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He got her back for it. He was a man who kept accounts. He had her on her back on the blanket with the road a hundred yards off and her jeans around one ankle and his mouth on her before she’d gotten her breath. It was cold and it was fast. She had to bite her own wrist, and the hawk went up out of the screen at the noise she made anyway, and didn’t come back.

“There’s a hawk.”

“There was a hawk.”

“He’ll be back,” he said. “He’s been in that sky since ’06. He’s heard worse.”

He drove her home at one with the heater on and the blanket over her knees, and neither of them said anything for a while, and the county went by, and at the cattle guard he slowed down more than a cattle guard needed.

“Sunny.”

“Yeah?”

“The BBQ’s Saturday.”

“I know when the BBQ is. I’ve got it on the chart. I’ve got a hundred and twenty people on the chart and two smokers and Lara’s not lifting a thing.”

“After the BBQ,” he said. “There’s something I want to say to you. I’m not saying it now, because I’ve decided not to, and I’m not saying it at the BBQ, because I’ll be carrying a smoker. After. That night.” He looked at the road. “I’m telling you now so you’ve got a week to decide whether you want to hear it.”

She sat there with the blanket on her knees.

“That’s not in the terms,” she said.

“No.”

“Brody, we shook on —”

“I know what we shook on. I’m not breaking it. I’m telling you I’m going to, a week ahead, so you can say no now and I’ll never say it.” He drove over the cattle guard. “You’ve got till Saturday.”

She didn’t say anything. She looked at the yard coming up, the kitchen window dark, the porch. She thought about a bag on a closet floor and a bag under a bed. A woman in a chair who’d said “her name first” and then “well.” A hawk that would be back. Her hands were shaking, a little, on the blanket, and not from cold.

“Saturday,” she said.

He nodded. He stopped the truck in the yard. He didn’t turn the engine off. He sat there with his hands on the wheel and looked at his father’s house, and she looked at him, and she understood that he’d decided something on that road, and that it had cost him, and that he wasn’t going to tell her what it was until Saturday, and that she was going to spend a week not sleeping.

“Go in,” he said. “I’ll lock up.”

“You always lock up.”

“I do,” he said, and she went in.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“Sunny. Come sit with me a minute.”

“I can’t, the second smoker’s —”

“The second smoker’s got Dean on it and Dean’s had it since he was twelve.” Lara patted the chair beside her with the hand that didn’t have pie in it. “Elena put me in this chair at seven and took my shoes so I couldn’t get out of it, and I’m not sitting here on my own being looked at. Sit. You’ve been up since four.”

“Three-thirty.”

“Three-thirty. On a Saturday. For a barbecue.” Lara looked at her over the top of the chart, which Sunny had put on the porch rail at six and which had already been rained on, once, by Levi with a hose. “A hundred and twenty people are going to eat brisket in that yard whether you stand up or not. Sit down before I have this baby out of spite.”

Sunny sat. She sat on the edge of the chair with her feet still on the floor, ready to go, and Lara looked at her feet and didn’t say anything, and Sunny put them up on the rail.

“Thank you,” Lara said, and went back to her pie.

It was the third Saturday in October and the yard was full by noon. Both families, which meant the Roystons and the Wainwrights and everybody either of them had ever married, buried, or sold a bull to, and then the county, which came whether you’d asked it or not. Two smokers going since midnight. Tables borrowed from the church. The paper’s photographer, a boy of about twenty with a camera worth more than his car, walking around the yard taking pictures of people who’d stopped noticing him by one o’clock, and every phone in the county out for somebody’s kid.