Page 27 of Devoted

“You want my coat?”

“Brody.”

“Okay.” He slid off the tailgate. “Night, Bateman. Tell your mama I’m coming for that pie recipe.”

“You don’t have the years left.”

She gave the conversation back at the right height for the rest of it, and if any of the last half hour was sitting on her face where the one man alive who knew her secret could read it, he was kind enough to keep it to himself.

Owen came back to the firelight ten minutes after she did, from the other direction, carrying wood nobody needed.

She watched him drop the load and take up his post at the far edge of everything, and she thought, with her mouth still stinging, that she finally had her answer to the question she’d been asking across bars, branding pens, and church parking lots since she was seventeen. She’d had him against her from boots to mouth for half a minute, and there was no unknowing it now, no version where she’d imagined the sound he made or his hands shaking as they came off her.

He felt all of it. And he’d stood in the dark with the whole of it in his arms, and handed it back.

Whatever he felt, he had never chosen her. She rode home on that, down the two-track with Lauren talking soft about nothing beside her, the fire shrinking in the mirror, and at her gate Lauren put the van in park and let her out into the cold.

“Text me tomorrow,” Lauren said.

“I will.”

She stood in her own yard until the van’s taillights cleared the cattle guard.

She got all the way up her own porch steps before she said anything out loud, and what she said, to the dark, in the voice she used for correcting a child who knew better, was, “He kissed me first.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

The heifer had been at it since noon and had nothing to show for it but two feet, and by three o’clock Owen had her in the chute with her tail tied off and his arm in her to the shoulder.

“Backwards,” he said. “Both hind feet. Chains.”

Olivia had the chains off the rail before he finished the word. She hung them by his elbow, stepped back out of the gate line, and didn’t say anything, because chains didn’t need anything said about them. Tuesday, Thursday, now Friday, three days in his alley with her at the headgate and him at the tail, and she’d given him every cattle word there was and not one other kind.

He got the loops above the joints and worked the calf’s hips around and stood back for the heifer to push.

“Pull with her,” he said. “Not against.”

“I know how to pull.”

She did. She took the handle beside him, leaned when the heifer strained, and the calf came in two long pulls, hips, ribs, then the head all at once, and it hit the ground wet and black and lay there like a sack. Olivia was on her knees in the muck before he’d got the chains off. She cleared its nose with two fingers, scrubbed its ribs hard with a twist of hay, and the calf jerked and snorted and blew. She sat back on her heels and looked at it, not at him.

“Breathing,” she said.

“Good.”

“Heifer calf.”

“Tag her and put her on the board.”

“I know what goes on the board, Owen.”

“Then put it there.”

He let the heifer out of the chute. She went straight to the calf, bawling, and started in licking, and he stood at the rail and watched a cow do the one job nobody ever had to teach her. Olivia got up, wiped her hands down her jeans, went to write the tag number on the board. Number, sex, dam, date, in a hand that was near enough her daddy’s.

The rest of the week was on that board. Heavies coming in off the trap two and three a day, pairs going back out with the calves tagged, older cows mouthed for age and sorted into the lots they’d sell in, Mabel and Opal both chalked into the good lot in Olivia’s hand. Five days since he’d said the thing at the creek. Three of them in this alley, with her handing him chains and calling counts, calling them right, calling him nothing at all.

“Same time Tuesday,” she said, at her truck, at dark.