Page 55

"It's not a page," Sunny said. "It's twelve photographs and a caption. Don't look at me like that."

"I'm not looking at you like anything. I'm looking at the Bateman and Royston Fall Bull and Female Sale, which has a logo now, and a map, and a picture of Judge that makes him look like he could run for governor." Remi turned the phone around. "Liv's in the barn crying, and Ainsley's shared it to four hundred people who breed cattle and eleven who don't. So it's a page." She put the phone in her back pocket. "Get in the truck. You're on coffee, Pearl's on pie, and the two of you can fight about who's in charge on the way."

In the truck Remi said, "It's a good caption."

"It's three words."

"Forty-one years running." Remi said it to the windshield. "It's a good three words. Edna ran that place for forty and Liv's never once said it out loud, and you put it under a picture of her mother's cow. Ainsley cried too, and Ainsley doesn't cry, she's half Wainwright, they had it bred out." She drove. "Brody seen it?"

"Brody was asleep."

"Brody was in his room with the door shut at one in the morning, which is not the same thing." Remi looked at the road. "He'll see it."

The Bateman place had a hundred and forty trucks on it by nine and Sunny counted them, because it was what she did.

A hundred and forty. Pearl had said eighty, if the weather held. The weather had held. By nine there were trucks on the road out to the county line and men in hats walking in. The pens were full. There was a ring where Mick Bateman’s chute had been, with a rail around it, bleachers borrowed from the rodeo pavilion, and a sound system Chase had rigged that worked about two-thirds of the time.

She had the coffee. The circle had the coffee: Elena, Lauren, Ainsley and Sunny at a table under a tarp with four urns and a cash box. Pearl was thirty feet off with the pie and a look on her, because they’d had the fight in the truck about who was in charge, and Pearl had lost, on the grounds that Sunny had a chart.

“She’ll get over it,” Elena said, pouring.

“She won’t.”

“She won’t. But she’ll get over it enough to sell pie.” Elena handed a cup across. “Three dollars, Wes, and don’t tell me it was two last year, it was never two.”

Edna Bateman was in a chair.

Down front, by the ring, in a folding chair somebody had brought from the house, with a hat on and a cane across her knees and a face that had run this place for forty years. She’d come a hundred and ten miles to sit in a chair and watch her daughter run it now. Olivia had put her there at eight and Edna hadn’t moved, and every man who walked past that chair took his hat off, every one, and she nodded at every one and didn’t say a word, and Sunny watched it from the coffee urn and thought, that’s what it looks like. That’s what it looks like when a place is yours.

Edna looked up, once, across the yard, and found Sunny at the urn, and looked at her. A long look. Dry. The kind that took a whole inventory and filed it. Then she looked back at the ring.

“She’s heard about you,” Ainsley said, at her elbow.

“Everybody’s heard about me.”

“Edna’s heard about you from Liv, which is a different thing. Liv showed her the page. All Edna said was ‘Well.’ Then she got in the truck.” Ainsley took a cup. “That’s Edna. That’s the whole speech. You’ve had it.”

Olivia was in the ring at ten with a microphone that worked and a catalog in her hand, and Owen beside her with nothing in his, and the first lot came in, and Sunny stopped pouring.

She’d been in a lot of rooms. She’d watched a lot of people stand in front of a lot of crowds and try to make a thing sound like more than it was, and she’d been paid for six years to help them. She’d never once seen a woman in a bandana stand in a ring on her own ground with a hundred and forty trucks watching and say, “This is Mabel’s bull calf. Tag nine. Ninety-one pounds at birth, I pulled him myself in March, and if you don’t want him I’ll keep him,” in a voice that didn’t need the microphone, and get four hundred dollars over her opening price on him inside a minute.

Owen didn’t say a word. He stood beside her with his hat on and looked at the calf, at the bidders, at her. When the gavel went he put one hand flat on the small of her back for about a second, in front of a hundred and forty trucks, and took it off.

Sunny took the photograph. She hadn’t meant to. Her phone was in her hand before she’d decided, and she had it: the ring, the calf, Olivia with the catalog, Owen’s hand. It was the best thing she’d shot in a year. She stood there with the urn going cold and looked at it.

“Post it,” Remi said, behind her.

“It’s their —”

“It’s their sale and it’s your page, and Liv said do what you want with it, and I heard her. Post it.” Remi took the phone out of her hand and did it herself, with her thumb, and handed it back. “There. Two hundred people just saw Owen touch her. Ainsley’s going to lose her mind.”

Ainsley lost her mind. Quietly, under the tarp, with her hand over her mouth.

Brody was at the rail.

He’d been there since the first lot, on the far side, with Chase and Jett, and he hadn’t come to the coffee, because the arrangement said nothing else and half the county was at the sale. But she felt him find her every time she looked up, the way she’d felt it on a pavilion floor in July, and when Remi posted the photograph he got his phone out and looked at it, and then he looked across the ring at her, and his face didn’t do anything anybody at the rail could see, and then it did, for one second, and he put the phone away.

Her name first. She’d written it for Olivia. She stood under a tarp with a coffee urn and let herself think, for about as long as his face had done it, that she’d have liked somebody to write it about her.