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"Go over and see Owen," she said then. "April’s not that far off, and he’s got no reason to be planning on us leasing Judge. He ought to hear it from us before he hears it at the feed store." A pause, deliberate as everything Edna did. "And whatever else you’ve got to tell him, you can tell him at the same time and save the diesel."

Olivia hung the dishrag on the tap.

"There’s nothing else to tell him."

"Mm," said her mother, into her coffee, and Olivia went out to the truck with her coat only half on, because the kitchen had gotten too small to finish dressing in.

It was nine miles to Owen’s, west down the county road with the heater roaring and doing nothing, under a sky the color of dishwater that had been promising weather for three days and not delivering it.

She knew the road the way she knew the alphabet cards over her whiteboard. Past the Simmons mailboxes. Past the low spot that flooded twice a year and got graded once. Past the corner of Royston grass where his fence ran along the road, four sections of it between his gate and her mother’s line, every post plumb, because Owen Royston didn’t own a leaning thing in this world.

Thirteen years. She’d done the arithmetic so many times it had stopped being arithmetic and become a fact about her, like her height. Thirteen years since she was seventeen and sat across a library table from him three days a week, and something had been right there, close enough to touch, and then it wasn’t, and nobody ever said why. Since then he’d been at the edge of every year she’d had. Church, weddings, brandings, the feed store, sale barns.

And every April, his bull. Judge came over on a trailer the first week of April the way he’d come for eleven years, on a handshake Owen had made himself the spring after the funeral. He unloaded him and checked the pens himself and never took a dime beyond the first year’s number. And every January, right about now, a breeding catalog showed up on her mother’s kitchen table with the good bulls marked in pencil and her name on the envelope in his own hand. Not the ranch’s stamp. His hand.

A man didn’t do that for nothing. Thirteen years of arguing with herself and she’d never argued her way past it. He felt something. She’d have bet the place on it, if it were hers to bet, and this morning it wasn’t even anybody’s to bet. Listed, near enough. Gone by June. Whatever he felt, he’d had thirteen years of chances to put a name on it, and he’d spent them mailing catalogs.

She turned in at his gate, and her stomach did the thing it did, and she was thirty years old and disgusted with it.

His pens sat east of the house, out of the wind, and he was in them.

She saw him before he saw her, a big man in a canvas coat moving down the trough line with an axe, breaking ice, unhurried, his breath and the cattle’s breath standing in the air all down the pen like the whole operation was steaming. Judge stood in the near pen by himself, black and enormous and offended by the weather, and when she got out of the truck the bull swung his head around, looked at her, and came over to the rail like she owed him something.

"Hey, old man." She pulled her glove off and let him breathe on her palm. "It’s just me."

Owen had straightened up at the sound of her truck. Now he came down the line, axe in one hand, and she watched him take her in and go through the list a man went through out here when somebody drove up unannounced on a cold morning. Wreck. Fire. Somebody in a ditch.

"Liv." He said it careful. "Everything all right? Your mama⁠—"

"Mama’s fine. Everybody’s fine. Nothing’s on fire." She put her glove back on. "I needed to tell you something and it didn’t feel like a phone call."

He set the axe on the rail and waited. He’d always known how to wait. It was one of the things about him she’d never decided whether she loved or wanted to throw something at, the way he could stand in a cold pen with his whole attention on you and no hurry anywhere in him, like the morning had been built with time in it for whatever you’d come to say.

Judge shoved his head at her arm.

"He remembers you," Owen said.

"He remembers I bring cubes."

"Same thing, to a bull."

"That’s the most romantic thing anybody’s said to me all year," Olivia said, "and it’s about feed," and she scratched the flat of the bull’s skull and made herself quit stalling. "Mama’s selling the place. She told me this morning. It’ll be listed inside the month, she wants it closed by June, and she’s moving to Midland to be near her sister and the doctors." She heard her own voice, level, like she was reading a lunch menu to her class. "So I came to tell you not to plan on April. Don’t bring him over. There won’t be anything to bring him to."

Owen didn’t say anything.

She’d seen him take news before. She’d stood next to him at a sale barn when a man told him a price that should’ve buckled him, and watched him nod like it was weather. This wasn’t that. This went into him and stopped everything for a second, the way a post goes into a hole, and then he looked away from her, down the pens, at forty head of his good heifers breathing steam, and his jaw moved once.

"June," he said.

"June."

"June’s a long way off," Owen said.

And she’d spend tonight the way she’d spent thirteen years of nights, holding a four-word sentence up to the light to see if there was anything in it. A lot can happen, he might’ve meant. Or he meant the plain words and nothing else. She was so tired of it.

"It’s sixteen weeks," she said. "It’ll go like nothing."

"Who’s handling the sale?"