Page 57

"He's calling tags. I've been listening." Brody looked down the alley at his cousin. "He hasn't called a lot all day. He says the number and waits."

"Waits on what?"

"You, I'd guess. Drink your coffee. It's getting cold and your mama'll ask."

She laughed. She hadn't meant to, and it came out at the right height in the right place with Owen twenty feet off, and it cost her. Every one of them did. She'd been paying them out for ten days, at the steakhouse, at Harvey's, in the church lot with her mama on her arm, and she paid this one the same way and went up the catwalk after him.

They worked it three ways. Owen called the tag off the ear, Brody read the age off the board, she called the lot and chalked it. It had always been fast with the three of them, and her hands remembered how it went before she did.

"Forty-one," Owen said.

"Forty-one's an eight."

"Two. She's had a bad quarter on the near side since last year, Owen. It's on the board."

"I felt it. It's fine this year."

"Then two."

"Two," Brody said, and let her by. He put his hand flat on Olivia's shoulder, once, to get past her on the catwalk where there wasn't room for two. He didn't leave it there. He'd put it there so Owen could see it, and Owen saw it, and got the next cow.

"You're in my light, Liv."

"There's no light up here to be in."

"Then you're in my way, and I'm being nice about it."

"Liv. You want the tens in two or three?"

"Three if they've got a calf. Two if they don't."

"That's what I'd have said."

"Then why'd you ask?"

"Because it's your herd." He said it easy, to the pen, to nobody. "Somebody ought to."

Owen brought the next one up without a word. "Forty-four."

"Forty-four's a three. Good cow. Looks at me like my sixth-grade teacher."

"Mrs. Nunley liked you," Olivia said.

"Mrs. Nunley sent me to the hall nine times in one year."

"Because she liked you. She sent Owen once and cried about it."

"I don't remember that," Owen said.

"You wouldn't. You were in the hall." Brody let the cow by. "One, Liv?"

"One."

"Forty-six."

"Forty-six is the one that fought the chute in February. She'll fight it now."

"She won't," Owen said. "She's learned it."