Page 4 of Devoted

I’d hate to see you go, like something you’d write in a card. And the worst part was the way he said it, low and rough and wrong for the words, a bigger sentence cut short on purpose.

"Well," Olivia said. "Now I know."

She gave Judge’s head one more scratch, because none of it was the bull’s fault, and she walked back to her truck with her boots loud on the frozen ground. Owen followed her partway and then stopped, the way he always stopped, some line in the dirt only he could see. While she was climbing in he came the last few steps, reached across the windshield, and broke the ice off her wiper blade with two cracks of his fist, first one, then the other, and knocked the pieces off the glass, and stepped back with his hat still in his hand.

"Roads’ll be slick till ten," he said. "Go easy on the low spot."

"Goodbye, Owen."

"I’ll see you, Liv."

She pulled out of his gate onto the county road, and in the mirror he stood where she’d left him, in the cold, bareheaded, watching her truck the way she’d have given a year of her life to be watched across a room at seventeen. She looked away from the mirror and drove.

Halfway home the sky finally made up its mind, and the light went the color of a bruise out over the seam, and the first spits hit the windshield and quit again, the way January rain out here promised more than it paid.

He felt something. She’d known it for thirteen years and she’d proved it again this morning, watched it climb nearly to the surface of him and get folded away with his own two hands. It had been enough, once. It had been enough for years, being felt something about, living off catalogs and Aprils and half seconds, telling herself a quiet man needed room and time. He’d had rooms of it. He’d had thirteen years of time. This morning she’d stood in his pens and asked him straight out, out loud, plain as she knew how to make it, and he’d handed her the school.

Whatever it was he kept behind that face, he had never in thirteen years picked it up and brought it to her, and a woman could get old waiting on a man to choose her. She wasn’t going to get old doing it. She was going to pack her mother’s house, finish out her school year, and go somewhere nobody had ever watched her across anything.

She turned in at her own gate. Down at the barn the pump was running, and it was still running when she got out of the truck, pulling air by the sound of it, chugging like it was sucking through a straw. She stood in the cold listening to it and added it to the list of things quitting on her this year.

Thirteen years she’d waited for that man to give her one reason to stay. June was four months off, the water was going wrong under her feet, and it looked like rain.

CHAPTER TWO

Owen Royston stood in his family’s cattle yard with his hat in his hand and watched her truck until the county road took it, and then he watched the empty road.

The cold got into him by degrees. His ears had gone past hurting, his bare head was wet where the mist had started, and he put the hat back on, picked up the axe, and went down the trough line breaking ice that was already broke.

Judge came along the rail with him, the whole quarter mile of pen, the way he did when he’d decided a man was more interesting than hay. At the corner Owen quit pretending to work and stood there, and the bull stood there with him, close enough that his breath came up warm off the black hide, and the two of them looked east down the road she’d gone.

"That’s the only woman I’ve ever loved," he said, "and now she’s leaving," and the bull shifted his feet and blew.

"I know," Owen said to the bull. "I fucked that up."

He’d have caught trouble for talking to an animal if there’d been anybody in nine miles to catch him at it, and there wasn’t. There never was. The bull had been hearing it for years. Everything Owen had never said in front of a living soul had been said in this pen at one time or another, to a ton of the best-natured bull in the county, and Judge had kept all of it. In April the bull went east to her place and Owen stayed home, and that was as close as any of it ever got to reaching her.

He could still feel her arm.

Through a coat and a glove, which made no sense and didn’t need to. She’d slipped on the ice and his hand had gone out before his head had a vote, and for a second he’d had the weight of her, the whole living fact of her, held in one hand like something he’d been given. Then she’d got her feet and he’d made himself let go. He’d been making himself let go for thirteen years. He was good at it the way a man gets good at anything he does every day.

Give me a reason to stay.

She’d stood right there, past the second post, and asked him. Out loud. Looking at him. And he’d had the reason. It wasn’t even a long one. It had been sitting in his chest since he was seventeen years old, and he’d opened his mouth with her watching, and what came out was the school.

Owen set the axe down on the rail because his hands wanted something to wreck, and that wasn’t the axe’s fault, and he made himself stand still until the wanting passed.

Seventeen. It always went back there when he let it, and this morning there was no not letting it.

The summer he was seventeen there was a fire out at the creek the last Saturday in July, the way there was every year, and half the county’s kids were at it.

He’d driven out with his speech in his head, five months in the building. Since February, since Olivia Bateman started sitting across a library table from him three days a week pulling him through the math he’d flunked, and somewhere in the second week of it he’d quit thinking about the math. He’d built the speech line by line on the drive to the creek and said it to the windshield twice. It wasn’t much of a speech. It asked her to the harvest dance and it took eleven words, and he’d built it the way he built everything, slow, no shortcuts, meaning to stand behind it once it was said.

She was across the fire with the Simmons girls, laughing at something, her face going orange and dark and orange as the fire moved, and Owen sat on his tailgate with a warm beer he wasn’t drinking, waiting for his moment like a man waits on weather.

Brody got there first.

Not to her. To him. His cousin came across the grass with a beer in each hand and held one out.