Page 37 of Devoted

She loved Owen Royston. She was leaving in June, and he was right here.

The calf made it halfway up and sat down hard. The heifer kept licking.

“Owen.”

“Mm.”

“You going to look at me?”

“I’m watching the calf.”

“Why’d you come?”

“You called.” He said it like she’d asked why water ran downhill. He didn’t look over.

“I know I called. That’s not what I asked you.” She turned toward him in the straw. “Twice a week since February. My cows through your chute, your diesel, your trailer, your Saturdays. You never said why, and I never asked, because asking’s the one thing I don’t know how to do.” Her voice shook and she let it. “Tonight I did it. Two in the morning and you were in your truck before I finished the sentence. So I’m asking the rest while I’ve got the nerve.”

He’d gone still. All of him, the stillness he got in a pen with a bad-tempered bull, and he still hadn’t looked at her, and the calf fell over again, and she kept going.

“Why, Owen? Why do you come every time and stand a gate’s width off me like I’m wired hot. You kissed me like a man starving and then called it a mistake, and I let you.” Her wet hand went flat on the straw between them, near his boot. “I’m done letting you. Why can’t we try? I’m right here. Don’t you feel this too?”

He turned his head and looked at her, and she was close enough to see all of it. She watched it happen. The wall came down off his face for one whole breath, and what was behind it wasn’t new. It was old, worn-in wanting, years deep, so much of it that it scared her, and his weight shifted toward her in the straw, his shoulder coming off the boards, his mouth opening, her name starting somewhere in his chest and getting as far as the first sound of it. She watched him almost.

Then she watched him choose. His jaw set. His eyes went somewhere flat and rehearsed, everything open in him shutting back down one piece at a time, and he stood up out of the straw away from her.

“No, Liv.” Quiet, and even, and dead. “I don’t feel anything.”

“Look at me and say it.”

“I said it.”

“You said it to the barn. Look at me.”

He didn’t. “You’ve got a live calf and a heifer that’ll raise him. Get him on her in the hour.”

He picked up the chains. He put them in the box, and the handles, and the jug, unhurried, a man packing up after a job, and he didn’t go to the bucket. He took his box and walked out of the lantern light toward the barn door with the blood of her calf drying on him to the elbows.

She was on her feet without knowing she’d gotten there. “I don’t believe you.” It came out raw, loud enough the heifer swung her head, loud enough to carry out the door and across the dark lot after him. “You hear me, Owen? I don’t believe you. You’re a coward, Owen Royston.”

He didn’t stop. He didn’t turn around, and the dark had him, and she stood in the straw with her hands wet and the wind going at the tin and thought of the library, seventeen, looking at Owen down a table in a room full of people and waiting for one word, and him looking at his book. She hadn’t asked anybody for anything since. Tonight she’d asked twice, once on the phone and once in the straw, and she’d gotten her calf, and she’d gotten his answer.

She believed his face. She didn’t believe his mouth, not for a second, and it made no difference at all, because a man could want you with everything in him and still stand up out of the straw and walk, and he had. Whatever he carried around for her, and he carried something, she’d seen it, he wasn’t ever going to pick her over it.

Out in the lot his truck turned over. The lights swung once across the barn door and went. The calf got all four legs under him and stood, swaying, the heifer near licked him off them again, and across the yard the kitchen light came on in her mama’s window.

Judge calf. Of course he stood.

CHAPTER TEN

Wednesday came up grey over the pens, and Owen was already standing in it.

He'd scrubbed to the shoulder at the kitchen sink at four, stood under the shower until the water ran cold, and hadn't been to bed, because there was no sense lying down with what he'd brought home. He'd pulled her calf. He'd sat in the straw with her while it stood, and then she'd asked him, plain, with her wet hand on the straw by his boot, and he'd looked at her and told her he didn't feel anything.

Thirteen years he'd told her the truth. He'd told her one lie in all that time, at three this morning, with her calf's blood drying on his arms, and she'd called it what it was across the lot before he got to his truck. She was right. He'd stood in her barn and been a coward, known it while he did it, done it anyway.

He wasn't going to dress it up. He hadn't done it for her. He'd done it because he'd given Brody his word at seventeen, and Brody was home now, for good, and a man didn't reach across his own blood and take a thing off it. He'd known for years it was the wrong word to have given. He'd given it.

What he couldn't do was get her face out of his head. Not the words. Her face when she said them, when she'd quit believing his mouth and gone right on believing what she'd seen, and he'd let her.