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“He fix the roof yet?”

“He built a fire out of a chair.”

“That’s about what I expected.” Chase looked at the tarp. He looked at his brother. “Tin.”

“Shingle.”

“Tin. I’ve got eleven sheets in the barn from the hay shed and Dad’s not using them and I’m not driving to Big Spring for shingle so you can have it look like 1950.”

“It’s my roof.”

“It’s my ladder.” Chase picked it up again. “Sunny. You’re living under it. Tin or shingle?”

She looked at Brody. She looked at the tarp, and at Chase with the ladder, and at the pie.

“Tin,” she said.

“She’s on my side,” Chase said, and went around the house with the ladder, and Brody sat on the step of his own house and looked at the woman beside him with his shirt on, eating Pearl’s pie with her fingers, who’d just picked his roof.

“You’re going to hear it rain,” he said.

“I know I am.”

“On tin. It’s loud.”

“I said I know,” she said, and gave him the last of the pie.

He was going to need a bigger fireplace.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

“You’ve put a chart on my wall,” Helen said.

She was standing in the kitchen doorway at seven on Tuesday with a suitcase in one hand and her coat still on, two weeks early, because her sister was on her feet and Helen had never in her life stayed anywhere a day past being needed. She looked at the chart. She looked at the baby in the basket on the table. She looked at Sunny at the stove with a pan in her hand and her hair down.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“In pen.”

“In pencil. It erases.”

“It does not erase, it’s been rained on.” Helen put the suitcase down. She came across the kitchen in her coat and stood in front of the chart and read it, all of it, top to bottom, the way John had read the laminated one in June, and Sunny stood at the stove with the pan and let her, and Max made a noise in the basket, and nobody moved.

“Pies,” Helen said, “underlined twice.”

“Pearl’s.”

“I can see whose.” She turned around. She’d run that kitchen since Kelly-Anne and she’d handed it to a stranger over a telephone in June with a list, and she looked at the stranger now, at the stove, with the pan, and at the kit by the back door, packed, lined up, ready for a truck, the way Sunny’s jobs had always ended. “You’ve packed.”

“You’re home.”

“I’m home two weeks early and you’ve packed. When did you do that?”

“Last night.”

“Uh huh.” Helen took her coat off. She hung it on the hook by the door where it had always hung, and looked at the chart on the wall beside it, and left it. “Give me the pan.”

“Helen—”