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"Figured. My ears been ringing since the cattle guard." He came over, and he was work-dirty and wind-burned and it was eleven in the morning and Lauren's whole body noted every part of that like it was going to be on the quiz. "Ladies."

"You want the booth?" Lara asked, sliding not one inch.

"Can't stay. Pearl's got two sandwiches back there with my name on them, I got feed on the truck." He said it to Lara and looked at Lauren, and there it was again, the thing that happened to his voice when it crossed the table to her side. "How's the paint coming?"

"The primer surrendered."

"That why you're in town, or did the quiet finally get you?"

It was such a direct hit that she picked up her coffee to buy a second, and over the rim she saw him watch her buy it, and the corner of his mouth knew everything.

Then he set his hand on the table edge, easy, leaning his weight onto it, and every thought in her head about coffee and quiet and dignity went out through the window glass.

The blister had torn again. Anybody could see it, sitting there raw across the heel of his palm, gone angry pink at the borders, a smear of dried blood in the crease, and he'd done exactly nothing about it, no bandage, no tape, nothing between forty feet of hauled pipe and a morning of feed sacks but his own hide.

"Your hand."

"It's fine."

"That's from my well, isn't it." She had it before she thought about it, before there was a decision anywhere in the chain, his wrist in one hand and his fingers in the other, turning it palm-up on the table between the coffee cups, and he let her.

That was the thing she'd keep arriving at, after. He just let her.

His hand lay open in both of hers, big and warm and calloused everywhere the blister wasn't, and she pressed her thumb along the edge of the tear like she knew the first thing about field medicine, and his fingers curled, slightly, not closing, and she could feel his pulse where her fingers wrapped his wrist, and it was not the pulse of a man standing calmly in a diner, and hers had no room to talk. Somewhere behind the counter a coffee pot had stopped mid-pour. The room had gone down to the jukebox and the fryer. She was holding a man's hand in the window booth at Pearl's at eleven in the morning in front of the entire voting population of Soluno, and she could not seem to locate the part of her that was supposed to care.

"It's a blister, Lauren," he said, quieter than the room required.

"It's open." Her voice had gone somewhere lower too, and she heard it happen and could do nothing about it. "You had it in feed dust all morning. You made me buy gloves."

"Mine don't fit over it."

"That's not the argument you think it is."

Neither of them moved. One beat past any version of first aid, then two, his hand open in both of hers and his eyes on her and neither of them breathing in any way they'd have wanted measured, and it was Pearl, of all people, who broke it, setting a white paper bag on the table beside their hands like she was laying evidence before a jury.

"Two sandwiches," Pearl said. "And a jar of Marge's salve, which she sent out the minute you walked in looking like that, because this county raised you better." She patted the bag once. "On the ticket."

Lauren let go of his hand on a schedule that fooled no one in the room, least of all the room. Mason straightened up, and took his bag, and had the decency, or the mercy, to put his hat back on like a man leaving a normal errand.

"Saturday," he said, to her, at the door. "Word of advice. Whatever Pearl tells you the picnic is, it's more than that. There's a betting line at Earl's."

"A betting line on what?"

But the bell had already rung him out, and through the window she watched him swing up into the truck one-handed, the bag in his teeth, and laugh at something to himself in the cab, and she turned back around to find Lara watching her with her chin propped on one hand, like the end of a movie she'd already seen.

"Don't," Lauren said.

"I'm an accountant," Lara said. "I don't editorialize. I just carry the numbers." She pulled the pie plate over to her side of the table and picked up the fork. "The casserole's still in my truck. I'll follow you home."

Lara carried the dish in herself, set it in the refrigerator like she'd been in the kitchen before, and then stood a moment in the middle of the room with her keys in her hand, looking around, and Lauren watched her do it and knew, a half second early, exactly what she was seeing.

"You know what stopped me in here" Lara said. "Not one flower in the whole house. A florist's house."

"Bakers don't eat cake," Lauren said. "What does a person wear to a Texas wedding in December?"

There was a beat where Lara decided whether to allow it, level and brown-eyed and missing nothing.

"Boots and a good coat," she said, allowing it. "December twelfth. You're on the list, and before you start, that wasn't me, that was Pearl, and there's no appeals process." She headed for the door, and stopped with her hand on the frame, and looked back, and for the first time all day there was nothing dry in it at all. "For what it's worth. I stood where you're standing about ten weeks ago, deciding whether this place was going to be a thing that happened to me or a thing I got to keep. Nobody could tell me which. I'm just saying somebody stood here."