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She’d stopped noticing him too. He went past the porch at one-thirty with the camera up and she didn’t turn her face, and it was the first time in four months she hadn’t turned her face from a camera, and she sat there with her feet on the rail and let that sit. Then Levi fell in the horse trough and she was off the porch before Lara could tell her not to be.
Edna Bateman was in a chair beside Lara’s by two, with a plate on her knees she wasn’t eating off and her cane across the arm.
“You’re the one with the chart,” Edna said.
“That’s me.”
“Liv’s got a chart now. Since Tuesday. Got it on the wall of the barn.” Edna looked at the yard. “Forty years I ran that place out of my head, and now there’s a chart.”
“Is it a good chart?”
Edna looked at her. The long dry look from the sale, the one that took everything in and filed it.
“It’s a fair chart,” she said, and ate a bean. “I had your number in my kitchen drawer from February. Elena wrote it out for me. I told Olivia I’d call it myself when I was ready, and I wasn’t, and then John had a house full and no Helen, and Elena said give it here, that house needs her worse than your hip does. So I gave it.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Bateman.”
“Don’t thank me. I said it’s a fair chart. That’s as far as I go.”
Lara, on the other side of her, put her hand over her mouth, and Sunny got up and went to see about the second smoker before her face did something in front of Edna Bateman.
The second smoker was Dean’s. Dean and Jace had it between them, the way they’d had it every year since Helen had handed it over, and there was a third man there she didn’t know, with his hat back and a beer in his hand and his shoulder against the truck, laughing at something Jace had said. Tall. Dark. Older than Chase and younger than Dean, with the look of a man who’d been gone a long while and was still figuring out where everything was.
“Who’s that?” She said, low, to Dean, with the tongs.
Dean looked over his shoulder.
“Aiden Kane. Went to school with him. He’s back to run the Kane place.” Dean turned a rack. “Divorced. He’s moving the family into windmills, God help him.”
“Windmills?”
“Wind. The big ones. Fifty of them on his daddy’s south pasture, if the county lets him.” Dean shut the smoker. “Jace thinks he’s lost his mind. Jace has been telling him so since eleven o’clock, and Aiden’s been standing there letting him, so I’d say they’re all right.”
Aiden Kane looked up, and nodded at her, and said, “Ma’am,” and she said, “Sunny,” and he said, “I know. Everybody knows,” and went back to Jace, and she went back to the porch, and that was all it was.
“That’s Uncle Brody’s.”
“I know it’s Uncle Brody’s.”
“So you can’t sit there.” Giana put her book on the bench beside her, on the seat, flat, four hundred pages of it, and put her hand on top of the book. “This is mine. That’s his. You can sit over there.”
“Where’s over there.”
“By Grandpa.”
Sunny looked down the table. The old man was at the head of it with his hat on the table, his coffee, a plate somebody had built him. The seat beside him was empty. He was looking at it, and then he looked at her.
“Sit down, Sunny,” he said. “Before that one puts a book on you.”
She sat down beside John Royston at his own table in his own yard with a hundred and twenty people eating his brisket. Brody came across the yard from the smokers with two plates and stopped. He looked at Giana’s book. He looked at Sunny beside his father, said, “All right,” and sat down beside the book.
“You can move it now,” he said.
“No.”
“Giana.”
“You’ll put your plate there and then somebody else’ll sit down. Elena did it last year.” Giana opened the book on the seat. “I’m reading. Eat.”