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"Thursday."

"I could see your front room wall from the road." Pearl set her purse flat on her knees. "Four people have told me this week you were already gone. I said she's still teaching. They said yes, but she's gone."

"I've got eleven days of school left."

"I know exactly what you've got. I've got a calendar and I've got a counter." Pearl looked down the porch at the door. "How's your mama taking it?"

"She's put fifty years in two piles since breakfast. She hasn't looked back at one of them."

"She's looked back," Pearl said. "You've not caught her at it."

"They start hauling Monday," Pearl said. "Gruver's trucks. I had the drivers at my counter this morning wanting pie and directions."

"First two lots go Tuesday."

"That's what they said." Pearl looked out past the yard at the pens, at the windmill, at the whole of it. "It's a pretty place, honey. I don't get out here enough to have said so."

"You've said it now."

"I have." Pearl squared the purse. "How's my name coming across that counter?"

"Kindly. It's coming kindly, and you'd know it if you'd been in." Pearl looked at her. "You've not sat down in my place since the branding."

"I've been busy."

"You've been hiding. You're entitled to it, and it's still hiding." "I didn't drive out for the view. I've got two things to say, and then Marge needs the car for the bank. You want them in any order?"

"Whatever order they come in."

"All right." Pearl looked at her the way she looked at a full counter, everything seen, nothing hurried. "Three generations of Royston men have built fence sooner than say good morning, and this county has buried two good women who spent their whole lives learning to read fence."

She said it the way she said rain was coming, and then she was done with it. She didn't add a word. Olivia sat on the step with the sun on her boots and didn't add one either.

"That's the one thing?"

"The one thing."

"Nothing else?"

Pearl was quiet a second. Pearl didn't do quiet, and Olivia sat up without deciding to.

"Your daddy sold Marge eggs nineteen years," Pearl said. "Every Tuesday. You know that."

"I carried the cartons in from the truck till I got too proud to."

"You were nine, and you charged a nickel, and Marge paid it." Pearl smoothed the coat over her knee. "In nineteen years that man said about forty words a year across that counter, and thirty of them were the count. One Tuesday, a long while back, he set the cartons down and he didn't leave. He stood at the pass. And Marge waited on him, because Mick Bateman standing still meant something was coming."

"What did he say?"

"He told her one thing. Past the eggs, in nineteen years, one thing, and she's kept it since. Last night she stood in her own kitchen crying into that crust, deciding whether it came to you or went with her. I told her it comes to you. So it's coming out of my mouth, because it'll never get out of hers, and you'll eat the pie either way."

"Say it, then."

"The fall you were seventeen, the left brake light went out on his flatbed. You were driving it to town then, the library and back, three days a week."

"I never knew it was out."

"It was out the better part of a week, and one Sunday it went right, and nobody at your place had touched it. Your daddy'd forgot his billfold that morning and turned around at the blacktop and came back up his own drive." Pearl's voice didn't change anywhere in it. "There was a boy's good boots sticking out from under that flatbed, and church still letting out in town. He backed down his own drive and went without the billfold."