Page 103 of Devoted

"Owen," Olivia said.

There was a pause about four seconds long.

"Well," Charla said. "All right."

"What happens now?"

"Nothing happens. Nothing can happen. I'll take the listing down or I'll leave it up and it'll sit there, and either way you're not selling that place this year and I'd be lying if I said otherwise." She stopped. "I'm sorry, Olivia. That was a fair price and it was a good buyer and I lost it for you."

"You didn't lose it."

"Somebody did."

"Yes," Olivia said. "Somebody did."

She sat down on the step after she hung up.

For about a minute she was as angry as she had been in her whole life. He had done it again. He had gone off and done a thing that reached all the way into her house and turned her year around. He had not asked her. She had found out from a woman on a telephone.

Then she made herself sit there and take it apart, the way she'd taken everything else apart this spring, and it came out different.

He'd put his own name on it. He'd filed it against his own daddy's operation. He'd told Clay Royston to his face in Clay's own kitchen. He'd told the whole town at Pearl's counter. He got nothing out of it and stood to lose plenty, and he had done it in May, when she'd have crawled over broken glass to get away from him and he knew it.

And he hadn't known this would happen. She was fairly sure of that. He had not sat down and worked out that a state file would run a buyer off. He had done a true thing in the open and it had come back around and knocked her sale over on its way past.

It had cost her the same money either way. Both of those were true at once, and she sat on her mother's step with the pair of them.

Behind her the screen went.

"That was Charla," Edna said.

"It was."

"And?"

"He's out. The buyer." Olivia turned the phone over in her hands. "There's a complaint on the water. Nobody'll buy it till that's settled."

Edna got herself down onto the step, which took a while, and Olivia knew better than to help.

"Whose complaint?"

"Owen's."

"Mm," said Edna.

They sat there a while with the heat coming up off the ground.

"I've been thinking about this since Thursday," Edna said. "I'd have said it Thursday if that lawyer hadn't sent us home."

"Mama."

"There's a house on Cedar behind the church. Two bedrooms and a carport and a yard the size of this porch." Edna said it the way she'd have priced a heifer. "Nine hundred a month or eighty-one thousand to buy, and I've got eighty-one thousand, and it'd be in your name by Friday."

"No."

"You've not thought about it?"

"I've thought about it since January." Olivia looked out at the trap. "You offered it to me the morning you told me you were selling. You sat at that table in your town clothes and offered to buy me a place, and I got in the truck and drove nine miles to tell a man I was leaving."