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“They were.”

“They were, and they were doing this while they did it.” He turned another page. “There’s a hauler named Gus Flanagan out of Big Spring who’s been running trucks up the north county road since August. Everybody’s seen them. Nobody’s asked, because trucks go up that road. They’re hauling rock. Samples. Off the corridor.”

“Samples of what?”

“Here’s the assays.” He put his finger on a column. “Look at that column. It’s three times what Clay’s pulling off the west line. It’s the thickest of the whole bed, and it’s not under Clay, and it’s not under my father, it’s under two miles of scrub that nobody’s thought about in fifty years, and Burchall’s had the paper on it since March.”

Greene took his glasses off.

“Say the rest of it.”

“The rest of it’s that they don’t need Clay. They never needed Clay. Clay’s the front. Clay’s the man with the pumps and the ponds and the state file, and everybody in this county’s been looking at Clay’s west line for a year, and while they were looking Burchall optioned the ground next to it that’s worth three of him. And they don’t need my father either. They wanted his ground because it was in the way. The corridor’s not in the way. The corridor’s just there.” He sat back. “They sent me to Odessa so I’d be ninety miles off when the trucks started. That’s all Odessa was.”

Nobody said anything. The pharmacy sign hummed. Greene looked at the folder a long time, and then he looked at Brody.

“Does Clay know.”

“I don’t think so. I think Clay thinks he’s the deal.”

“Does your father.”

“My father doesn’t know I’ve got a desk.”

“He knows.” Greene put his glasses back on. “He’s known since the fence. He doesn’t say, which is a different thing.” He closed the folder and put his hand flat on it. “I’ll want Dean in this chair. Not today. When it’s time. I’ll want to run this Delaware business back one more time with my man in Midland and I’ll want the option on paper from the county, which I can get, and then I’ll want Dean in that chair and you in this one and we’ll decide what your father hears and when. Can you keep it a week?”

“Yes.”

“Can you keep it from her?”

Brody looked at him.

“I do wills, son,” Greene said. “I know what a man looks like when he’s got somewhere to be. Go on. I’ve got reading.”

He drove home at five-thirty with the folder under the seat and the sun going down over the works on Clay’s side, and he came up the drive and the kitchen window was lit and she was in it, at the counter, with the laptop and her hair up, and Lara’s truck was in the yard and the old man’s, and Dean’s, and the house was full.

He didn’t sit in the truck.

He’d sat in that truck in that yard in July with his hand on the key, and in August looking at that window, and in September hating a phrase, and he got out now and shut the door and crossed the yard and went in the back, and she looked up from the counter, and Lara looked up from the office door, and the old man looked up from the table, and Levi said, “You’re back,” and Brody said, “I’m back,” and went past all of them and put his hand on the back of her neck, in the kitchen, in front of his father, for about one second, and took it off.

Nobody said anything. Lara’s face did something and she went back in the office. The old man looked at his coffee. Levi said, “Why’d you —” and Sunny said, “Wash your hands, Levi,” and Levi went.

“Table looks like a table,” Brody said, low.

“I scrubbed it.”

“Uh huh.”

“Twice.” She didn’t look up from the laptop. “Sit down, you’re in the way of the door.”

He sat down. She fed him. And whatever he’d brought back from Odessa under the seat of his truck, he’d take it to Greene’s chair in a week and not to this table, and she’d asked him why and he hadn’t told her, and she’d let him not, because that was the arrangement, and he sat at his father’s table with his father not looking at him and a woman feeding him and thought: a week. I can keep it a week.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

It was the second Saturday in October, seven in the morning, and Sunny had been up since four. At eleven the night before she'd sat down at the counter with Olivia's calving photographs and thought, I'll just tidy these. By one she'd built the woman a website.

She hadn't meant to. The calving pictures she'd taken because Olivia with her arm in a heifer to the shoulder and her hair in a bandana was the best thing Sunny had seen through a lens in a year. Tuesday, dropping a pan off, she'd taken more: Judge, the herd bull, in the pen with the gray coming in around his eyes, the Fort Worth two-year-old beside him, and Mabel, who'd looked straight into the phone like a cow who'd seen it all and wasn't impressed. Then Ainsley had said on the porch that the sale was Saturday and a flyer in Earl's window was the whole of the marketing, and Sunny had gone home and done the only thing she'd ever been good at, which was making something look like what it already was. Twelve photographs and one caption, and Olivia's name in front of the Roystons'.

Remi was in the kitchen door at seven with her phone out.