Page 20 of Devoted

There was plenty in his cousin’s voice, and Owen declined every bit of it.

"Party’s at two," Brody said, coming back down the rail. "Dad’s acting like it’s a funeral, which is how you know he’s happy. Helen’s been cooking since Thursday. You’re coming."

"I’m coming."

"You’re coming, and you’re going to stand at the edge of the yard with a plate and say four words all day, and everybody’s going to say that’s just Owen." Brody swung a leg over the four-wheeler and sat there a second, and the grin gentled into something older. "I missed you, you know. Whole continents of missing you. You were the hardest one to be gone from."

Owen went back to the hay. "Then you’ll want somebody that missed you back," he said. "Party’s at two. I heard you."

He heard it land, too. He’d known the man on that machine since before either of them could walk, and he kept forking hay while the grin held, and held, and cost something to hold, and he didn’t take one word of it back.

Brody looked at him a second longer. Then he started the machine and went back across the west section flat out, scattering the same heifers twice.

The yard at John’s had trucks down both sides of the drive by two thirty, and the smoke off the pit had been going since morning.

Owen came with Knox and Ainsley, a folding table his mother had sent along with her regrets, and Helen’s dish. The two houses did it that way. Clay and John hadn’t sat in one yard in years, so a party at John’s meant Clay stayed home and Stephanie sent a table, two pies, her love to the boy, and everybody carried it in without one word about the empty spot where a brother should be. The cousins came, though. The cousins always came. The old men kept the fence and the young ones climbed it, and today the yard was full of both houses’ kids and half of John’s church besides.

John stood on his porch most of the afternoon with a coffee he didn’t drink, watching his second son move through the yard, and his face did the thing Owen had only seen it do at weddings, which was nothing, on purpose, so it wouldn’t do everything.

Helen had made brisket, three kinds of beans, and the vinegar slaw that Aunt Kelly-Anne used to make, and nobody said whose slaw it was, and everybody took some. It was six years this June, and the whole yard knew what this party didn’t have in it, and the whole yard had agreed, without a word, to let the day be about the living.

Dean found him in the first hour. Owen was near enough to hear it: Dean took his brother’s hand, hauled him in by it, thumped his back once, and set him back at arm’s length.

"We’re glad you’re home," Dean said. "But you ever stay away that fucking long again, I’ll whip your bony ass the whole length of this county."

"You could try."

"I’d send Chase."

Chase had the pit. He’d gripped his brother’s hand and his shoulder both, early, before the trucks, and said whatever five words he’d said, and now he ran the party from the smoke, no hurry on him anywhere, turning up wherever a thing was about to go wrong just before it went.

Levi met his uncle by the pit. The boy had been circling him for an hour, working up to it, and finally planted himself in Brody’s path with his chin up and stuck his hand out like he’d practiced.

"I’m Levi."

"I know exactly who you are." Brody went down on his heels and took the hand and shook it, slow and serious, man to man. "You were a month old when I left. I’ve been wanting to shake this hand your whole life, and leaving before you could talk is the single dumbest thing I ever let happen."

Levi considered that. "Dad says you live in Africa."

"I did. I’m done. I live here now."

"Do you know about hyenas?"

"Levi," Brody said, "I have personally been robbed by hyenas."

"Do they really laugh?"

"They laughed while they did it," Brody said, and the boy’s whole face came open, and the two of them were gone into it. Twenty minutes later they were still by the pit and Levi hadn’t stopped talking except to breathe.

Giana didn’t go over. She stayed on the porch steps next to Helen with a plate she wasn’t eating, watching her uncle with her grandmother’s flat measuring eyes, in a yard full of her grandmother’s slaw, at a party for the man who hadn’t come home for the funeral, and Brody saw it and had the sense to let her be. Some accounts you didn’t get to settle in an afternoon.

Owen took his plate to the fence line at the edge of the yard, because Brody had called it that morning and there was no sense making a liar of him.

Somewhere between the pen this morning and this yard, the county had gone and rearranged itself around him. Brody was home, for good, at every table from here on. Olivia was leaving in June. And the promise that had governed half his life had both its men back in one county, and Owen stood at the fence with a plate of his dead aunt’s slaw and understood, plainly, the way he understood weather, that everything was going to get harder from here.

Last night sat on top of all of it. He could still feel the exact line of her wrist on his forearm, and he’d quit expecting that to fade sometime around breakfast.

"You look like a man doing math," Remi said, arriving at his elbow with two beers, handing him one. "Stop it. It’s a party."