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Her own phone went in her back pocket. She got it out with her bad hand, read it, and put it face down on the table next to his.

“Lauren,” she said.

“What’d she say?”

“She said, ‘Lamesa?’ With a question mark.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s Lauren. That’s a whole paragraph.”

He looked at the two phones lying next to each other on the table, and something went across his face, there and gone. It wasn’t for her, and she couldn’t read it.

“It’s home,” Brody said, and lifted two fingers at Kenzie for the check.

Kenzie brought it. He paid it. He tipped the girl the way a man tips when he wants a story told kindly, and Kenzie said, “Night, Miss Bateman,” in the voice of somebody’s big sister, and “Night, Brody,” in another voice altogether, and the whole room watched him take his coat off her chair and walk her out the door with his hand where it had been going in.

He drove her home with the radio low and didn’t talk, and she was grateful for it. At her gate he slowed for the cattle guard, and she saw the sign in his headlights, the kitchen light on past it, the pump running.

He got out. She said he didn’t have to. He said he knew that, walked her across the yard in the yard light with his hands in his coat pockets, stopped at the bottom of the porch steps a good three feet off her, and didn’t come up.

“You did fine,” he said.

“I laughed twice.”

“You laughed twice. I’d have taken one.” He looked at her a minute with the light full on his face and let it be. “Liv. Whatever he does with this, you’re not the one who’s going to look bad. Not to me. I want you to know somebody in this thinks that. This is the only thing that’ll stir the truth out of him.”

“Go home, Brody.”

“Yes ma’am. Tell your mama I’ll be back for the rest of that pie.”

He went. She stood on the bottom step and watched his taillights find the road and turn west, and then she stood in the yard in the cold with the pump chugging at the corner of the barn and the pairs dark shapes in the trap, and she let herself have it, all of it, plain.

The only time Owen had ever kissed her was when it burned out of him from jealousy at Harvey’s. And just now she’d sat in a full room and let a good man put his hand on her back for show, and she hoped it’d work again. Pearl’s phone was ringing right now in town, and by the time Owen drove to town for his coffee tomorrow it would be waiting for him on the counter with the cream, and she could feel it working the way she could feel weather coming, and she was ashamed of it all the way down, and she stood in her daddy’s yard and looked for the part of her that was sorry and couldn’t find it.

She went up the steps. Her mama had left the porch light on.

Let him look at it.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The trailer was backed to the chute by four, and the first load stood in the cull lot with the sun on them, waiting on the trailer.

Eleven head. The roan with the bad bag, three broken-mouth cows, two dries, four her daddy had named, and she’d chalked every one of them into the cull lot Saturday in Mick’s hand and argued none.

She came through his gate at ten past four with her cap on and took the trailer gate without a word.

“Roan first,” he said. “She’ll lead.”

“She’s never led anything in her life.”

“She’ll lead them into a trailer. They know to follow.”

The roan led. He brought them up in threes, and Olivia ran the ramp with the tape off her hands now, the knuckles pink, and chalked each one off the board as it went up.

“Six.”

“Six. Seven’s the dry.”