Page 81

"I said yes before he'd got it all the way out of his mouth." Ainsley put her hands in her back pockets and took them out again. "What I said at the fire was mine. Every word of it. I'd buy that horse today with my own money and never blink. But the wallet was his. I told myself it was a kindness. It was a kindness with a lie in it, and I knew it when I shook your hand."

The windmill turned over slow behind the barn. Olivia stood in her own yard and looked at the girl, level and ashamed and standing square in front of it, the girl she'd have picked out of either family with her own hand. That part had been real. And she'd told her to her face, standing up, which was more than anybody else in this had managed.

"I stood at that fire and thanked you," Olivia said. "I thought it was the one piece of this year I'd picked myself."

"I know it." Ainsley didn't flinch off it. "So you call it. I'll tear the transfer up today. I'll pay you my own money. I'll drive home empty and never say his name to you again. Whatever you want done, I'll do it, and I won't argue."

Olivia didn't answer straight off, and Ainsley shifted her feet.

"Liv, if you'd rather sleep on it⁠—"

"I'd rather it be done." She heard her own voice come out steady, and was glad of it. "But not the way you drove out here to do it. I'm not selling him to you, Ainsley. I'm not selling him to anybody."

"Liv—"

"His check goes back and your money stays in your pocket." She had it worked out before she knew she'd been working on it. "There's no yard in Midland. So you'll take him home and keep him for me till I'm gone, and after that we'll see, and not one of you is going to put a number on that horse while I'm still standing on this place."

Ainsley let a breath go. "That I can do."

Olivia went in and got the envelope out of the kitchen drawer and brought it out and handed it across, and Ainsley folded it into her shirt pocket and buttoned the pocket, and neither of them said a word about it.

"You'll want your hundred back out of it too."

"The hundred was always mine," Ainsley said. "That part I never lied about."

"Then keep it and buy him something he doesn't need."

"Can I say one thing about him?"

"No."

"All right." Ainsley put her hat on. "Then I'll say one about me. I've never had a person be decent to me while I stood there being a liar, and I don't know what to do with it."

"Feed him first or he sulks," Olivia said. "That's what you do with it."

Then Olivia went to the pen and haltered Duke herself. He loaded the way he'd loaded his whole life for anybody who acted like there was no other outcome, and she acted like it, and her hands were fine. She tied him, stepped down, swung the gate to and pinned it, and it was done.

Ainsley got in her truck and put her arm out the window.

"He'll holler tonight," Olivia said. "New pen, he hollers till dark, then he quits."

"Then I'll sit out with him till dark," Ainsley said, and pulled away, easy over the washboard for the horse's sake, and the trailer went around the bend, and the pen at the barn stood empty.

Olivia stood in the yard until the dust came down. Then she went back to the boxes.

She got to the feed room at the tail end of the light, because she'd left it for last all day without saying so to herself.

There wasn't much to it. Empty bins, a stack of buckets, a bridle hook with nothing on it. She worked front to back with one box for keeping and one for the sale, and behind the far bin, on the nail where they'd hung since before the funeral, were his coveralls.

She took them down. The denim had gone stiff and the color of dust. The knees still held the shape of his knees, and a feed receipt in the chest pocket had worn soft as cloth. She sat down on a feed sack with them across her lap, and her body went ahead and remembered without asking her. The line camp, the stove ticking down and the cold on the glass and the heat of him the whole length of her back, his hand spread flat on her stomach like he was holding something shut. This barn, twenty feet from where she sat, his mouth at her neck and her name in it, low. She let it run because stopping it had quit working months ago, and it ran, and it ran out, and she was still sitting on the feed sack in her daddy's feed room, dry-eyed, with her heart going hard and the light nearly gone.

She came close. She sat there with the coveralls in her fists and her eyes burning and her throat shut, and she breathed through it, and she didn't break.

She stood up and folded them, legs and arms and square, and laid them in the keeping box, and taped it shut, and wrote nothing on the lid.

The yard had gone blue by the time she came up from the barn. The pie sat on the porch rail where it had sat all afternoon, and she stood on the steps a minute in the cool with her hand on the post.

Her daddy had known, and Marge had known, and Pearl had known, and the whole county had known some piece of it, and in thirty years nobody had asked her one question. She'd have answered. Anybody could have had all of it for the asking, any Tuesday, at any counter in town.