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"There's no cattle on this place," she said.

"No."

"And the well's bad."

"The well's bad."

"And you've got four years of buying back cows that were already mine."

"Three, if the man at Lamesa has a hard winter."

"Owen."

"It's a bad deal," he said. "I've run the numbers twice and it's a bad deal, and I've got a page in a drawer at home that says I want it anyway, and now it's out of the drawer."

Olivia sat on her mother's kitchen counter in a half-packed house with one boot on.

"Bring the book Wednesday," she said. "After the van goes. Bring the whole book and we'll start at the front."

EPILOGUE

Saturday the twelfth, and Olivia was at the kitchen window at daylight with her coffee.

She'd drink it like a grown woman and go out when she heard the guard.

The road came out of the low place and ran straight for a mile after that. At ten past six his truck came up it with the gooseneck behind. She put the cup down hard enough to slop coffee on her wrist. She was out the door with her boots half on.

She didn’t run down the drive.

He came up slow so as not to rattle them, and he took two goes at lining the trailer up on the trap gate. She'd hold that over him for a year. Then he got out and put his hat on and didn't say good morning.

"Six," he said.

"You said five."

"They had a change of heart about the old cow. It cost me another four hundred dollars and a compliment about their bulls, and the bulls are nothing much."

"Which old cow."

"Get the gate, Liv."

She got the gate.

The first one off the ramp was Mabel.

She came down brindle and wide and about a hundred years old, with no hurry in her anywhere. She walked out into that trap the way a woman walks through her own kitchen with the lights off. She got three steps in and put her head down in the grass.

Olivia had to stand still a second.

Owen stayed at the ramp with the stick in his hand, let her have it, and said not one word about it. Then Opal came off with her good eye rolling and her mother's exact way of putting her feet down. Three more came off behind her. Olivia got her breath back somewhere in there.

"That's Opal's heifer from last spring," she said.

"It is."

"She's grown."

"They do." He shut the gate on the last one and dropped the pin. "They kept them clean and kept them together. It's the only reason this was worth doing." He put the pin in his pocket. "There's five more of the good ones at the second outfit and they'll come, but not this year. The forty-one up at Lamesa are staying up at Lamesa. The nine at Herrera's are gone for good, and I'll tell you now so you're not hoping about it."