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"I told you it took a while. That June I wasn't there yet, and I'd have given a good deal to be." He put his hand over his eyes a second and took it down. "I had the ticket. I had it bought, I had my bag packed, and I sat in a room in a town you couldn't say and I saw the yard. Dad on the porch, you at the fence, her in the line with her hand out, because she'd come, she'd have come for Mama if she had to walk, and I'd have had to stand there and shake hands with the two of you a foot apart still not doing it. So, I sat in that room and let it go by, and I've had every year since to work out what it cost me, and I've got the number." He looked at Owen. "That's all of it, and nobody's heard it. Not Dean, not Dad, and not her."

"You never said her name," Owen said. "Seven years of phone calls and you never said it once. I had you down as a man that was too hurt to even mention her."

"I was over her, that's why I didn't say it." He laughed, short and not much of one. "You don't go around saying a woman's name to the man who ought to have her."

"I've told two lies in thirteen years."

"I know which two."

"You've told one for seven years to the whole family."

"I know what I've told." He didn't look away. "I'm not asking you to like it. I'm telling you what it was."

The wind came around and the pumpjack went off with it. Owen reached across with his left hand, got the bottle, drank. The whiskey went down and sat there, and he gave it back.

"And this spring," he said.

"You want it or you want to guess at it?"

"I've guessed enough."

"All right." Brody set the bottle on the rail and put both hands around it. "I drove to her mama's on a Sunday and ate pie. I walked her down to her pens and I worded her into it. Lamesa. Harvey's. Church. Your alley, every day I could get there. The cap this morning. I told her it was a con. She said it was beneath her, she was right, and she picked it up anyway, and she told me why. She said you'd stood in a barn and told her you felt nothing, and she believed you, and it was the only card she had left."

"I know what I said in the barn."

"Then you know why she picked it up." He turned the bottle. "She hated it. She told me so at the steakhouse with the whole room looking. I've watched that woman carry things her whole life. I handed her one more so you'd look at it. She loves you, Owen. She's loved you since that library, and I used it. I used a woman that loves my cousin as a stick to move my cousin with, and I knew what it was when I did it."

"That's my daddy's trick."

Brody went still, and Owen kept on. "Find the thing a person can't say no to and set it down in front of them. Clay's worked that on every one of us at that table for thirty years and he's never had to raise his voice one time. You ran it on her."

"I know whose it is."

"Do you?"

"I've known since the steakhouse. I sat across from her with her hands taped and watched her laugh at something I said and hate herself for it. I knew what I was doing. I drove her home and did it again at Harvey's." He looked at Owen. "You want me to say I'm sorry. I'm not going to. I'd do the same thing tomorrow and I'd hate it the same, and that's not sorry. That's just knowing."

"I didn't ask you to be sorry."

"No. You never ask." He drank. "And I'm not asking you about the lip."

"Good. Don't."

"It's a good lip. It's the best thing I've had since I landed."

Owen didn't answer that. The bull had put his head down over the rail near Brody's arm and Brody put his hand on the flat of the black face without looking at it, the way he'd have done at ten, and left it there.

"So, what now?" Owen asked.

"Monday I write the report."

"Under your name?"

"Yeah, my name, with a date on it, your numbers in it and hers, what the crews did and whose crews they were. I put it on a desk in Midland and I stand there while the man reads it. Burchall can do what Burchall does. It's the one thing in this whole mess that's mine to put right and I can have it right by Monday noon, so I'm going to. Then I'll find out what a man does for work out here when he's done that."

"Surely your daddy will take you on."

"Dad'll take me on. Dean's got the deed. Dean'll have a thing or two to say."