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"Eleven years I've poured your coffee, honey," Pearl said, to Owen. "That's the first thing you ever told me."

Then she picked the pot back up and went and filled Bea Nunley's cup, because there was a room to run.

Owen put a bill on the counter. Pearl put it back in his hand without breaking stride.

He got his hat on and got as far as the door. Behind him Edna Bateman said it to his back, and to the room, in the voice she used for weather and for prices.

"Well," she said. "That's the first true thing you've said out loud since January."

He worked Friday and he worked Saturday.

He could feel the telephone lines doing what they do. Jett rang him at nine on Friday night about nothing at all and stayed on the phone eleven minutes. Ainsley came by Saturday with a pie she had not made and did not mention. His mother telephoned and asked whether he'd eaten and then asked nothing else, which from Stephanie Royston was a standing ovation.

He didn't drive out east. He'd said it where she told him to and to the people she told him to. The rest was hers.

He fed and fixed a float valve and slept about four hours a night.

Sunday at half past twelve her truck came up his drive.

Half the road was coming home from church and would be for another hour. She parked square in his yard where a man passing on the road could read the plate.

Owen came out of the barn with his gloves still on.

She got out. She had a dress on and her boots and her hair down, and she stood by her own door with the sun full on her and did not come any closer.

"I heard about Friday from four people before nine o'clock in the morning," she said.

"That'd be about right."

"Bea Nunley telephoned my mother's house at six twenty. Six twenty, Owen." She hadn't put her keys down. "Then Lauren. Then Remi, who got it off Jett, who got it off Knox, who was not in that room. And Knox has told nine people what you said."

"What did I say?"

"Depends who you ask." Her chin came up a quarter inch. "Delia Voss has you making a speech about a bull."

"There was a bull in it."

"Of course there was." She didn't smile. "Mama came home at seven and sat down at that table and never said one word to me about any of it, and she isn't going to. I'll be getting her opinion in pieces for the next twenty years."

"That sounds about right."

"She put ten dollars on you."

"Earl told me."

"Earl told the whole road."

"Duke's still in my yard."

"He is."

"I took the board off him Wednesday night and put it in the tack room." She looked past him at the barn. "I'm not going to tell you what I did with it after that."

"All right."

"Don't ask me about it."

"I wasn't going to."