Page 17 of Devoted

Brody put his bottle on the table, still half full, and shouldered the duffel, and stood there one second with his sister hauling at his arm and the rest of them arguing about trucks, and Olivia saw him take a breath before the door the same way he'd taken one inside it. Seven years, and now his father's porch, and no way to do it but to drive out there and stand on it.

"Good to see you, Olivia," he said. "I'll be around. I'm posted stateside now. Midland office." A beat. "Small county. We'll manage better than a bar table."

"Go see your daddy, Brody."

"Yes, ma'am."

The whole crowd of them went out in a wedge, Remi first, walking backward, giving orders about the convoy, Knox with three beers he hadn't finished distributing, Jett with Brody's duffel because Brody had lost custody of it somewhere between the bar and the door, Mason holding the door with the grin still on him, and the cold came in and the noise went out, truck doors, engines, Remi's laugh carrying over all of it, and then Harvey's was just a bar again, half empty, the jukebox suddenly loud.

Lauren turned her bottle in a slow circle on the wood.

"So," she said. "You were all in school together."

"Same class, kindergarten up. Him and Owen both." Olivia kept her voice level, and it held, and she was almost proud of it. "He left the summer we were twenty-two. This is the first he's been back."

Lauren looked at the door, then at her, level and mild, a woman laying a fact on a table and leaving it there. "That's a long time to stay gone from a place everybody loves you in."

"The work took him."

"Mm," said Lauren, exactly like Pearl, exactly like Edna, and mercifully let it lie.

They sat with their beers while the bar settled back to its Saturday.

"You held your face the whole time," Lauren said. "In case you were wondering. Nothing showed."

"I don't know what you mean."

"I know you don't." Lauren lifted two fingers at Harvey for another round. "For what it's worth, he held his too."

Olivia looked at her, and decided not to ask what she meant by that, because Lauren answered questions, and some answers she didn't have room for tonight.

Olivia finished her beer. Through the front window she watched the convoy sort itself out in the gravel, headlights swinging, Remi's little truck first out of the lot with its horn going for no reason at all, and the whole procession pulled onto the county road headed east toward John's, toward the porch and the weather and the old man about to get his son back across his own cattle guard.

Brody's truck went last. A rental, airport plates, and at the edge of the lot it slowed, and sat a second with its blinker going, and she watched through the glass as he looked back at the bar. Not at the door. At the window. At the booth.

At her.

Then the blinker quit and the truck pulled out, and Olivia Bateman sat in Harvey's with an empty bottle and her heart going, and the one man in Texas who knew her secret drove off into the dark to hug his father, and she was no closer to knowing what he'd brought home than when he walked in, and now he'd be at every table in the county until June.

"Another?" Lauren said.

"Another."

CHAPTER SIX

Saturday supper was the second one of Edna’s deal, and Owen washed off the chute at his own place, changed his shirt, and drove the nine miles east with his hair still wet in February, to eat a meal he could’ve cooked at home. He’d have driven ninety.

The porch light was on when he came across the cattle guard. Edna had made a roast, and the table was set for three with the good plates, and she sat at the head with her cane hooked over the chair back and ran the table.

"Sit," she said. "You’re scrubbed. Olivia, look at this. The man scrubbed for us."

"Mama."

"It’s a compliment, girl. Sit down, Owen."

He sat. Olivia came in from the kitchen with the cornbread, sleeves pushed up, flour on one forearm, and put the pan down and took the chair across from him, and under the lamp she still had the afternoon’s work on her, wind-burned, her hair pushed back rough where the cap had been, and he made himself look at the roast.

"Well," Edna said, when the plates were going around. "Give me my count."