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“I’ve got it. Ed Hardwick died the week your brother’s boy was born, and his two girls are in Amarillo with a probate lawyer and a real estate man, and they’d sell the ground to the first soul who walked in here with a check, because neither of them has been on it since their mother’s funeral and neither of them wants to be.” He put the folder down. “Two sections. The house wants a roof. The pens are rust. Windmill’s good, the tank’s good, and the south fence of it runs along the far side of that corridor from your father’s, which I’d have thought you knew, since you’ve been standing on it all summer.”

“I know where it runs.”

“Then you know what you’d be buying.” Greene took his glasses off. “Say what you’re asking me, son. I’ve got a deposition at two.”

“I’m asking what they want for it.”

Greene told him.

Dean, in the second chair, said, “Jesus,” quietly, and Brody didn’t say anything for a second, and then he took his checkbook out of the inside pocket of his jacket, from behind a folded chart and a letter of resignation, and put it on the desk.

“Brody.”

“Dean.”

“That’s a ranch. That’s not a room, that’s a ranch, with a roof off it, and you’ve just handed a company back its paycheck in this chair, and I’ve watched you live out of a bag for nine months, and I don’t know what you think you’re⁠—”

“I’ve been paid, since I was twenty-two, by a company that put me in places where there was nothing to spend it on.” Brody said it plainly, to his brother. “Camps. Tents. A desk with no window. I’ve never bought a thing in my life bigger than a truck, and the truck’s got a flat. I’ve got it, Dean. I’ve had it a long while. I never had anywhere to put it.” He uncapped the pen. “Nathan. Full price, cash, close whenever the girls in Amarillo can sign. I’ll want the surface and I’ll want it clean, and I know what’s under it, and so does Burchall, and I’d like them to find out who their new neighbor is from the county paper.”

Greene looked at him a long moment. Then he opened a drawer and took out a form.

“Dean witnesses,” he said. “Sign there. And there. And Brody.”

“What?”

“Your father’s going to ask me Monday why you didn’t buy the ground next to his.” Greene put his own pen down. “What do I tell him?”

“Tell him I did,” Brody said. “It’s just got a corridor in between. He’ll know what to do with that.”

He signed. Dean signed under him, with a look on him Brody hadn’t seen since a green hallway, and Greene blotted it and put it in the drawer and said, “Go on. Both of you. I’ve got reading, and I’ve got to call two girls in Amarillo and ruin their morning.”

Chase was in the lot with the engine running.

He’d driven Brody in, because Brody’s truck was at the north fence with a flat, and he’d sat in the lot an hour and a half with the radio on. When Brody came out with Dean, and Dean went one way to his own truck without a word and a hand on the back of his brother’s neck going past, Chase leaned across and pushed the door open.

“Where to.”

“The Hardwick place.”

Chase looked at him.

“Ed Hardwick’s,” Brody said. “North of the corridor. Two sections and a house with the roof off. I’ve just bought it.”

Chase sat there with his hand on the gearshift.

“You’ve bought Hardwick’s.”

“Full price. Cash. Dean witnessed it and nearly fell off the chair.” He looked out the windshield at Greene’s window. “She’s going the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. And when she goes, I’m not going to be a man in his father’s house who stayed because he had nowhere else to go. I’m going to be a man with his own ground in this county. Whether she’s on it or not. I have to be able to say that before I say anything else to her.”

Chase didn’t say anything for a while. Then he put the truck in gear.

“Ed Hardwick’s,” he said. “Roof’s been off since the hail in ’24. You know that.”

“I know that.”

“And the pens.”

“I know about the pens, Chase.”