Page 56 of Devoted

"You've had it coming since grade school."

"That's what he said." He held the left one. "Coffee's on the tailgate. Get you some before he works you."

"I'm not late. I said one."

"You said one. We started at noon. He was out here at eleven with the sheet, and I've been reading your board back to him off the fence ever since like a boy in Sunday school."

"He can read?"

"He can read his own hand. He can't read your daddy's. Nobody can."

"I can."

"You're the only one, and you weren't here, so I got put on it." He let go of her hand. "Go on. He's waiting to say your name."

She put her hand in the glove. Down at the chute Owen had a cow caught and his thumb in the corner of her mouth, and he read her teeth, let her go, and said without looking up, "Olivia."

"Owen."

"Sheet's on the tailgate with the coffee. Lots are marked. Mabel and Opal are in the far pen. I want them last."

"I can read a sheet."

"I know you can."

"Anything else?"

"Bring your board up when you come. Brody's been guessing."

"I have not been guessing," Brody said. "I've been reading it from here. It's forty feet."

"It's twenty."

"It's forty to a man in borrowed gloves."

Owen went and got the next one. Polite. He'd said Olivia and touched his hat brim and gone for a cow, and there wasn't a thing in it she could have pointed at. She'd have taken careful over it. She'd have taken anything.

The sale sheet was on the tailgate under a rock. Thursday's, eleven head, every cull priced, and he'd brought it to her mama's table last night with the check and left before the biscuits were out. Under it was his own sheet in his square hand, the good lot split three ways by age, the old ones sold as pairs. At the bottom, Charla Denton's name, a phone number, Tuesday the sixth, ten a.m., with a circle around it.

He'd planned her whole herd on one sheet of paper. She'd have done it exactly the same, and she couldn't have said which of those made her madder.

Brody came down the catwalk with the thermos lid, put it in her hand full, and it was Edna's coffee. She could smell it.

"Your mama sent it," he said. "I went by."

"You went by my mama's on the way to Owen's?"

"It's on the way to everything."

"It's the wrong direction."

"Then I went the wrong direction." He grinned. "Drink it. Then come tell me which of these old girls goes in lot two, because he says the tag, and I say the age, and then we both stand here."

"You call the lot. It's on the sheet."

"It's your herd, Liv. I'm not calling your lots."

"He is."