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“Same time. Bring the close ones in Monday night, save us a morning.”

“I know which ones are close.”

“I know you do.”

She drove. Tomorrow was Saturday, and everybody under thirty-five would be at Harvey’s, and so would she.

Edna’s supper was pot roast again. She asked for her count, got it, looked from her daughter to him and back over the top of her glass, and let it lie. Olivia washed and Owen dried with a foot of air between their elbows, and at the door Edna said, “Lauren’s coming for her at eight. You’ll want to go on home and change that shirt.”

“I wasn’t planning on Harvey’s.”

“You weren’t planning on supper either, the first Saturday,” Edna said. “Go change your shirt.”

He went home and changed the shirt, and Harvey’s on a Saturday was one low room with the whole under-thirty-five crowd in the back corner and a band on the little stage, three old boys and a kid on a bass, playing the same twelve songs they’d played since Owen was old enough to lie about his age. They weren’t good. Nobody had ever needed them to be. The jukebox carried the breaks, Harvey stood behind the taps drying glasses, and the back booth with the pool table beside it had been the cousins’ camp for ten years.

“He came,” Knox said, when Owen got to the booth. “Somebody write down the date.”

“I come every Saturday.”

“More like every third Saturday and you stand at the bar like you’re waiting on a bus.”

“Was it a calf?” Remi said. She was on the table, not at it, boots on the seat, a bottle in each hand, neither one hers. “It’s all over your face. Tell me it was a calf and it lived.”

“Backwards heifer. Lived.”

“See?” She held a bottle up at the whole table. “He’s got a face for it. Every one of you’s got a face for it and you think nobody can read it. Brody, look at his face.”

“I’m looking,” Brody said, from the end of the booth, with his back to the wall and his boots crossed under the table and a beer he’d barely started. “Big calf?”

“Big enough.”

“Bateman heifer?”

“They’re all Bateman cattle right now,” Owen said.

“How many left to calve?” Mason said.

“Forty-some. We sorted the ones that didn’t breed on Thursday. They’ll go in the first load.”

“You’ll have that herd papered before the sign’s got a buyer.”

“That’s the idea.” He looked at the bar. “Harvey. Round for the corner.”

Harvey set nine longnecks up on the bar without looking at anybody, and one more off to the side with the cap off, and said, “Twenty-five,” to the glass in his hand. Owen paid it, carried the nine back four in each hand and one in his teeth, and Jett took that one, because Jett took everything.

Mason and Lauren had the far side, Lauren against the wall with her feet up in Mason’s lap, Ainsley beside them with her level look, and beside Ainsley, with her back to the room, Olivia. She’d looked up when he came in. He’d seen her do it, seen her look down again, and he went back for the bottle Harvey had left him and took it to the pool table and racked for Chase.

“Here’s what I don’t understand,” Jett said. “You were there. Remi was there. There’s two of you and one horseshoe.”

“I rang it,” Knox said. “It rang like a bell. She heard it.”

“I heard something,” Remi said. “Could’ve been anything. Could’ve been the truck settling.”

“You were looking right at it.”

“I’d been paid, Knox. I don’t look at things I’ve been paid not to look at. I’ve got ethics.”

“One brownie.”