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He laughed, which helped him. “She had a list. She showed me the list. I’m on it four times, I don’t know how she works that out.”

“You’re on everybody’s.”

“That’s what Lauren said.” He looked at his boots and back up. “Look, I’ll be honest with you, I’m not much of a dancer and I’m on call at ten, and Pearl told me to come over here and be charming and I don’t know how to do that on purpose. So I’m going to say I’m glad you’re here, and if you ever need a deputy for anything at all, I’m the one they’ve got, and then I’m going to go back over there before she comes and checks.”

Sunny put her hand out. He looked at it a second, and shook it, and she held on a beat longer than she needed to so that Pearl would see her do it.

“Ryder. I’m off men. All of them, not just you. But if I wasn’t, you’d be a lot further up that list than four, and you can tell Pearl I said so.” She let go. “Go on. She’s watching.”

He went, grinning. Brody came past behind him with two beers, going somewhere, and held one out to her without stopping, the way you’d hand a beer to anybody, and she said, “I’ve got one,” flat, without looking at him, and turned back to Delia Voss’s hip, and he went on with both beers, and Pearl, who’d been watching all of it, came back across the grass with her mouth set and her eyes doing something else.

“You handled that boy.”

“He’s a nice boy.”

“He’s twenty-nine. And you were kind to him.” Pearl looked at her. “You’ve been kind to Levi and Lara and Delia Voss, who doesn’t deserve it, and Earl, who doesn’t know what it is. Five days in this county and you’ve been kind to every living soul in it.” She said it like an accusation. “Every one but one.”

“Pearl.”

“He’s over there,” Pearl said, “and he’s been looking at you since you got out of Dean’s truck, and you haven’t looked at him once, and I’m sixty-four years old and I’ve watched people not look at each other for forty of them, and honey, I know what that is.”

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s the only nothing in three counties I’d bet the diner on,” Pearl said, and went to see about the pie.

He was over there. She’d known where he was since she’d gotten out of the truck, which was the problem Pearl had put her finger on, and she’d have liked to say she hadn’t looked because she was above it, and the truth was she hadn’t looked because she didn’t trust her face.

He’d come in his own truck, hat on, blue shirt with the sleeves rolled, and he was at the Royston end talking to Chase. He’d been talking to somebody for an hour, because that was what he did. Every ten minutes or so she’d feel him find her across the floor, and she’d turn a quarter turn away and go on talking to Delia Voss about her hip. It was exhausting. It was more exhausting than the man himself would have been, and she knew that, and she did it anyway.

“You’re the housekeeper,” said a voice at her shoulder, and it was one of the tall ones from the far end, with a grin that had cost somebody money in braces. “Knox. I’m the one they don’t talk about.”

“Ainsley said you were the one with the horse that bites.”

“Ainsley’s got a big mouth for a small girl. Come meet Mason, he’s the one they talk about too much, and then I’ll tell you why Pearl won’t sell me pie.”

She met Mason, who had the prettiest smile she’d ever seen on a man and used it once and put it away, and Lauren beside him with her hand in his back pocket. She met Owen, who said four words and meant every one of them, and a woman named Olivia beside him with sunburn and a laugh and a way of looking at Owen when he wasn’t looking that Sunny recognized from about nine hundred hospitality tents and had never once had aimed at her. She met Jace, who was the best-looking of the four and knew it and didn’t do anything with it, which she liked, and who looked at her a second longer than the others and said, “You’re the one Brody’s not talking about,” and Mason said, “Jace,” and Jace said, “What? I’m just saying it out loud so nobody has to,” and went for a beer.

“The county fair,” Knox said. “In ’19. You want to hear it?”

“Everybody keeps saying that. Nobody’s told me.”

“Because nobody’s allowed to tell it but me, and I’ve been waiting for somebody new.” He leaned on a post. “I was twenty. I’d had four beers. There was an amateur bronc riding, and there was a horse in it called Sunday, which should have told me something, and I’d told a girl from Lamesa I’d ride it, and I rode it. For about a second and a half. And that horse threw me forty feet, I’ve had witnesses measure it, straight over the rail and into the Baptist choir’s bake sale table, which was a long table, and I went the full length of it on my back, and came off the end of it into the pastor’s wife.”

“You did not.”

“Ask anybody. Ask the three sisters who run the choir, because they bought me at the church auction last fall out of what they call Christian charity and what I call guilt about the table.” He grinned. “And Pearl was judging the pie that day, and her pie was on that table, and it’s not on that table anymore, and she has never once sold me a slice since, and it’s been eight years.”

She laughed. The big one. Across the floor she felt a man’s head turn, and she didn’t look.

The fireworks were at nine-thirty, off the back of a trailer in the field behind the pavilion, and everybody went out into the grass with their plates to watch them, and she went too, with brisket and beans and a roll and a plastic fork, and stood at the edge of the crowd where she could see the whole of it, the way she stood everywhere.

She was thinking about nothing. She’d have sworn to it. She’d been in the county five days and had had brisket and met a hundred people and been told a story about a bronc, and the sky was doing the thing Texas skies did, going dark all at once and enormous, and the first rocket went up and cracked open red over the field and three hundred people said “oh,” and for a second she was a woman at a fireworks show with a plate, and nothing else.

A hand came down on her shoulder from behind.

Friendly. Heavy. A man’s hand, warm through the shirt, the way a hand lands on a shoulder in a crowd at a fireworks show, and a voice behind it said, “Now you’d be the —”

She was gone before he’d finished the sentence. Not a step. A lurch, away from the hand and sideways. The plate went out of her hands and hit the grass upside down. The fork went somewhere. She was three feet from where she’d been standing with her heart slamming and her hands up before she’d known she was going to move, and the man behind her, who was fifty and wide and had a Fire Department cap on and had never in his life meant anybody any harm, stood there with his hand still in the air and his mouth open.