Page 3 of Devoted

"Nathan’s doing the sale. Mama will use whoever he tells her for the rest of it."

"And the cows. Who’s getting them ready?" He was looking at her now, working it the way he worked everything, front to back. "You can’t sell a hundred and sixty head off a photograph. They’ve got to be preg-checked, sorted, hauled. That’s not a Saturday job, Liv. That’s a spring."

"Then I guess it’s my spring."

"That’s not an answer, Liv."

"It’s the one I’ve got."

He looked at her a moment longer, and whatever he was going to say about that, he put it somewhere, and she watched him do it and could not for the life of her tell what shelf it went on.

"And you," he said. "Where are you in all this?"

"She says she’s buying me a house in town." Olivia laughed, and it came out with no laugh in it. "In my name. First money out of the sale. I’m supposed to be grateful, and the awful thing is I am. And then I stood in that kitchen this morning and realized that if the place goes, there’s not one thing holding me in this county but a classroom and a habit." She looked at him. "So I don’t think I’m staying. I think when school’s out in June, I’m gone too."

He went stiller than the waiting had been, all the way through, a man standing in his own pens with his breath hung in front of him, and his eyes came off the heifers and onto her and stayed, and for a couple of seconds nobody in that pen was breathing except the bull.

"Gone where," he said.

"I don’t know. Anywhere. Midland. Lubbock. Further. Schools everywhere need kindergarten teachers, that’s the one thing about me that travels." She was watching him the way she’d promised herself she wouldn’t. "Ask me the other thing."

"What other thing."

"Why I drove nine miles to tell you myself, this morning, before Nathan’s even signed on it."

The wind came down the pen line and moved the dust, and neither of them moved with it. Judge, done being ignored, threw his head and knocked her arm off the rail, and her boot slid on the frozen ground, and Owen had her before she’d finished slipping. One hand, closed around her forearm, holding her weight up like it was no weight at all. Through her coat and his glove there shouldn’t have been anything to feel. She felt it go up her arm all the same. She got her feet under her, and he didn’t let go for a beat past when she had, and then he did, and stepped back, and put his hand on the axe handle like the axe needed him.

"Careful," he said. "Ground’s slick."

"I noticed."

He looked at the ground. Whatever had been on his face when she said gone, he’d got it put away by the time she found it again, and there they were, the two of them all over, a man getting a thing put away half a second before she could read it.

She should’ve left it. She was cold, and her mother was sitting in a kitchen nine miles east being right, and there was a sane version of this morning where Olivia Bateman said something about the weather and got in her truck.

"Give me a reason to stay," she said.

Owen’s head came up.

"I mean it." Her heart was going like she’d run here. "You’re the man who knows everything worth knowing in this county. You know cattle, you know grass, you know whose water’s sweet and whose fences are incorrect. So tell me what you know about this. Give me one reason a thirty-year-old woman with no ranch anymore and no family left in it should stay in Soluno, Texas."

"Liv."

"That’s not a reason, that’s my name."

He took his hat off. She’d never seen him do that in a working pen in January in her life, and he did it now, turned it once in his hands, and looked at her over it, and she watched something come almost all the way up in that quiet face, up to just behind his eyes, close enough that her breath stopped to make room for it.

"The school," he said. "You’ve got that whole room of little kids. They send you those drawings. Wallace’s boy learned to read off you when the district said he wouldn’t. Any school in Lubbock would take you, sure, but you belong here in Soluno." He said the whole thing steady, plain, like a man reciting something he’d gone over. "That’s a reason."

"That’s the school’s reason."

"It’s a true one."

"I know it’s true." Her voice stayed level and she paid for it. "I asked for a reason and you gave me a true one. So I’ll ask you once more. Is there any other reason, Owen? Any reason at all?"

She let it sit there in the cold between them, the plainest thing she’d said to a man in her whole careful life, and she watched him hold it. His hand had gone tight on the brim of the hat. Down the pen a heifer bawled, the wind got in under the gate, Judge breathed at her sleeve, and Owen Royston stood there with everything he was good at all around him and looked at her, and looked at her, and said:

"I’d hate to see you go."