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She could call him now. It was five. He’d be up. She could call him and say it, all of it, the shop and the flowers and the sedan and the police and the reason she was in his father’s house at all, and he’d listen the way he listened, and he’d say something plain, and it would be in the room with them forever, and in November she’d have to drive away from it.

She didn’t call him.

She went down and made the coffee, the right kind, and stood at the stove at six with nine people’s breakfast going and her face doing nothing at all, on purpose, and when the old man came in and sat down and said “Morning,” she said “Morning,” and it came out fine. It always did.

Twelve nights, eleven calls. She’d counted, and she’d said she wouldn’t. Two from Indiana, and the second one had heard her say “what.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

He left Odessa at noon on Friday with five days of the job still on the schedule and a folder on the seat that wasn’t his to have, and he didn’t call the house.

He’d thought about calling. He’d thought about it at the county line with the phone in his hand, and put the phone down, because if he called she’d have an hour to get her face ready, and he’d spent twelve nights on a phone with a woman who could get her face ready in four seconds, and he wanted to see the one before that.

Two o’clock. The kids were at school till three-thirty. Lara was at Elena’s on a Friday for the blood pressure. The old man went to the co-op Fridays and stood around it till three. Dean and Chase were on the north section with the pairs, because it was October and that was where you were in October. He knew the house the way he knew the wells now, what was where and when, and he came up the drive at two with the dust behind him and the yard empty and the kitchen window open, and he parked, and got out, and stood in the yard a second.

She came to the door.

Not the window. The door. The screen door banged and she was on the porch in the T-shirt and jeans with a dish towel in her hand and her hair coming down, and she stopped at the top of the steps and looked at his truck, and at him, and her face did the thing he’d driven ninety miles to see, which was nothing at all, for one second, and then everything.

“You’re early,” she said.

“Five days.”

“You said the thirteenth.”

“I’m here.” He came across the yard. “Who’s in the house.”

“Nobody. Lara’s at Elena’s. John’s at the —”

“I know where John is.”

“Then why’d you ask.”

“So you’d tell me nobody,” he said, and went up the steps, and she didn’t move off the top one, so he stopped one below her, which put his face level with hers for the first time, and she looked at him from there with the dish towel in her hand and said, “You smell like a motel,” and he said, “I’ve been in one,” and she put her hand flat on his chest, over his heart, the way she’d done after the calving, and left it there.

“Twelve nights,” she said.

“Eleven calls.”

“You counted?”

“You counted first,” he said, and she laughed, once, and he got his hand in her hair and kissed her on his father’s porch in daylight with the dish towel between them.

They didn’t make the hall.

They made the kitchen, because it was the nearest room with a door that shut, and she shut it, and put her back against it, and pulled him in by the shirt the way she had on the porch in July, and he’d been going to be slow. He’d thought about slow for ninety miles. He got her T-shirt over her head and his mouth on her and forgot the whole plan.

“Here,” she said.

“There’s a table.”

“I know there’s a table, I’ve eaten off it for thirty years.” He got her jeans open. “Sunny, the old man eats breakfast at that —”

“Then don’t tell him,” she said, and got his belt, and that was the end of the argument.

He put her on the table. He got her jeans off and got on his knees on his father’s kitchen floor, and she said, “We don’t have time,” and he said, “We’ve got till three-thirty,” and she said, “Brody,” and then didn’t say anything for a while, because he’d been away twelve nights and he’d thought about this on a bed with a boat over it every one of them, and he took his time about it, and she had her hand in his hair and her heel on his back and her other hand over her own mouth out of habit, and he reached up and took it off.

“Nobody’s home.”