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"And what do you get?" Olivia said.

"The bull’s dam line came off this place. Half my program’s papers run through your daddy’s cows." It was true, and he’d chosen it on the drive for being true, and for what it covered. "I’d as soon they didn’t scatter to four states unrecorded."

"So it’s business."

"It’s cattle."

"It’s my mother’s cattle," she said, "and I can’t pay you, and you know I can’t pay you, and you’re standing in my yard with your trailer already loaded like the yes is a formality, and I have spent my whole life not owing anybody one single thing, Owen Royston, and you are asking me to owe you sixteen weeks."

"You won’t owe me."

"That’s not how owing works. You don’t get to decide what I owe."

"All right," Owen said. "Then owe me. Pay it off however you like, whenever you like, or don’t. I’ll haul cattle either way."

"You’re impossible to fight with. Has anybody ever told you that? You just stand there agreeing in different words."

"I’m not asking for a fight."

"Then what are you asking?"

He looked at her, in the cold, in her daddy’s falling-down sorting pen, with the work standing all around them the way it was going to stand between them until June, and there it was again, the whole reason, right there in his chest, and he put it down the way he’d put it down in the pens, at the fire, at the library table, every year of his adult life.

"Tuesday," he said. "After four. I’ll bring the trailer."

She looked at him so long he heard the windmill turn over behind the barn. Somewhere under the tank the pump kicked on, and ran, and went on running a beat past right, and he marked it again the way he’d marked it across the dark, and said nothing about that either.

The screen door went. Edna came out onto the porch with her cane and her town coat on, bound for somewhere, and took in the yard in one pass, the trailer, the panels, the two of them squared off across a chained gate.

"Take the man’s chute, Olivia," she said, and came down the steps one at a time. At the bottom she stopped and looked at Owen the way she’d look at a bid on the place, all the way through. "And you’ll take diesel money or you’ll take Saturday supper. Pick one, right now, in front of me."

"Supper."

"Mm," said Edna, in the exact tone her daughter pretended not to have inherited, and got in the truck to wait.

Olivia shut her eyes. When she opened them the fight had gone somewhere he couldn’t see, and what was left was so tired and so level it was worse than the fight.

"Tuesday," she said. "After four."

The first batch came through his alley on Tuesday with the light already going, twenty head of Mick Bateman’s cows pouring off the trailer into pens they’d never stood in, bawling at the strangeness, and by the time the first one walked into the chute it was like the place had been built waiting on them.

He hadn’t known what it would be, working beside her. He’d worked beside her before, an afternoon here and there across the years, brandings, hauling, the odd April, always with other people around, the county between them like a fence you could trust. This was the two of them, twenty cows, and nobody, and it took about four cows to find out what it would be, and what it would be was easy, and the easy was terrible.

She knew cattle. She’d grown up on them and it hadn’t gone anywhere, it had just been buried under a schoolyear for eight years, and it came back up in her hands inside the hour. She ran the back gate off his nod. Then she ran it before the nod.

"Three in the alley," she called over the bawling, flat and clear. "Watch the roan. She goes left."

The roan went left. He caught her.

"No teeth left on her," he said, with his thumb in the old cow’s jaw. "She’s done. Cull lot."

"That’s Mabel."

He looked back down the chute at her. "You’ve got names on a hundred and sixty head?"

"Daddy named the good ones." She swung the back gate and brought the next cow up. "I kept the habit. Mabel raised eleven calves and never lost one, so you can write cull on your clipboard, but she goes in the good lot, and you’ll find a way to make the papers agree with me."

He wrote Mabel in the margin and made the papers agree with her.