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"I’m not doing math."

"You’re always doing math." She knocked her bottle against his and watched her brother across the yard, and her voice went quieter without going quiet. "He’s really back. I keep counting him. Is that strange?"

"No," Owen said, and meant it.

"Daddy’s counted him all afternoon. Off the porch, over that coffee, like somebody might short him." She drank. "Don’t tell either of them I said that."

"Wouldn’t know how to bring it up."

"That’s what I like about you." And the two of them stood at the fence and counted him together.

The truck came up the drive at four.

It came slow, and everybody who belonged in this yard drove that drive like they’d been born on it, and it was clean, clean in February in a county where nothing stayed clean past the first cattle guard. It parked at the end of the row, and a man got out alone, sixty-some, silver-haired, in a jacket that had never been near work, carrying a bottle with wax on the neck, and the yard didn’t go silent, it just went down a notch.

"Who’s that?" Remi said.

"Don’t know the face," Owen said. "Know the kind."

The man came up the drive smiling like he’d been invited, and by the time he reached the edge of the party the name had run through the yard ahead of him, low, mouth to mouth.

Burchall.

Not a rep in a clean truck. Not one of the smiling men with the folder. Burchall himself, the name off the letterhead, walking into John Royston’s yard with a bottle in his hand and a hundred people watching.

"Beautiful afternoon," he said, to the nearest knot of guests, warm as a stove. "Don’t let me interrupt a thing. I was passing through and I couldn’t ride by. When your best man in the field comes home, you pay your respects." He held up the bottle, presented it to the general air. "Where’s our boy?"

Our boy went through Owen like ice water.

Brody was already coming, fast, hands loose, the show up at full and something underneath it that hadn’t been there all day, and behind him, off the porch, without hurrying, came John.

Dean was closer. He’d been at the pit not twenty feet off, and he took one step and stopped, and Owen watched him stop. The ranch was Dean’s now, deeded and signed, the whole county knew it, John had handed it over after the stroke, and Dean stood on his own ground with the tongs in his hand and let his father go past him to defend it.

John got there first.

He stopped an arm’s length from Burchall, and he didn’t take the bottle, and he didn’t put his hand out, and the yard quit pretending not to watch. John Royston was sixty-seven years old. He’d buried a wife on this place and turned this man’s paper away from his door for two years running, and he stood in his own yard in front of his own guests and looked at Burchall the way he’d look at something the flood left on his grass.

"You’re on my land," John said.

"John." Burchall said it like they were old friends, which was its own kind of insult. "I won’t stay. I wanted to welcome Brody home and put a bottle in the house. That’s the whole of it."

"His home," John said, "is the house behind me. It’s got nothing of yours in it, and it’s not going to."

"Dad," Brody said, quiet, arriving.

"I’m talking to your employer." John didn’t raise his voice. He’d never needed to, that Owen had heard, and he didn’t need to now, and that was somehow the loudest part. "You’ve had men on my county road for two years, sir. You’ve had paper in my mailbox and paper in my brother’s and paper at every place on this road with water under it, and now there’s a sign at the Bateman gate, and here you stand in my yard on a Sunday. So we’ll skip the bottle. Whatever it is you’re pricing while you smile at my guests, it’s not for sale, and neither is the man you flew home."

The pit crackled. Somewhere behind Owen a paper plate blew off a table and nobody moved to catch it.

"Well," Burchall said, and the warmth stayed on his mouth and left the rest of his face. Owen watched it go and thought: there. That’s the real one. "It’s a fine thing, a family that knows its own mind. Brody. Monday, Midland, eight o’clock." He set the bottle down on the nearest table, unhurried, and left it there like a card. "Enjoy the afternoon. It really is a beautiful piece of country out here."

He looked at it while he said it. All of it, the long look, east across the yard and the grass toward the road, toward the county, toward every gate on it. Then he walked back down the drive, got in the clean truck, and was gone the slow way he’d come.

Brody moved the bottle off the table, carried it to his rental, put it in the bed, out of the party, and came back with the show running again, a joke already going for the nearest cluster of church ladies. The yard let itself be joked. The talk came back up. John went and stood at the pit with his sons and didn’t say anything for a long time. Dean handed him the tongs.

Remi had gone still at Owen’s elbow. "He knew about the Bateman sign," she said. "It went up Thursday."

"He knew everybody’s water," Owen said.