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“Water?”

“Glasses are behind you.”

She didn’t turn around. She should have turned around. He put the carton back in the fridge without taking his eyes off her, and shut the door with his hip, and the light went, and it was worse in the dark, because she could still tell exactly where he was.

“I’m not interested,” she said.

There was a pause about the length of a heartbeat, hers.

“What makes you think I am?”

He went past her to the hall, close, not touching, and she felt the warmth of him go by her arm like he’d brushed it, and then he was on the stairs, and then a door shut somewhere over her head, quietly, the way a man shuts a door when he’s been raised in a house with a father in it.

Sunny stood in the dark kitchen with her hand flat on the cold door of the fridge, and breathed, and said, out loud, to the dog under the table, “I really hope I can handle this.”

The dog thumped its tail once, which was no help at all.

CHAPTER TWO

Brody Royston was awake at four-thirty, which he’d have told anybody who asked was on account of the letter.

The letter was on the dresser where it had been since Friday. One page. Burchall’s name at the bottom. As of Tuesday the twenty-ninth of June he’d be reporting to the Wainwright office as company liaison to the west expansion, and the company thanked him for his flexibility. He’d read it eleven times. Flexibility. In April he’d put his own report on that desk with his name under it, saying the west line was pulling the Bateman well down a foot a week. The company had read it. Then it had moved him to a room with no window, and when that didn’t get rid of him, it had sent him out to the one man in the county who’d be glad to see him, and sat him across the desk from that man to keep everybody honest. His uncle. They’d sent him to work for his uncle. You had to admire it.

He hadn’t told his father. He wasn’t hiding it. The letter was on the dresser, the truck had the name on the door, and the old man could read. But John Royston hadn’t asked his second son one question since February, and Brody wasn’t going to start with this one. He thought his father was wrong about it, too. The old man’s answer to the mine had always been the fence and the word no, and neither one had ever kept water in the ground. The only way to watch Clay’s gauges was from Clay’s side of the desk. He’d say so, if he was ever asked. He also knew exactly what the old man’s face would do when he found out, and he’d walk a long way around not to be in the room for it.

He lay there and looked at the ceiling and thought about that for about a minute and a half. Then he thought about the fridge, which he’d been not thinking about since ten past midnight, with some success, right up until he’d shut his eyes.

Last night he’d gotten to his door before he’d let his breath out. He’d stood there with his hand on it until he heard her on the stairs and her door shut, twenty feet from his. Then he’d lain there a long while knowing exactly which direction that door was in, going over what he’d said to her in the fridge light. He’d been satisfied with it. He wasn’t sure it had one bit of truth in it. What makes you think I am. Christ. He’d been hard before she’d gotten the sentence out.

He got up. Breakfast was at six. The old man had said so to Helen for fifteen years, and every morning since February Brody had been the last man down, after the trucks had gone, because a desk in Midland didn’t care when he got there and he’d been in no hurry to sit at that table alone with his father.

She could cook.

He knew it from the hall, from the smell of bacon and coffee and biscuits. Then he was in the doorway and saw the rest: the table laid, the pot on the burner, eggs going in a pan she’d have had to find. The housekeeper at the stove with her hair up and her back to him, in a shirt buttoned all the way this time, a dish towel over one shoulder. The clock over the door said four minutes to six. His father was already at the head of the table with a cup in front of him, and it was half gone.

John Royston had not said one word about the coffee. He was drinking it, and in that house, from that man, drinking it was the review, and Brody had grown up reading them, and he stood in the doorway a second longer than he needed to and read this one, and it said she’ll do, and it said it before the sun was up.

“Morning,” she said, to the pan.

“Morning.”

“Sit down, you’re in the way of the door.”

He sat down. Chase came in behind him, gripped his shoulder in passing the way Chase did, and sat. Dean came down last with Levi under one arm, because Levi had wanted to be carried and was too big for it and had gotten his way anyway. Dean set the boy in a chair. He looked at the table. He looked at his brother, in a chair, at the table, at six in the morning. He didn’t say anything, and Brody watched him decide not to, and was grateful, and was annoyed at being grateful.

She fed them. Eggs, bacon, biscuits, a jar of the peach preserves Helen put up every August, which she must have found in the pantry and known enough to put out. She went around with the pot. His father first. Dean. Chase. Levi’s milk. Then she came to him and filled his cup and didn’t look at him doing it, and he looked at her hand on the pot and the inside of her wrist, and at the shirt buttoned to the neck, and thought about what had been under a T-shirt at ten past midnight and what he’d give to get his hands on it. He drank his coffee. It was right. Of course it was right. She’d been in the house a day and got right the one thing his father cared about, and Brody had been in it since February and hadn’t managed that yet.

“Jett,” John said, to the table, meaning where is he.

“Went straight to the mine,” Chase said. “Said tell you the pump’s back on and he’ll be by for supper.”

“Dean.”

“Gary at ten. I’ll be at the pens.”

“Chase.”

“Hay. Long as it holds.”