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Pearl put the pen down.

She came around the end of the counter with her hands flat on it and stood there in front of the whole room, and she didn’t look at any of them. She looked at Marge, who’d stopped with the pot halfway to the banker’s cup.

“Marge.”

Marge waited.

“You said leave that girl be. In September. In front of everybody, and I said sixty years, Marge, and I said it as if that answered anything.” Pearl’s voice didn’t shake, because Pearl’s never had, but it was quieter than any of them had heard it. “I thought she was being rude to a nice man. I thought she was weather. Blow in, blow out, nothing to do with us. She wasn't weather. She was a girl who'd been followed, and she came into my place and I put her in a chair and tried to hand her to every single man in this county who’d stand still long enough, and you knew. You knew, and you said leave her be, and I didn’t.” She put her hands down. “I’m saying sorry to you. Here. Where I said the other thing. So they all hear it.”

The room didn’t breathe.

Marge looked at her a long moment with the pot in her hand. Then she put the pot down on the counter, and she reached over, and she put one hand on top of Pearl’s, on the counter, for about a second, and took it off.

“Eat your eggs, Pearl,” Marge said, and picked up the pot, and went on down the counter to the banker.

Pearl went back to the register. She sat down on her stool and looked at her pen, and Earl folded his paper, and the room ate.

Earl’s was next door, and Brody went in after, because he wanted staples, which was a lie, and Earl knew it, and sold him staples anyway.

The slate was still on the wall behind the register where it had been since August. BRODY R & THE HOUSEKEEPER, BEFORE THANKSGIVING, in Earl’s chalk, and the odds under it, which had come down from three to one against to even money after the sale. Earl had stopped taking bets on Saturday night, because after the dance nobody in the county would take the other side.

Earl looked at it. He looked at Brody.

“I’d have paid out Saturday night,” he said. “Chase came in Monday for his money. I told him a bet’s not won till the woman says so.”

“She said so.”

“When?”

“Yesterday. To Ryder Davis. On my phone.” Brody put his money on the counter. “She told him she was taken.”

Earl looked at him a while. Then he reached up and took the slate off its nail, and turned it face to the wall, and leaned it there behind the register where it had hung.

“That’s not paying out,” he said. “That’s taking it down. There’s a difference. I’ll put it back up when there’s something worth chalking, and it won’t be that.” He rang up the staples. “You go on home now, Brody. He’ll be at Harvey’s by eight finding it shut, and the motel’ll have lost his booking by nine, and he’ll be at the Bateman gate by noon asking Liv, and Liv’s already been told. There’s not a door in this county that man can open. Let him try them all. Go home and sit on your step.”

“You know about the step.”

“Son,” Earl said, “there’s not a thing in this county I don’t know about. Except what that girl sees in you, and I quit trying to work that one out in August.”

She came at eleven. She shut the door, and she didn’t stand against it.

She came across the room, got on the bed, got his shirt open, put her face against his chest, and stayed there. He lay with his hand in her hair, the lamp off, the house asleep under them, a rifle by the back door, and waited.

“I don’t want gentle,” she said, into his chest.

“I know.”

“I’ve had a whole day of gentle. Remi, and Lara, and Ryder Davis with his pen. Elena brought soup. Soup, Brody, I’m not sick, I’m followed.” She lifted her head. “I don’t want you being careful with me. I’ve watched you being careful since nine yesterday morning, on the step and in that kitchen, and I can’t stand it. I want the porch. I want the truck in July. I want you to have me the way you did when you thought there was nobody.”

He looked at her in the dark.

“There’s somebody now,” he said.

“You know to me he’s nobody.” She got her hand on his belt. “Don’t be angry at me in the daylight and careful with me in the dark. Pick one. Be angry.”

So he was angry. He turned her over, got her out of her clothes without one word, put his mouth on her without asking. She wasn’t quiet. He didn’t tell her to be. She’d used the voice on him with the lamp on and he’d believed it, and he put every bit of that into her with his hands and his mouth until she was saying his name at the ceiling and pulling his hair. Then he went into her fast, the way he had on a kitchen table, and she said, “Yes. That. There,” and got her nails in his back and held on.

“Nobody,” he said, into her neck, moving.