Page 86

Clay looked up.

"You've been calling it country since January," Owen said. "It's a kitchen with a seventy-one-year-old woman in it and a school teacher packing it into boxes, and the reason it's going is there's no water in the tank, and the reason there's no water in the tank is on that page you didn't read."

"You watch yourself."

"I've watched myself thirteen years. I'm about done with it."

"You did all this for a girl?"

"I did it because it's true."

"This spring those aren't two different things," Clay said, "and you know it, and the state's going to know it inside a month."

"That's enough."

His mother said it quietly, and both of them quit, because she had said it perhaps four times in Owen's life and it had worked every one of them. Stephanie Royston sat at the end of her table with her hands folded and looked at her third son.

"It's a good folder," she said. "Your daddy will read it tonight after you've gone, because he reads everything, and he'll be up at two with it and I'll hear him." Clay didn't argue with that. "So we can leave the water alone for a minute and say the other part out loud."

"Mother."

"She's not going to take you back over a speech, son."

"It's not for getting her back."

His mother looked at him a while longer and didn't say anything else.

He drove out past the works for no reason he'd have given anybody, with the lights running away west along the seam, and turned north and came at his own place from the top.

He stopped at the head of his drive with the engine going and the empty pens down the hill in front of him.

He said her name out loud in the cab, once, to see how it came out.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

By Monday the front room was empty enough to hear yourself in it.

The rug had gone to the church sale. The curtains came down Thursday. What was left stood by the door in boxes with MIDLAND across the lids in her own hand, and the house gave every sound back bigger, so a chair leg on bare boards went off like a shot.

Edna was doing the hall closet sitting down. She'd quit pretending about that a week ago.

"Coats."

"It's June, Mama."

"It'll be January somewhere." She held one up without looking at it. "Church sale."

"That's Daddy's."

"I know whose it is." She put it on the church pile and reached for the next one. "Midland."

"You've got four coats in that pile and you'll wear one."

"I'll wear the brown one."

"You're taking the brown one and not that one."

"The brown one fits me."