Page 6 of Devoted

Olivia stared at him. "That’s four months away."

"I know."

He had his hat in both hands. He turned it once, slowly, his thumb working along the brim.

"I’ve been thinking about it."

"Since when?"

That made the red climb. It started at his collar and went all the way to his ears.

Olivia’s heart gave one hard, inconvenient thump.

He looked at the floor, then at her, and somehow managed to keep looking.

"Long enough that I figured I ought to ask before somebody else did." He swallowed. "I’d like to take you."

The Simmons girl’s book had not turned a page in some time.

He glanced toward her, seemed to remember they were standing in a library with half the town’s daughters within hearing distance, and went redder.

"That’s all," he said. "That’s what I came in to say."

"Wasn’t what I came in for. But it’s what I came in to say, apparently."

Owen sat there with a pencil in his hand, and he had that sentence. He’d had it since February. He’d worked it out word for word on the drive out to the creek four nights ago and got as far as opening his mouth, and the man saying it now had said the other thing first, in the dark, with his forearm over his eyes, and had made Owen swear to it twice.

Olivia didn’t answer.

She looked at Owen.

Straight across the table, with a boy standing there holding his hat, and she waited. He knew she was waiting. He knew it at the time and he knew it thirteen years later and he had never in all those years let himself sit down and finish the thought about what she’d been waiting for.

Owen looked at the second line of his own working and said nothing.

Time went on as she waited and he said nothing.

"All right," Olivia said. "Yes."

Brody made a sound like a man who’d been holding his breath since the parking lot, and said something about Friday, and knocked a chair with his hip on the way out, and was gone before anybody could take it off him.

Olivia turned the book around and put her finger on the second line.

"Do it again," she said, "and this time write down what you’re doing."

He did it again. He got it wrong twice. She didn’t say anything about that either.

They went to the picture show in Lamesa, and again the week after, and to something at the church, and three weeks in it was over. Owen got the news at the feed store off Jett, who had it off Remi, who had it off Brody. What Brody had said was that they were better as friends, and that Olivia had been decent about it, and that he was not going to discuss it.

Brody never said why. Owen never asked him.

And Olivia came back to the corner table on the Tuesday and made him show his work, and didn’t look at him for the first twenty minutes, and by the end of the hour they were what they had been, and neither of them ever mentioned it again.

He passed the retake in August. He played football that fall. He went to the harvest dance on his own and stood along the wall and watched her dance with somebody’s cousin out of Lamesa, and it was years before he let himself call the thing at that table what it was. He had not been keeping his word to Brody. He had sat at a table and let a room go quiet while she waited on him, and he had gone on doing it every year since.

He’d driven Brody home that night, the night of the fire, with the windows down and the radio low and his cousin asleep against the door before they hit pavement, and somewhere on that road the thing had set in him the way concrete sets. Quiet, and for good. Brody had said it first. There wasn’t a court in Texas that would call that a claim, and it didn’t need to be one. It was his best friend, drunk and scared, handing him the one thing he couldn’t carry alone.

Seven years now Brody had been gone. Cards at Christmas. Money wired home whenever anybody out here needed it, and sometimes when they didn’t. A voice passed around the table on the phone at a wedding. And in seven years of postmarks and phone calls Brody had said her name exactly never, and a man that far past a thing didn’t guard it that careful, or that’s what Owen would have thought if he’d let himself think about it, which he didn’t.