Page 66 of Devoted

"There might've been."

"In six years?"

"Weather's been mild."

"Owen Royston." She said it to the roof, not to him. "I can tell you've been practicing but you're still the worst liar in two families."

She went up on the porch. The old well was behind the windmill, cased in iron with a plank over it. He moved the plank and let the weight down. The cord ran through his fingers to the tape mark, past it, on, and caught. He pulled it up. A foot and a half of dry cord between the tape and the wet.

"Well?" she said, from the porch.

"It's down."

"How far?"

"Enough."

"Owen."

"Foot and a half since I marked it. September." He coiled the line. "It's coming this way. Brody says it'll come till they quit."

"You took it to Brody."

"He reads water."

"He works for the man who's drawing it."

"He knows that." He put the plank back. "He knows it better than I do."

The rain came while he said it, over the rise from the north, a grey wall of it with the sun still on the porch and then not, April rain coming straight down and then sideways. She went in the door and he came in after her, and the road out was gone before he'd got it shut. Two ruts through grass went to gumbo in ten minutes and stayed that way till the sun dried them.

She stood in the middle of the room with the rain on his roof over her head and looked at the stove, the bunk with the blanket folded on it, the table.

"We're here a while," he said.

"I know what gumbo is."

"Could be two hours."

"Could be all night. I've lived here thirty years, Owen, I've seen it rain." She sat down on the bunk. "There's wood?"

"There's wood."

"Then make a fire."

He made a fire. He did it slow, because it was something to do with his hands, and she watched him from the bunk, and the rain on the tin was loud enough that nobody had to say anything, until it caught and there was nothing left to do but stand up. He stood up.

"Every April," she said.

He stayed where he was.

"Eleven Aprils. You brought that bull to my gate at daylight and he walked into my trap like it was his. Then you checked the latch. You put your hand on it and worked it, twice, and it's a bad latch, Owen. It's been bad since I was nineteen. And you'd stand there with your hand on it." She stopped. The rain came down. "And you'd get in your truck."

"Liv."

"You could've said it was going. That latch is going, I'll come by Saturday and fix it. I'd have been at the gate." She was looking at the fire. "On any April morning at that rail you could have said the thing about the latch and I would have been yours before dinner." Her voice had gone. "Do you understand that? The latch. That's all it would have taken."

He couldn't say any of it. He had his word in it, thirteen years old, wrong the day he gave it and kept every day since, and his cousin's face under a bulb not asking, and he stood in the one room he'd ever built for her and couldn't get six words out about a gate.