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He hadn’t meant to say it out loud. Remi looked at him, and looked back at the party, and neither of them said anything else. The beer went warm in his hand while he ran the man’s long look over again, east, across the grass, toward every gate on the road, and put it away in the place he kept things that would need thinking about on a night with more room in it.

He left at dark, first of the family to go, which surprised nobody, and Brody followed him out to his truck with his hands in his pockets.

"Thanks for coming."

"It was a good party."

"You had a terrible time," Brody said. "You stood at the fence for three hours. I watched you make one small child cry with a look."

"That was Pruitt’s boy, and he was standing on my plate."

"He’s four."

"Then he’s young enough to learn."

Brody laughed, then quit laughing. He stood there in the cold in the light off the porch, and for one second the years were in his face, the whole weight of them, and Owen saw what the staying away had actually cost, and looked away, because it wasn’t his to see.

"Everybody hugged me today," Brody said. "Everybody’s glad. Dad about broke my ribs last night. And you’re the only one in the county acting like I owe money." He said it light. He said everything light. "You’re not mad I stayed away. I know what you look like mad. This is something else."

"There’s nothing else."

"Okay," Brody said, easy, and stepped back from the truck, and knocked twice on the hood the way he used to knock on Owen’s locker, half a lifetime ago, in a hallway neither of them had mentioned in thirteen years. "Good night, Owen."

Owen drove out past the trucks and the yard light and his uncle’s cattle guard, onto the county road, west, toward his own place and the pens with her daddy’s cows standing quiet in them. Brody had always been able to read a room from the doorway.

He drove home hoping Africa had dulled it.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Everybody under thirty-five took Brody out to the creek the Sunday after the homecoming, because a man wasn’t properly home until he’d had a party his daddy wasn’t invited to.

Lauren picked Olivia up at one, the flower shop van still smelling of eucalyptus, a pot of real chili on the floorboard between Olivia’s boots, and they came down the two-track through the Royston west pasture and parked in the line of tailgates above the water. Somebody had a fire going already. Somebody always did. The creek ran low and clear under the cottonwoods, the cold had eased just enough to make being outside a choice instead of a dare, and Remi was standing on a cooler holding her phone up in the wind so the music would keep playing.

“No,” Knox was saying, from the grill he’d bolted into his truck bed and defended like a homestead. “Absolutely not. You played this song at Dean’s wedding six times.”

“It’s a good song.”

“It’s the same four songs, Remi.”

“They’re the four good ones.”

“Jett. Back me up.”

“I’m with her,” Jett said. “They’re good songs.”

“You’re all banned from the truck.”

Brody sat on a tailgate at the center of it with a beer he wasn’t drinking fast, taking the whole thing in, and Olivia watched him do it while she helped Lauren wrestle the chili pot onto the grill shelf. He’d been home eight days. He had on a coat that fit him now, his own truck, plates and all, and the look of a man who’d slept eight nights in his own bed and still couldn’t quite believe the water pressure.

“Bateman,” he called. “Tell Knox the horseshoe thing can’t be done.”

“What’s the horseshoe thing?”

“He’s bet Jett twenty dollars he can hit the far bank from his own tailgate. It’s sixty feet if it’s an inch.”

“It’s forty feet,” Knox said, “and I was born to do it.”

“Born to make Jett’s truck payment,” Mason said, without opening his eyes.