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Wes Fewell, who had held forth at that counter every morning for thirty years, opened his mouth and shut it again.

Nothing happened to him. The grill went on and nobody put him out the door and the coffee in front of him was still warm.

Wes put his cup down.

"Your daddy know you said that?"

"He will by dinner."

"He'll know by nine," Wes said, and picked his cup back up.

Delia Voss was still at the register with her pie in both hands.

Then Earl got off the third stool and came down the counter and set his hand flat on the wood in front of Owen.

"Twenty-two dollars," Earl said.

"Sir?"

"You've never bet on my board in your life, so you don't know how it works. That's fine. I'll tell you." Earl had his reading glasses pushed up in his hair. "I chalked you in January. First week. Before there was one thing to chalk and before that girl's place was ever on the market, because a man watched you order coffee for eleven years and I keep a board for a living."

"You chalked me in January?"

"Three to one against. Nobody took it." He said it flat, no relish anywhere in it. "In March I moved you to five to one against, and I'd have gone ten, and the whole road agreed with me. That's what this county had you at, son. Ten to one you'd never open your mouth."

"Earl," Pearl said.

"I'm getting to it." Earl looked at him. "Two people took the other side of that line. In eleven weeks. Two."

"Who?"

"Marge Whittaker took a dollar of it in February and wouldn't say why."

Marge, in the pass-through, with the spatula. "I don't have to say why."

"And Edna Bateman put ten dollars on you in the third week of March," Earl said, "at five to one, which is fifty and the ten back, which is your twenty-two after I take the other half over to the church like I do." He counted it onto the counter in front of Owen. "She'll want that. She's sitting right there."

Owen looked at the money. Then he looked at the woman on the stool beside him. She had not turned around. She was cutting the corner off a piece of toast with the edge of her fork, like a woman doing arithmetic in her head.

"You bet on me," he said.

"I bet ten dollars," Edna said. "Don't make a parade out of it."

"In March?"

"You'd hauled my hay in February and never said what for." She put the toast down. "I'd have gone twenty but I'm on a fixed income and Earl's a robber."

"That's the truth," said Earl.

Pearl came down the counter with the pot. She stopped in front of Owen and did not pour. She looked at him a while, and it was not how she'd looked at him at the end of March.

"I've been saying this in this room since the first week of February," she said. "I said it to Marge and I said it to Bea and I said it to two of you sitting right there. I said that man is not slow, he’s not shy, and he’s not waiting on anything. I said he decided something a long time ago and he has been paying for it in installments ever since." She set the pot on the burner. "Not one of you would have it. Y'all had him at ten to one."

"I had them both in the sixth grade," Bea Nunley said, from the booth. "I could have told you inside a week."

"You did," Pearl said. "You did, at that."

Nobody argued with either of them.