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“I know what you said.”

“Then why?”

“Because you’d have gone.” She said it fast. “Not away. To him. You’d have gotten up off that bed and put your jeans on and driven to Indianapolis and stood in front of a man who’s never once broken a law, and you’d have been the one in the cell by morning, and I know what it does to a house when a man goes and does the thing. The woman in Ohio had a brother. He went. He’s the one with a record now, and the man with the flowers doesn’t have one.” She stopped. “And because if I’d said it, it would’ve been in the room. With us. Every night after. And I had six weeks left on a piece of paper and I didn’t want six weeks of a man looking at me as if I was a thing that had to be minded. I wanted six weeks of a man looking at me the way you did with the lamp on. So I lied to you in the only voice you’d have believed and I’d do it again, and I’m sorry, and I’m not sorry, and you can have whichever of those you want.”

He sat there.

“Both,” he said.

“You can’t have both.”

“I’ll have both. I’m angry, and I’ll be angry a while, because you looked at me with the lamp on and lied, and I didn’t know that voice could do that.” He looked at her then. “And I’d have gone. You’re right. I’d have been in Indianapolis by breakfast. So you read me right, and you lied right, and I’ve got to sit here and be angry about a thing you were right about, and I don’t know how a man does that.”

“You sit on a step,” she said. “That’s how. You’re doing it.”

He looked at the yard a while. Then he put his hand out, palm up, on the step between them, in daylight, where the county road could see it, and left it there.

She looked at it a long time.

“That’s not kind,” she said. “Remi said no kind.”

“It’s not kind. It’s a hand. Take it or don’t.”

She took it. She put her hand in his on a porch step at nine-thirty in the morning with a windmill going. He closed his fingers. He pulled, and she came across the foot of daylight and put her face in his neck, and he got his arm around her and held her against him where anybody could see, and didn’t care who did.

“Then he’ll find out where you live,” he said, into her hair.

“He knows where I live. He asked at Pearl’s.”

“He knows the county. He doesn’t know the house. And Pearl’s never heard of you, and Harvey won’t be open, and Earl’s got a phone, and there’s five men in this house and a deputy who’d like something to do.” He held on. “He’ll find out where you live, Sunny. Let him. This is where you live.”

She didn’t say anything. She held on to his shirt with both hands and breathed against his neck. A truck went by on the road, slowed down, went on. Neither of them looked up.

“Give me the phone,” he said.

“No.”

“Sunny.”

“No. Give me yours.” She held her hand out. “Ryder Davis. You’ve got his number, you were at school with him. Give it here.”

“I’ll call him.”

“No. It’s not your name he asked for.” She took the phone out of his hand and found the number and stood up off the step, and he sat there and looked up at her with the sun behind her and her hair coming down and her thumb on the screen, and she said, “Ryder. It’s Sunny Tyler. From the Fourth, you asked me to dance and I said I’d think about it. I’m still thinking. Listen, there’s a man in a rental at the motel who asked for me at Pearl’s this morning by name and I want to tell you who he is before somebody else does, so you’ve got it from me and not from Pearl. Have you got a pen.”

She walked the length of the porch with it. She gave him the name, the company, the plate Tate had already run, the woman in Ohio and the order she’d gotten, the dates, all of it, in the fast voice, standing up. When she’d done she said, “No. He hasn’t. He won’t. That’s the point of him,” and listened, and said, “Then I’d be grateful.” She hung up. She put the phone back in Brody’s hand and sat down.

“He’s coming out this afternoon to write it all up. He’ll call the woman in Ohio himself. He says he’s never had a real thing to do and he wants to do this one right.” She looked at the yard. “He also asked if I was still thinking about the dance.”

“And he asked how the man found me.” She looked at the yard. “The paper. The barbecue page ran Wednesday and it’s on their website, and there I am in the middle of your father’s dance floor with your hand on my back, and under it, Sunny Tyler. T-Y-L-E-R. Because I spelled it for a boy with a notebook.”

“You spelled it for him?”

“I spelled it for him. First stranger I’ve given my name to since April, and I stood there and felt good about it.”

“What’d you say?”

“I said I was taken.”