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He didn’t say anything.
She put her hand on the box.
“This is the Berrys.” She said it to him, quieter, but the room had it. “Lorna and Will. Everything I’ve got of them. Will’s glasses. His last crossword, he never finished it, twenty-two down. Lorna’s recipe cards. A photograph of me at six on their porch. My file from the state. I taped it the week of the second funeral and I’ve never once had the tape off, not in Indianapolis, not here, and I’ve taken it into every place I’ve ever lived and never opened it, because opening it meant I’d stopped somewhere, and I’ve never stopped anywhere.” She looked at him. “I brought it in from the truck. I want to open it in this county. Not tonight. Not here. On a Tuesday, in a kitchen, with nobody watching. But I want you to know it’s on the bar, and it’s not going back in a closet, and I’m not going to Indiana on Tuesday, whatever you say to me next. I’m staying whether you’ll have me or not. I learned that one from you.”
Harvey put a glass down on the bar. He put another one beside it. He didn’t say anything.
Brody looked at the box a long time. Then he looked at her.
“Come here,” he said.
“No.”
He looked at her.
“Not yet.” She didn’t move. “You’ve got a thing to say. I can see it. You’ve had it since the door. Say it, and then I’ll come.”
He stood there with his hat on and the rail behind him and the county in front of him, and she watched him decide to say it in the room, and not take her outside, and not lower his voice.
“You don’t get to decide for me again.” Plain. The way he’d asked her not to at a door. “Not what I can take. Not what I can stand. Not when I go, or if I go, or whether I’m better off. You had that from me once and I’m not handing it over twice, not for love, not for kindness, not for anything. That’s the condition. Say that. And then say the other thing again, slower, because you said it fast and I want it slow.”
She looked at him.
“I don’t get to decide for you again,” she said. “Not what you can take. Not when you go. That’s yours. I’ll never take it from you again, and if I try, you’ll say so, and I’ll hear it.”
“And the other thing.”
“I love you.” Slow. “I love you, Brody. I’m sorry. I’m staying.”
“That’s three things.”
“I know how many things it is.”
“Then come here,” he said, and she went.
She went the last four feet with the county watching and got her hands in his collar, both of them, the way she’d gotten his shirt in her fists on a porch in July, and pulled his face down, and kissed him at the rail at Harvey’s in front of every soul in Soluno who’d bet on it. He got his hands on her face and kissed her back the way he had on a dance floor. His hat came off and he didn’t go after it. Somewhere Remi’s voice said, “Oh, thank God,” and the fiddle player started the next song without being asked.
Earl came down the bar. He had a slate in his hand, the one from behind his register, and he’d chalked it fresh, and he leaned it against the back bar behind Harvey’s bottles where the whole room could read it, and it had one name on it, and no odds.
SUNNY.
Harvey looked at the slate. He looked at the two of them. He poured two and pushed them across and didn’t say a word. Then he went down the bar and came back and poured two more, and didn’t say a word again, and from Harvey that was a speech.
Dean came down the rail. He’d gotten his brother’s hat off the floor, and he put it on the bar beside the box, and looked at Sunny a moment with the face he’d had in a green hallway, and said, “Lara said if you came back without her she’d have my hide. So.” He put his hand on the back of his brother’s neck, once, and went back to his beer.
“Tuesday,” Brody said, into her hair. “The box. I’ll be there.”
“I know you will. You’ve got a ranch.”
“I’ve got a ranch,” he said, and Chase, behind him, said, “He’s got a tarp. I’ve seen it. I’m doing the roof Saturdays and I’m charging him,” and the rail laughed, and Sunny stood at it with her hands still in a man’s collar and didn’t care who was looking.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
There were no curtains, because there was no roof, and the sun came in over the tarp at six-thirty and found her asleep on his jacket in front of a fireplace that hadn’t had a fire in it since the hail.
He’d built one at one in the morning out of a broken pen rail and a chair leg, in a house he’d driven her to at midnight in Chase’s truck, with Chase’s bedroll behind the seat and two of Pearl’s pies on it, because Pearl had known before either of them had. She’d gotten out in the yard in Remi’s boots and looked at a house with a tarp for a roof.
“Oh, Brody.”
