Page 47

“Yeah.”

“Call the house. When you get there. Lara worries.”

“Does she.”

“She does,” she said, to the pan, and turned the faucet off, and went to get the kids up.

Clay had the Odessa file on his desk Tuesday morning with a rubber band around it, and he pushed it across without getting up.

“Two weeks.”

“That’s what it says.”

“They’re wearing you out, son. You know that.” Clay looked at him over the top of his glasses. “Houston’s had you on my line three months and you’ve given them nothing they can use, and now they’ve found a field ninety miles off with a problem in it and they’ll keep finding them till you quit. That’s what this is.”

“They’ve been trying since April.”

“And you’re still here.”

“Still here.” Brody picked up the file. “Jace can pull the readings while I’m gone. Same day, same hand, I’ve shown him. If the numbers move, I want to know the day they move.”

“The numbers won’t move.”

“Then it’ll be a quiet two weeks,” Brody said, and Clay looked at him a while longer, and took his glasses off, and said, “How’s the housekeeper?” and Brody said, “She’s the housekeeper,” and Clay said, “Uh huh,” the way the whole county said it, and let him go.

She came at eleven, and shut the door, and stood against it.

He was on the bed with the lamp on. He’d been there an hour, not reading, and he looked at her and she looked at him, and neither of them said anything smart, and he understood before she’d crossed the room that it wasn’t going to be like the other nights.

She came and stood between his knees. She put her hands on his face. Both of them, flat, the way she’d put one on his chest after the calving, and she looked at him with the lamp on the side of her face and didn’t say a word, and he sat there and let her, and it went on long enough that he’d have said something on any other night and didn’t.

Then she kissed him, slow, slower than the porch, slower than the rock. Her hands stayed on his face the whole time and her mouth was soft on his and it wasn’t going anywhere, and he got his hands on her hips and just held them there, and let her.

She got his shirt off. She did it slowly, one button at a time, looking at each one, and pushed it off his shoulders and put her hands on him, and he watched her look at her own hands on his chest with a face he’d never seen on her. Not the poker face. Not the laughing one. The one from the deep end, before she’d said shut up.

“Lamp,” he said.

“Leave it.”

Nobody said anything, for a long time.

“Brody.”

“I’m here.”

“I know,” she said into his neck. “That’s the trouble.”

She watched him in the lamplight and didn’t make one joke about Earl, and then she pulled him over her, and he went into her the way he’d learned she wanted, slow, all the way, and stopped.

He didn’t mean to stop. He’d stopped the first night because something had gone through him he hadn’t been ready for, and she’d said put it away, and he had, mostly, for six weeks. He stopped now because she’d opened her eyes.

She was looking at him. Six inches. The lamp on her face and his weight on his arms and all of him in her, and she wasn’t looking away and she wasn’t saying put it away, and he understood that she’d come down the hall tonight for this, for exactly this, the thing she’d been frightened of in August, and that she’d decided somewhere between the kitchen and the door that she was going to look at it.

So he let her. He stayed still and let her look, and looked back, and didn’t talk, and didn’t smile, and it was the hardest thing he’d ever done with his body, to hold there inside her and not move and not say one word and let a woman see the whole of him with the lamp on. Her hands came up. She put them on his face again, the way she had at the door, and her thumbs went along his cheekbones, and she looked at him the way she’d looked at her own hands on his chest, and he felt his arms start to shake with holding, and didn’t move.

“There,” she said. Very quiet. “That.”

“Yeah.”