Page 43 of Devoted

"Nobody wants to see Jett. Jett comes to you, that's how Jett works."

"I wanted to."

"Yeah," Brody said. "That's what I'm saying."

Owen went around to his door. Brody came around with him, no hurry, and stood between Owen and the handle without seeming to.

"I've been watching you since I got home," Brody said. "You know that. You knew it at the party."

"There's nothing to watch."

"There's plenty. You stand at the fence and count things. You've got her cattle in your pens and her mama's dishes in your truck, and you drive out at two in the morning for a heifer, and I heard about that off Pearl before I'd got my coffee. And you stood at Harvey's bar the whole time I had her on the floor and turned a bottle."

"You were watching me. Not her."

"I was watching both of you." Brody said it light. He said everything light, and it had never been less than what it was. "So I'm going to ask you straight, because I'm a straight-asking kind of guy, and you can tell me to go to hell." He looked at him. "You in love with her?"

The yard light from the big house came through the mesquite a long way off. Owen stood with his hand on the cold door of his truck and looked at his cousin, the best friend he'd ever had, the boy he'd sworn to, the man who'd come home, and said it.

"Of course not. She's always been your girl."

Brody didn't say anything, and he didn't move, either. He stood there with his hands in his coat and looked at Owen, and Owen looked back and watched the thing happen in his face that he couldn't read, the grin gone out of it and nothing come up to take its place, and Brody's eyes went off him, east, toward the road and her gate at the end of it, and came back, and something was working behind them, slow, the way a man works a sum he already knows the answer to and doesn't like, and his mouth moved like he'd started a word, and he didn't say it. He looked at Owen a long time. Then the grin came back, a beat late, all the way up, and it didn't reach anything.

"Okay," Brody said.

"Okay."

"Go see Dad sometime. He counts trucks." He stepped back from the door and knocked on the hood, twice, and turned toward the house. "Night, Owen. Drive careful."

"Night."

Brody walked up through the mesquite toward the light, not hurrying. Owen stood by his open door and watched him go until the dark had him, and got in.

He drove home the long way, past her gate. The kitchen light was on. The sign was on the fence beside the cattle guard where it had been since February, and the pump was running.

His own yard was dark and the bull was a shape in the east pen. Owen shut the engine off and sat in the truck with the cold coming in and his hands on the wheel.

Two lies in thirteen years, both of them this week. One to her and one to Brody, the second one covering for the first, and the second one had come easier.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Saturday he had the tape out of his pocket before she’d shut her engine off.

He held it out across his tailgate, half a roll of it, white, without a word. She took it without touching his fingers, put her boot up on his bumper, did her own right hand, wrist to knuckles, three turns, tore it with her teeth. He’d done it for her Thursday. He wasn’t going to do it today, she wasn’t going to ask him to, and they both stood in his alley in the cold knowing it.

The left was harder. Her right hand was already wrapped and clumsy with it, so the tape went on crooked over the split knuckles and gapped at the little finger, and she knew it was wrong while she did it and pressed the end down anyway. He stood three feet off with his hands in his coat pockets, watching. She saw him see the gap. She saw his right hand come half out of the pocket and go back in, and she saw him look at the pens instead.

“Pairs,” she said.

“Nine left. Then the trap’s done.”

“Then bring them.”

He brought them. She caught, he tagged, she chalked with her bad hand and it came out readable. The wind was down, the sun had some weight in it, the calves came up the alley bawling, and the two of them worked nine cows through a chute without saying one thing that wasn’t about a cow.

“Sixty-one. Heifer.”

“Tagged. Out.”