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She wanted his hands. She’d have taken them anywhere on her, at a rail, in daylight, with his father’s house behind her, and she kept her own on the wood and didn’t ask.

“Say it,” he said.

“Say what.”

“Whatever it is. You’ve got a look on you I don’t know. Say it.”

“You pulled the trigger.”

“On an empty gun.”

“He didn’t know that.”

“No. He didn’t.” He put the shells in his jeans pocket. “That was the point of it, Sunny. He’s a man who’s never once done a thing anybody could take to a judge, and now he’s a man who’s knelt in the dirt in front of six people and cried, and that’ll stick to him longer than any piece of paper would. He won’t come back. Not for you. Not for anybody. That’s what I did.”

“Your father⁠—”

“My father’s right. I’d have said the same to Levi.” He looked at her. “I’d do it again tomorrow, and I’d take the same sentence from him for it, and I’d stand there and say no sir, because he’s right and I’d still do it. That’s the whole of what I’ve got. You want more, I don’t have it.”

She didn’t say anything. She looked past him at the yard, at the place in the dust where a man’s knees had been, and the marks were still there.

“Go in,” she said. “Lara needs you to look normal in front of the kids. Go be normal.”

He looked at her another second. Then he went in, and the screen door shut behind him, and she stood at the rail on her own.

The phone called at six. Earl.

“Tate’s at the state line,” he said. “He called me from the state line. Followed that car a hundred and eighty miles at four feet and never once lit him up, and when the man crossed into New Mexico Tate got out and stood on the line and watched him go till he couldn’t see him.” Earl was quiet a second. “And the man never once checked his mirror. Tate says that kind doesn’t come back the way he went. Tate’s not a smart man, Sunny, but he’s watched a lot of people leave this county, and I’d take that one to the bank.”

“Thank you, Earl.”

“Don’t thank me. I sold a box of staples.” He hung up.

She put the phone down on the rail. It was getting dark. The yard had gone gray and then blue, and the marks in the dust were still there, because nobody in the family had wanted to be the one who walked over them, and the kitchen window was lit behind her and she could hear all of them in it, the whole house, eating a pie she’d made because her hands had needed a job.

She stood there a long while.

They thought she was watching the road. She could feel them think it, through the wall, Lara and Remi and the man who’d pulled a trigger for her, and they’d have said, leave her, she’s watching the road, she’s making sure. She wasn’t watching the road.

She was counting.

A woman thirty-six weeks along on a porch rail with her hand in a stranger’s, because the stranger had brought a man to her yard. Two children behind a screen door with a hand over the little one’s mouth. A father who’d asked about his second son once in eight months, asking him now in the dust, in front of everybody, whether he’d break his dead wife’s rule again, and the son saying no sir, and meaning yes. Pearl, who’d lied for her. Harvey, who’d shut. Earl’s board on the wall, turned to face it. A deputy who’d driven to the state line on his own time. A woman in a diner with a sign in the window that said GONE FISHING. Dean, standing in his own yard in front of his own children, because of a girl who’d come to cook for three months and stayed for a chart.

She’d always half believed it. She’d believed it at six with a bag on a closet floor, at twenty-three at the second funeral, this spring in a gray sedan’s headlights. She’d let a county talk her out of it for four months, with pie, a dance, and a man who’d said he loved her three times in the dark.

Bad luck wasn’t a thing that happened to her. It was a thing she brought. She’d brought it up a drive in a car full of boxes in June and set it down in the nicest house she’d ever been in, and today it had come over the cattle guard in a good jacket and knelt in the dust, and a whole family had stood in a yard to take it for her.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

She didn’t come on Sunday, and he lay there till one with the lamp off and told himself it was the day she’d had.

She didn’t come on Monday either.

Tuesday she came. Eleven, the door, the shoes in her hand. She crossed the room, got on the bed, got on him without a word, and it was fast and it was quiet and she kept her face in his neck the whole time. When he tried to get her up where he could see her she said, “No. Like this,” and held on, and he let her. She went with her teeth in his shoulder and no sound at all. Then she lay on him with her heart going against his chest and didn’t move.

“Sunny.”

“Don’t.”