Page 50 of Denied

“He says it’s a mess out there,” she said. “Somebody’s been pumping that field dry for fifteen years and they’ve sent him to say so.” She put the eggs on the table. “He’s in a motel with a boat on the wall. He says the coffee’s terrible.”

John looked at the eggs.

“They sent him to say it?”

“That’s what he says.”

“He’d have said it in April for nothing.” He picked up his fork. “Motel coffee.”

“He says it’s terrible.”

“It is,” John said, and ate, and nodded, once, at his plate, the way he’d nodded at her the first night about Helen’s chair, and went on to Levi and the lizards, and down the table Remi put her fork down very carefully and looked at Chase, and Chase looked at his eggs, and Dean got up and went out to the pens without finishing, and Lara, at the far end with her feet up, looked at Sunny and put a hand over her own mouth.

Sunny went back to the stove. She stood there a minute with her back to the table and the pan in her hand and breathed.

“He asked me,” she said, that night, at eleven, to the phone.

“Who asked you what?”

“Your father. This morning. In front of everybody. He asked me how you were getting on.”

Nothing, on the other end. The television through the wall. Then, “What’d you say?”

“I told him about the field. And the boat. And the coffee.”

“What’d he say?”

“He said it’s terrible.” She turned on her side, toward the phone. “He said you’d have told them for nothing in April. Then he nodded at his plate, Brody, and I had to hold on to the stove.”

He didn’t say anything for a long time.

“He asked you,” he said, finally, and his voice had gone rough, and she lay there and listened to a man in a motel two hours off not be able to say anything else, and didn’t make him.

“Go to sleep,” she said. “He asked. That’s all. Go to sleep.”

The seventh night he didn’t let her talk about the house.

“No.”

“No what.”

“No chart. No lizards. No Lara’s feet.” He’d had a beer; she could hear it, one, the way he got looser by one beer and no more. “I’ve been in a room with a boat for a week and I’ve got a week to go and I’m lying on a bed that smells of somebody else’s cigarettes, and I don’t want to hear about the house. I want to hear about you.”

“You hear about me every night.”

“I hear about the house. What are you wearing?”

“Brody.”

“What are you wearing, Sunny?”

She looked down at herself. The T-shirt. She’d worn it on purpose and she’d have denied it.

“The T-shirt.”

“Which one?”

“You know which one.”