Page 64 of Devoted

"I didn't come here for that."

"They'd never say why. They'd just quit having field work for me. And there's not another outfit from here to Midland that'd take a man who's done that to the last one. I know what you came for. I'm the only one who'd know what it said." Brody picked the bolt back up and turned it over. "Your daddy hired them."

"He did."

"And mine's turned that man's paper away at the door two years running and stood in this yard and told him so."

"I was there."

"I know you were. I watched you." He put the bolt in the can. "So which fence you standing on tonight, Owen? Because it's not the one you were born on."

Owen didn't answer, and Brody didn't wait for it. His uncle had shut a door on Burchall twice with his own hand, and his father had opened a gate to the same man's crews, and Owen had sat on his father's side of that at every table for thirty years. Now he stood in his uncle's shop with a notebook that said his father's water was coming up out of her ground.

"Give me the numbers," Brody said. "A copy. Not the book. I want to see it against what I've got at the office."

"You'll have it tomorrow."

"I'm not saying I'll write anything."

"I heard you."

"I'm saying I'll think." He looked at the can. "It's what's got me sorting bolts at ten o'clock. What's in the front?"

"Bull records."

"Show me Judge. Remi says he's thrown forty calves this spring off the pairs alone and I told her that's a lie."

"Thirty-eight."

"Close enough for Remi." Brody turned the book around and went through the front pages with a bolt for a pointer. "Birth weights. Every one. You weigh a calf in the mud at three in the morning?"

"Where else would I weigh him?"

"Most men guess."

"Most men are wrong."

"Ninety-one pounds. That's not a calf, that's a hog. Whose cow?"

"Mabel's. The last one."

"Mabel's got no business having a ninety-one pound calf at her age."

"Tell her."

"I've told her. She's not a listener." He turned a page, and then another one, and stopped with his finger on it. "This one's not cows."

Owen put his hand flat on the book and shut it with Brody's finger still in it.

Brody took his finger out and let him have it. He didn't ask. They stayed at the bench, quick, Brody talking and Owen answering short and Brody talking over the answer, the way they'd done everything before Brody got on a plane, and Owen forgot for twenty minutes that there was anything between them but a bench.

Then he put the notebook in his shirt, and Brody looked at him.

Just looked. He'd asked the question with his hand on Owen's truck in March and got his answer, and now he didn't ask it again, and Owen watched him not ask it. Owen couldn't tell what was in the man. Whether he wanted her, or was playing at it because he'd always played at everything. He'd answered first.

"Copy tomorrow," Brody said.

"Tomorrow."