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"It was stupid at eighteen. At twenty-four it was something else." He hit the rail once with the flat of his hand. The bull backed off a step. "You had a speech that night."

"Eleven words. The harvest dance. I'd built it since February, since the library, and I said it to the windshield twice on the way out to the creek, and I sat down on my tailgate with a warm beer to wait till she was by herself, and you came across the grass with two more."

"And I said it first."

"You said it first."

"And you sat there." Brody turned all the way around and didn't look away. "You had it in your mouth and you let me put my arm over my eyes and say it, and you swore, and four days later I walked into a library and asked her in front of you. She looked at you, Owen. I saw her look at you. I thought she was embarrassed for me. You sat there."

"I'd given you my word."

"I don't want your word. I never wanted your word, I wanted you to tell me to go to hell." He stopped. "Say something."

"I fixed her brake light."

Brody stared at him, and Owen kept his eyes on the bull. "That fall. The right one. I got under her daddy's flatbed on a Sunday while they were at church and put a bulb in it."

Brody laughed. It came out of him hard and wrong, with the lip going. He put the back of his hand to his mouth and kept laughing behind it, and it bled, and he didn't care. "Thirteen years," he said. "I have wondered thirteen years who fixed that light. I asked Mick. I asked Jett. I'd got it down to Chase."

"Chase can't wire a bulb."

"I know he can't. I was desperate." He wiped his hand on his jeans, looked at the blood, and let it be. He picked up the bottle. "You were under her daddy's truck. And you let me take her to the picture show."

"Three weeks."

"Three weeks. And you never asked why it quit."

"You said you were better as friends."

"I said that to Remi so she'd quit asking. It's what you say." He drank. "She ended it. In my truck, at her gate, kind as she could do it, and she was kind, and I sat in that truck an hour after she went in. I was seventeen. I told myself I'd have it out of my system by football."

"Then why'd you leave."

Brody didn't answer for a while. The bull came back to the rail. Somewhere north a pumpjack was going, the sound of it coming and going with the wind, and Brody let it go by twice before he said anything.

"You want the honest answer or the one I've been telling."

"The honest one."

"It wasn't all her. It'd be a tidier story if it was." He turned the bottle a quarter on the rail and left it. "I was nineteen years old in a county where I was John Royston's boy and Dean Royston's baby brother and Mason and Jace were already grown men doing it right in front of everybody. There wasn't a room in Soluno where somebody hadn't decided what I was going to be before I got a vote on it. I could see the whole of it, Owen, all the way out to sixty, and every bit of it was somebody else's. So I went and found one place on this earth where not one man had heard my last name, and I did well there, and it was mine."

"And her?"

"And her. I'm not going to stand here and tell you she wasn't part of it, because she was, and she was the part that made the rest of it easy. I had a reason to go and she handed me one more on that fence and I took it and I ran." He picked the bottle up. "Dad's barbecue. The fence behind the barn, in the dark, with the whole yard up at the house. I'd come home with a job offer and four days and I'd decided I'd ask her again, properly, that night. I walked her out there and she saw it coming and she said it before I got my mouth open. It's Owen. It's always been Owen. She said it twice, same as you swore twice. She wasn't sorry and I didn't want her to be. She'd been holding it since she was seventeen and you could watch it go out of her when she put it down."

"You never said."

"I said it to her, and once was enough."

"And then June?"

"And then June."

"Dean thinks it was the work."

"Dean's thought that seven years." He set the bottle down without drinking. "I let him. Dad's let him, and Helen and Remi. Giana looks at me across a yard like she's putting it together, and she's got it wrong, and I've let her have it wrong because the right answer's worse." He stopped. Then he said it to the bull, plain, with nothing on it. "The reason I wasn’t at my own mother's funeral is a woman who was never mine."

"You just told me you were over her."