Page 74 of Devoted

"Go on and ask me."

"What'd you say to me at that trailer?"

"You know what I said."

"I want to hear you say it sober."

"I'm not sober. I had two at Dad's before I could get in the truck." He looked at the bull. "I'm asking her tonight, cousin. That's what I said. I said it with my head on one side so you'd know I meant it."

"Were you?"

"No, I wasn't."

"Then why'd you say it?"

"Because I've been at you since Lamesa and you stood there. I walked her into Harvey's with my hand on her back and you drank your beer. I sat with her in church, Owen, in your mama's pew, near enough, and you looked at the hymnal. I put my hands on her cap this morning forty feet off your fire. You set an iron on a calf and went back for another one." He touched the lip and looked at his fingers. "So I walked over to the trailer and told you the one thing I figured you couldn't stand there for. I picked it. I'd pick it again. I wanted to see what you'd do when you thought she was gone. I found out. In front of Dad, Helen, the church, every ground man on the place, and it was a fist."

"And after. When you got up."

"I told you it had taken you long enough." He put his tongue against the lip and left it. "I meant that part."

"You could've asked me."

"I did ask you. Friday night at Jett's, with my hand on your truck. You looked me in the face and lied."

Owen took the bottle off him. "I told her."

Brody didn't turn his head. "Told her what."

"After. At her truck. I told her all of it." He drank. It didn't help. He set it down. "The tailgate. That you said it first, and asked me to keep it quiet, and made me swear it twice, and I swore it twice."

"That's all I asked you for."

"I know it."

"Then what did you tell her you'd done?"

"That I'd made her yours."

Brody put both hands on the pipe and left them there.

"She said you'd said one sentence drunk at seventeen and I'd turned it into a deed," Owen said. "She's right. It's what I did, and you never asked me to."

"Thirteen years."

"Every April."

"Off a thing I said with my arm over my eyes and three beers past my limit." Brody's voice didn't go up. It went down. "I'll give you this much, because I'm not going to sit here and lie to you tonight of all nights. It took a while. I didn't walk away from that fence whistling. It took me years and I made a fool of myself more than once getting there." He turned his head. "But I got over her, Owen. I got there. And by the time I got there I could see it for what it was, which was a schoolboy crush. A kid at a fire who liked a girl because she told Coach Hardy he'd spelled Wednesday wrong."

"You called it love."

"I was seventeen. At seventeen I'd have called my truck love." He put both hands back on the pipe. "And not one day of it, not one day in all that time, did I sit somewhere on the other side of the world and think, well, at least Owen's not having her either. You think that's what I wanted? You think I wanted you standing at that woman's gate every April with your hat in your hand, holding a place in a line I quit standing in before I was twenty-two?"

"You made me swear."

"I made you swear not to tell people. I was a drunk kid and I didn't want the county laughing at me." His voice came up now and he let it come. "I never asked you for thirteen years of your life. I wouldn’t have asked a stranger for that. I never once thought you'd deny yourself, or her, or the pair of you, over one sentence out of my mouth, and if I'd had the first idea you were paying it I'd have got on a plane and told you to your face what I'm telling you now, which is that it's fucking stupid, Owen. Stop. It's the stupidest thing I have ever heard a grown man say out loud, and I've sat and listened to Chase."

"It wasn't stupid at seventeen."