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“I said after dark. It’s not dark enough yet.”

Remi had gone to the jukebox with a fistful of quarters during the break, and a man off one of the drilling crews, big, red-faced, three hours into his night, had gone with her without being asked. He had one arm on the machine over her head, the other doing the pointing. Remi was punching in her own songs and ignoring him hard, and it wasn’t working.

“I’ve got a truck out there,” the man was saying. “Lifted. You’d like it.”

“Everybody in this bar’s got a truck,” Remi said. “Go sit in yours.”

“Come sit in it with me.”

“I’m picking songs.”

“Pick one for me.”

Owen set his cue against the wall.

“Where’s he going?” Lauren said.

“Jukebox,” Mason said. “Let him.”

Owen walked over and stood at the man’s elbow until the man turned around, and said, “She’s picking. You’re done,” in the voice he used on a bull that had decided about a gate, and took the man by the arm above the elbow, not hard, and walked him back to his stool and set him on it. “I was talking to her,” the man said.

“You’re done talking.”

The man looked at Owen’s face and stayed on his stool. Harvey never looked up.

“I had it,” Remi said, when he came back past her.

“I know it.”

“I did.”

“I know it, Rem. Play your song.”

She played it. It was one of the four. Knox groaned from the booth, Jett said “Good song,” and Owen picked his cue back up and finished the rack. Chase, who’d waited on him, sank the eight without a word.

The band came back from its break and started into something slow enough to be a waltz if you were generous. The kid on the bass found the key about four bars in. Jett was already out of the booth. Jett two-stepped anybody, always had, girls, aunts, church ladies, anybody standing still long enough. He had Lauren by the hand before Mason finished saying “Go on.”

“Quick quick, slow, slow,” Jett said, backing her onto the floor. “You’ve got the quicks. Everybody’s got the quicks. Nobody trusts the slows.”

“I’ve got it.”

“You’ve got the quicks.”

Owen went to the bar for another bottle he didn’t need, and Harvey looked at the one in his hand.

“You’ve got one,” Harvey said.

“It’s warm.”

“Warm’s what you get for holding it,” Harvey said, and pulled him a cold one anyway, and Owen was standing there with it when Brody stood up.

He stood up easy, the way he did everything, stepped down the booth past Ainsley, held his hand out to Olivia, palm up, and said something Owen couldn’t hear over the band. She looked at the hand. She looked at Brody, and laughed, one short real laugh, and put her hand in it and slid out of the booth.

Brody danced well. He always had. He’d learned it from Kelly-Anne on the porch when the rest of them were still stepping on their sisters, and he took Olivia out onto the floor and turned her once and brought her in, and his hand went to the small of her back, low and easy and sure of itself, and hers went to his shoulder, and the two of them went around the floor like they’d done it last week, and Brody leaned down and said something at her ear and she laughed again, her whole face, the way she laughed at Lauren and never at him, and Owen stood at the bar with a longneck on the wood in front of him and turned it a quarter turn, and a quarter turn, and a quarter turn, and did not look anywhere else, because there was nowhere else in the building.

Brody looked over her shoulder once, on the turn by the stage, not long and not unfriendly, a man checking a thing he already knew the answer to, and went back to the dance.

Owen wanted to hit something. He knew what, standing there. He knew he wouldn’t, and he knew he wasn’t going to say the name of it even inside his own head, and he turned the bottle a quarter turn on the wood and watched his cousin’s hand on her back.