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“You coming in?”

“In a minute.”

“It’s been forty.” Chase leaned on the door. He didn’t say anything about the table, or the mudroom, which he’d have heard about from Dean by now, because Chase never said anything about anything. “Faucet holding?”

“So far.”

“Good.” He hit the roof of the cab once with his hand and went back across the yard, and Brody watched the flashlight not come on the whole way.

He’d fixed a faucet. A man who’s fixed a faucet has a reason to be in a house the next morning, to see if it held. He sat with that for twenty minutes, in the dark, looking at a kitchen window with a light on in it and nobody at it, and knew it was horseshit, and sat there anyway.

At ten the kitchen light went off. He watched her window come on upstairs, second on the left, and stay on a while, and go off.

He sat in the truck outside his father’s house a long time after that, with the engine off and his hand on the key, and he told himself the whole time that it was about the faucet.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Soluno Volunteer Fire Department held its Fourth of July dance on the third, because the Fourth was a Sunday and the Baptists had been clear about that since 1971, and Sunny found this out from Lara at four in the afternoon while being told she was going.

“I’m the housekeeper.”

“You keep saying that like it’s a note from your mother.” Lara was on the bed in Sunny’s room with her feet up on the footboard and a hand on the front of her, going through Sunny’s duffel without asking, which she’d decided sometime on Tuesday she was allowed to do. “Helen went every year. Helen judged the pie. You’re going, you’re wearing this, and you’re going to eat brisket off a paper plate and let Pearl walk you around like a heifer, and then you’re going to come home and tell me everything, because I’ll be on a chair with my ankles up by nine and I’ll miss all of it.”

“This is a work shirt.”

“It’s a good shirt. Roll the sleeves.” Lara held it up. “And you can put your jeans on and your boots on and nobody in that pavilion is going to be dressed any better than you, I promise, except Jett, who dresses for a dance like he’s the one getting married. Go shower. Dean’s driving. Brody’s taking his own truck, so you don’t have to sit next to him, before you ask.”

“I wasn’t going to ask.”

“No,” Lara said, “you were going to figure out how to not sit next to him and then not ask,” and threw the shirt at her.

The rodeo pavilion was a tin roof on posts at the edge of town with a concrete floor under it and a flatbed truck pulled up at one end for the band, and by seven o’clock there were three hundred people under it and around it and Sunny had been introduced to a hundred of them and had remembered forty, which was her average in a press room and she was pleased with it.

Pearl had her inside two minutes of the Royston trucks pulling in. She came across the grass with a plate in each hand and took Sunny by the elbow without putting either plate down, which Sunny would think about later, and walked her.

“Delia you know. Elena you know, that’s a dress, we don’t see it often. Earl’s doing the raffle, it’s a side of beef, buy two, he’ll tell you it’s for the fire truck and it is. That’s Harvey. He’s got the bar. That’s a pressed shirt on him and I have never in my life seen one on him before, and if you look at my sister at the pie table right now you’ll see her not looking at him, and that’s all I’m going to say about that.”

“Pearl —”

“Honey, I’ve got two plates and one night. Keep walking.” She turned her by the elbow. “Now. That’s Clay.”

Sunny looked.

Two old men at opposite ends of a tin roof. She’d gotten the shape of it at the ranch, the fence and the gate and the truck with the name on the door, but she hadn’t seen it laid out on a floor before. John Royston at one end with his hat on and a chair he wasn’t sitting in. At the far end a man of about the same age, better dressed, with a wife beside him who’d clearly cost money. A hundred and fifty feet of concrete between them that neither one had crossed in thirty years, Pearl said, and wouldn’t tonight. And in between, all over that concrete, their children, who’d never once paid the fence any mind: Chase and a tall cousin named Knox at the beer trough with their heads together; Ainsley with the horses on her shirt braiding Giana’s hair on a hay bale; Mason and Lauren; Jett telling something to a cousin who looked like a taller, quieter Jett; and Brody, who’d be Brody anywhere, in the middle of all of them with his hat pushed back, making the whole lot of them laugh. Two men not speaking, and ten of their children who’d been best friends since they could walk, and the county had been watching it for thirty years and had stopped finding it strange.

“Brothers,” Pearl said. “They don’t. Thirty years. The kids do, thank God, or this county would’ve split down the middle. Don’t ask either of them about it, and don’t ask me, I’ll tell you and it’ll take an hour.” She squeezed the elbow. “Now. Ryder.”

“Pearl.”

“He’s right there, honey, and he’s washed, and I’m not asking you to marry him tonight.”

Deputy Ryder Davis was twenty-nine and scrubbed to the ears and had a haircut that had been done that afternoon, and he stood in front of Sunny with a beer in one hand and his other hand not knowing what to do, and she looked at him and liked him at once.

“Deputy.”

“Ma’am. Ryder. Pearl said —”

“I know what Pearl said.”