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"It's been sweet all her life."

"Everything's sweet all your life and then it isn't."

"You didn't look at the pages."

"I don't need the pages to know a fifty-year-old well." Clay laid his hand on it and left it there. "That's what a man from the state is going to hear from every operator in this basin, and he's going to hear it because it's true and because it's cheap, and by the time anybody knows different that woman's water is somebody else's problem and my name's been in a file for two years."

"Then take it out on me."

"I intend to."

Owen waited. His father was quick and he never hurried, and Owen had watched him take three men apart at this table without raising his voice.

"You had a question about my water," Clay said.

"I did."

"You've sat at this table every Sunday of your life. You could have set that folder down on it any night of any week and I would have looked at it, and if you were right I'd have shut the west line down myself before I'd have let it come out of Austin. You went to the state first. My own son, and a stranger with a telephone knew before I did."

Owen had nothing. It was true, and it was the one piece of the whole business he hadn't been able to work out an answer to on the drive over, and he'd had nine miles to do it in.

Nothing had ever come ahead of this table in his life. Not a woman, not a wanting, not his own heart, and he'd been proud of that at twenty and he'd been proud of it at twenty-nine. He'd finally found the thing that came ahead of it, and instead of setting it down on the wood he'd carried it to Midland and handed it to a stranger.

"I couldn't be talked out of it," he said. "Not by you. I'd have sat down at that table and you'd have said old casing and been reasonable at me for an hour, and I'd have gone home and thought about it and been six months getting back to it. So I filed it first."

"Well," Clay said. "That's honest."

"It's not taking it back, either. I'm not taking it back."

"No," Clay said. "You wouldn't."

"There's one more thing and then I'm done talking."

"Go on."

"Jett gave me those gauges because I drove out to his cabin at nine o'clock at night and asked him, and there's not a man in either house has asked that boy one question about that mine in two years." Owen kept his voice where it had been the whole time. "If it costs somebody, it costs me. There's no name on that file but mine. You want to be sore at a Royston over your own gauges, I'm sitting at your table."

His father looked at him a while.

"You've got a lot to say tonight."

"I'm behind."

His mother turned around then and put a cup in front of each of them and sat down at the end of the table with none for herself. She'd taken that chair for thirty years.

Clay slid the letter out from under his glasses and turned it around with two fingers so it faced Owen.

"Since you've come to be honest," he said. "That's what was on my table before your water was."

Greene's letterhead. Four lines of it and a signature.

"Burchall's got a standing interest in the Bateman place," Clay said. "He's had one since March. Greene's obliged to tell me because I asked to be told. She's under contract to a man out of Big Spring who wants it for grass, and if that falls through, and half of them fall through, that letter says whose name is next."

"It won't fall through."

"Everything falls through." His father said it without any pleasure. "Four sections and a set of pipe pens and a bad well. He'll pay for it because of what's under it, and he'll dry it up inside ten years and sell the grass to somebody's grandson, and there's not a thing you or I can do about that except one of us own it first."

"That's her mama's kitchen."