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“Loud,” he said.

“It’s the roof.”

“It’s not the roof.”

She went with his name in it and the rain in it, and he went after her still laughing, and it was the shortest and the best they’d had, and they lay there after with the tin going over them and couldn’t stop.

“I like you,” he said, into her neck.

“I know you do.”

“Since the fridge.”

“Since the fridge,” she said, and listened to the rain.

She’d come up a drive in June with a car full of boxes and a bag she’d never once emptied, and she’d left every place she’d ever lived the same way she’d come into it, with the tape still on. There was a photograph on a nail and a pair of glasses on a sill and a tin by a stove that wasn’t there yet, and three flat boxes by a door for a man to burn.

She unpacked.

EPILOGUE

“Out of my kitchen,” Helen said.

“I’m getting a beer.”

“You’re getting under my feet. There’s beer on the porch in a tub, there’s been beer on the porch in a tub since nine, your brother put it there, go stand by it.” She didn’t turn around from the stove. Behind her on the wall the chart was still up, in pencil, rained on, with PIES underlined twice and a new line under it in Helen’s hand that said THANKSGIVING, 19, and under that, in Sunny’s, 20, because Helen had forgotten Max. “And send that girl in. She’s the only one of you I can use.”

He went and got the beer. He sent the girl in.

The house was full the way it got full once a year, both families and everybody either of them had married, and it was loud from the yard, and he stood on the porch with a beer in his hand and his hat off and looked at it through the window the way he’d looked at it from a truck in July, and then he stopped doing that and went in.

Giana had the seat beside him.

She’d had it at the BBQ with a book on it and she had it now with nothing on it, because she’d gotten to the table first and put her hand flat on the chair and looked at Levi till he went around the other side. He sat down. She looked at him sideways, nine years old, and didn’t say anything for a while.

“You bought a ranch,” she said.

“I did.”

“With a hole in it.”

“It’s got a roof now. Chase put it on. You watched.”

“I watched Chase put it on and Addi hold a ladder that was on the ground.” She looked at her plate. “Dad says you’re not going anywhere.”

“Dad’s right.”

She thought about that. She had a way of thinking about things that took the whole of her face and then let it go, and he’d watched her do it in a hay field in July and across a console in November, and he watched her do it now, and waited.

“You can have the seat now,” Giana said. “Permanently.”

She picked up her fork. Sunny, on his other side, put her hand over her mouth, and he sat there with his brother’s daughter’s verdict and didn’t trust himself to say thank you, so he didn’t.

Mason stood up.

He did it between the bread and the bird, with his glass in his hand, and the table went quiet the way it did for a Wainwright standing up, and he opened his mouth, and looked at his wife, and shut it.

“Mason,” Clay said, from the far end.