Page 1 of Devoted

CHAPTER ONE

Olivia Bateman had waited thirteen years for Owen Royston to ask her out on a date, and he never had, so on the coldest morning in January she drove over to tell him she was leaving.

The morning had started the way every morning started, which was in the dark, in coveralls, with a hundred and sixty head bawling at the fence line before she’d got the truck door shut. She fed. She broke ice on the troughs with the flat of a spade, checked the two heifers she didn’t like the look of, found them fine and told them so. By the time she came in with her hands burning from the cold, the kitchen was warm and lit, and her mother was sitting at the table dressed for town on a day with no town in it.

"Sit down," Edna said. "I’ll say this once, and then you can be however you’re going to be about it."

Olivia poured her coffee first. It bought her ten seconds and she needed them, because her mother had been building up to something all winter, in the way she went quiet over the checkbook, in the calls to her sister that ended when Olivia came in. Olivia had done what she always did with a thing coming that she couldn’t stop. She’d fed cows and gone to work and let it come.

She sat.

"I’m selling the place," Edna said. "I want it listed inside the month and gone by June, and I’m going to Midland. My sister’s been at me since the hip to quit being proud and come, and she’s right, and I’m done arguing with her just because I don’t want to move. I have to face reality, my body’s not as young as it used to be." She had her hands folded on the table like a woman at the bank. "I’m seventy-one, Olivia. It’s two hours to the doctor and two hours back, and you’re driving me both ways every time. This winter about finished me and it isn’t done being winter."

The clock over the stove ticked. Out at the pens a cow bawled and another answered.

"Okay," Olivia said.

"That’s it. Okay."

"You’ve thought about it all winter. You just said so. What am I going to add in one morning that you didn’t already weigh?"

"How long I’ve been thinking isn’t the point."

"How long have you been at it? Honestly."

"Since the hip."

"So three months of you deciding," Olivia said, "and you’re only talking it through with me now?"

"That’s how deciding works when it’s mine to do." Edna said it without heat, which made it land harder. "It’s my hip, my winters, and my name on the deed."

"It’s Daddy’s cows."

"It was your daddy’s cows," Edna agreed, not unkindly, which was worse. "And your daddy’s been in the ground eleven years come March, and I notice he didn’t take them with him."

Mick had been gone eleven years, near enough. Over a decade since the funeral and the casseroles, the county filing past his box saying what a hand he’d been with a cow, and Owen Royston standing at the back of the church in a pressed shirt, nineteen years old, same as her, shaking her hand in the line like everybody else and holding it half a second longer than everybody else. She’d gone home from burying her daddy and thought about that half second for a month, and had known even then it was a pitiful ration to live on. His pens were still standing out there in the dark, welded out of pipe he’d hauled himself, and his cows were still in them, the cross-bred line he’d spent forty years on, and every morning Olivia fed them she was keeping something running that had nowhere left to run to.

"What about the cows?" she said.

"They’ll sell. With the place or ahead of it, however Nathan says it works." Edna watched her over the coffee. "And before you make your face do that, hear the rest. The place will bring good money, and the first of it buys you a house in town. Yours, in your name, done before I sign anything else. You’re thirty years old and you’ve been living in your daddy’s house taking care of his cows and your mother, and I’m grateful, but it’s no life. I’m not going to Midland leaving you with no roof of your own. That part’s not up for discussion."

"None of it sounds up for discussion."

"No," Edna agreed. "It doesn’t. You’ve worked this ranch and so have I, over a decade of it, out of loyalty, keeping it for future generations because that was your daddy’s wish. Well. You never asked to be a rancher. You always wanted to teach children, and that’s all you should be doing. It’s time, Olivia."

"And if I said I’d fight you on the house. There’s nothing here for me without you here, Mama. I’ll come to Midland too."

"You don’t fight me, Olivia. Nobody fights me. The county quit trying sometime in the eighties." Edna turned her cup a quarter turn. "You can come if you really want to. But is it what you really want?"

Olivia got up and rinsed her cup and stood at the sink with her back to the room. Through the window the land ran flat and grey to the west, and a long way out, where the country stopped being anybody’s and started being Clay Royston’s, the lights along the seam were still burning against the last of the dark, a mile of them, strung out straight as a fence. She’d grown up with that view empty. Now it glowed.

There were things she could’ve said. She could feel them lined up behind her teeth, the whole crowd of them, and she looked at the dishrag in her hands and wrung it out and didn’t say one. Wanting a thing had never been a reason. Not in this family. You made your case with work or you didn’t make it, and there was no case. Her mother was right. The math was right.

"You could say something," Edna said, to her back. "I’d let you."

"There’s nothing to say, Mama. You’re right."

Her mother was quiet a moment.