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“Chase has John. Chase has had him since four-thirty, I heard the truck. You’ve got the chart and you’ve had it all night, and I’ve watched you read it, and you’re coming, because when that baby comes somebody’s going to have to look at Lara’s face and tell her it’s all right, and it’s not going to be me and it’s not going to be Dean.” He got his jacket off the chair. “Get the kids up. I’ll get the truck warm.”

They said nothing for two hours.

Giana in the back with her book, not reading it. Levi asleep on her by the county line, because it was six in the morning and he was seven. The sun coming up flat over the scrub on the right, and the road going straight, and the heater, and the two of them in the front with a console between them and not one word, and every mile of it she felt him there the way she’d felt him at a fridge.

Somewhere past the halfway, with the light full up and the works on Clay’s side going by on the left, Giana leaned forward between the seats.

She didn’t say anything. She put her hand across the console, past Sunny, onto her uncle’s hand on the gearshift, and left it there.

He didn’t look at her. He turned his hand over under hers and held it. He drove the last hour like that, one-handed, with a nine-year-old’s hand in his and the sun on his face, and Sunny looked out the window on her side at nothing, and didn’t cry, because she’d done that in a shower and she was in a truck.

The hallway was long and green and had a floor that squeaked, and Dean was standing in it with his hat in both hands looking at a door.

“Dean.”

He turned around. His face had been somewhere for six hours and wasn’t all the way back. He looked at his children, at his brother, at Sunny, and said, “It’s a boy,” in a voice with nothing left in it. “Max. He’s Max. He’s here. He’s eight pounds and he’s got Lara’s whole face and he’s shouting. Lara’s fine. Lara’s asleep. I’ve been out here four minutes because the nurse said go stand somewhere and I can’t figure out where.”

“Here’s fine,” Sunny said.

“Here’s fine,” Dean agreed, and Giana put her arms around his middle, and Levi did, and he stood in a green hallway holding his children with his hat squashed between them and shut his eyes.

Addi came out of the door. She’d been in the room; Lara had wanted her, and Lauren had driven her at three, and she came out in a coat with no sleep in her and a nurse behind her, and the nurse had the baby.

The nurse looked at Dean, and at the children on him, and looked around the hallway for the next person, the way nurses did, and found Sunny, and put the baby in her arms.

She hadn’t asked for him. She stood there with him. He weighed nothing. He had a red furious face and a fist out and Lara’s whole mouth, and he was shouting, and she stood in a hallway in Midland with her arms full of Dean’s son and didn’t have one word in her.

She looked up.

Brody was six feet off. He’d stopped where he’d stopped when the door opened and he hadn’t moved. He was looking at her with the baby. His face was doing the thing it had done in a barn in June when Levi told him a hyena fact, on a rail in October when a hand went on a woman’s back, at a fridge, on a step. She’d told him in the voice he trusted that she didn’t love him, and he was looking at her with his brother’s child in her arms and every bit of it on his face where a hallway could see.

She crossed the six feet. She didn’t decide to. She put Max in his arms, and he took him the way he took anything she handed him, without a word, and got him against his chest with one big hand under the whole of him, and looked down at him, and then up, over the baby’s head, at her.

He didn’t say anything. She couldn’t have. She stood a foot from him with her hands empty and looked at a man holding a baby and looking at her over it, and she understood, standing there, in a way she hadn’t on a porch or a stair or in a closet with three boxes, what she’d done. Not what she’d cost him. What she’d thrown away. It was in his face and it was in his hand under the baby and it was in the six feet she’d just crossed without deciding to, and it was hers, and she’d stood at a door with her shoes off and said it was never him.

Addi was beside her. She’d come down the hallway and she was standing at Sunny’s shoulder with her coat open and her face doing nothing at all, for once. She saw the whole of it, Sunny knew she saw it, the crossing and the handing and the look, and Addi Baxter, who’d never in her life let a thing go past her without a word, didn’t say one. She looked at the two of them, at the baby, put her hand on Sunny’s back, once, between the shoulders, took it off, and went to find her sister.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“Walk up with me,” the old man said.

He had his hat on. He was standing at the bottom of the porch steps at four on Sunday with the baby two hours home and the house behind him full of people passing it around, and he said it to Brody the way he’d have said bring the truck around, and turned, and started walking, and didn’t look back to see if he was followed.

Brody followed him.

Up meant up. Past the barn and the pens and the tank, along the fence that ran north, to the rise at the top of the section where the ground lifted enough to see the whole place from, and where the two stones were, inside a rail Dean had painted in the spring. Brody hadn’t been up there. Nine months in the county, every one of them in that house, and he’d been on every acre of the place with a chart and a bucket and he’d never once walked up that rise, and the old man knew it, because the old man knew where every one of his children had stood on his land for forty years.

They didn’t talk on the way. John walked the way he’d always walked, not fast, with his hands loose, and Brody walked beside him and not behind, and the windmill turned below them, and at the rail the old man stopped and took his hat off and stood there.

KELLY-ANNE ROYSTON. The dates. And beside it, smaller, LUCIA, and hers, and a space on the other side of Kelly-Anne’s where there’d be one more one day, and every man on the place knew whose.

Brody took his hat off.

He stood there and looked at his mother’s name cut in stone and he had nothing. He’d had things to say to Greene, to Clay, to a Houston room, to a woman at a door. He stood on a rise in November with his hat in his hand and there wasn’t one word in him that was any use. The old man had known that too, and had brought him up here anyway, and was going to wait.

He waited. The wind came across the rise. Below them somebody came out on the porch with the baby and went back in.

“I didn’t come,” Brody said.