will. Nobody in Texas had that, and now he did, and she’d handed it over on a rock without being asked, and she lay there and found she wasn’t sorry, and that was new.
She was keeping something. Not the Berrys; that was given now, and it was his. The other thing. The gray sedan and the flowers and the police being kind, the reason she was in this county at all, the thing he’d waited for in the dark in August and not asked about, and she’d kept it, and she was keeping it still.
She just didn’t know yet what she’d do when it was time to give it back.
CHAPTER TWELVE
He told her before he told anybody else.
Not his father, not Dean, not Chase in the barn with his back turned. He came in from Clay’s at five on Monday with the email still on his phone and the dust still on him, and she was at the counter with the laptop, and he stood in the kitchen doorway with his hat in his hand and said it.
“Odessa. Two weeks. Wednesday.”
She didn’t look up. Her hands stopped on the keys.
“Two weeks.”
“Fourteen days. Burchall’s got a client out there with a well field and a problem, and they want a man who can read water standing over it, and it’s me, because I’m the one they’re trying to wear out.” He came in and put his hat on the table. “I’ll drive back Friday nights if I can. I might not be able to. It’s an hour and a half each way and they’ll want me at six.”
“Okay.”
