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“I’ve got it.”

“Then say it.”

“I’ve got it, Dad.” He looked at Lauren. He looked at the glass. He looked at the ceiling, which had nothing on it, and his jaw tightened, and Lauren, who’d sat beside him for a year and knew what that meant, put her hand on his arm and stood up beside him.

“We’re having a baby,” she said. “June. He’s been trying to say it since the bread and he’s not going to get there, and the turkey’s getting cold. Sit down, Mason.”

Mason sat down. He put the glass down and put both hands over his face, and the table went off the way it went off. Stephanie first. Ainsley. Pearl from the far end saying “I knew it, I said it in September.” Remi banging the table. Owen leaning across Olivia to get a hand on his brother’s shoulder. And Clay, at the end, not saying a word, sitting there with a look on him Brody had only ever seen on his own father, looking at his second son with his hands over his face, and letting him have the minute.

Sunny’s hand found his under the table.

She didn’t look at him. She was looking at Lauren, who was looking at Mason, and her hand came across under the cloth and found his on his knee and took it, and held it, and he sat at his father’s table with his brother’s daughter on one side and a woman’s hand in his on the other and didn’t move.

“Grace,” John said.

The table stopped. He didn’t stand. He never had. He sat at the head with his hat on the wood and his hands flat either side of his plate and looked down the length of it, at all of them. Dean and Lara with the baby between them. Chase, Jett, Remi. Clay and Stephanie and their five, Lauren, Olivia beside Owen. Helen in the door with a dish towel. Addi at the far end from Jace with her chin up. Pearl, Earl, Marge, who’d come and hadn’t said a word since she got there. The old man’s eyes went along all of it and stopped, once, on his second son, and stayed there a second longer than they’d stayed anywhere, and moved on.

“Lord,” John said. “We’ve got more at this table than we had last year. We’ve got a boy in a basket and one coming in June and we’ve got a chart on the wall I’ve been told I can’t take down. We’ve had a hard year and a man in the yard and a rifle by the door, and every one of us is still here, and one that wasn’t here last year is here now.” He stopped. “That’s all. Amen. Helen, the bird.”

“Amen,” said the table, and Helen brought the bird.

Remi said it over the pie.

“I’m coming home.”

Chase looked up. “You’re home.”

“After the new year. For good. I’ve told Lubbock. I’m done with Lubbock, there’s nothing in Lubbock I can’t get here, and Dad’s got a ranch and Dean’s got a baby and my brother’s bought Hardwick’s and somebody in this family’s got to keep an eye on all of you.” She said it fast, to her pie, the way she said everything she’d decided a while ago. “So. January. That’s all.”

“Well,” John said.

“That’s what you said to Sunny.”

“It’s what I say.” He ate his pie. “Good.”

Her phone lit up on the table beside her plate.

Brody saw it. He was two seats down and he saw it light, and he saw her look at it, and her face did the thing it did when a certain name lit her phone. She picked it up. She got up, said, “I’ll be a minute,” to nobody, and went out through the kitchen and the back door into the cold in her shirtsleeves with the phone in her hand.

Nobody else saw. Chase was arguing with Jett. Lara had the baby. The old man was looking at his pie.

Brody watched the door shut behind his sister. He sat there with a fork in his hand and looked at it a while, and then he looked at his pie, and ate it, and didn’t wonder, because it was hers, and he could keep his sister’s business to himself.

Addi washed and Jace dried.

Nobody had asked them to. Helen had gone to sit down for the first time since five, and the two of them were at the sink with their backs to the room and a foot of air between them, not talking, and Brody stood in the door with a beer and watched Jace dry a platter and put it on the shelf without being told which shelf, in a kitchen he’d eaten in maybe six times in his life, and watched Addi not look at him while he did it.

A man doesn’t know where a platter goes in another family’s kitchen unless he’s stood at that sink before with the same woman and nobody else in the room.

Across the kitchen Lauren looked at Mason, and Mason looked at his plate. Brody finished the beer and kept that to himself too.

Dean caught him on the porch.

The tub was empty and the yard was dark and the kitchen was loud behind them, and Dean came out with two beers he’d gotten from somewhere and handed him one and stood beside him at the rail, with the county in front of them and nothing in it.

“Every year you were gone, somebody set your place,” Dean said.

Brody didn’t say anything.