Page 77 of Devoted

"Dean'll say it and then he'll put you on a horse."

"That's about right." He took his hand off the bull. "And you?"

Owen looked at the pen and didn't answer.

"I'm not going to tell you what to do about her."

"I know you're not."

"I've got one thing to say about her and it won't help you and I'm going to say it anyway." Brody picked the bottle up and looked at the level in it. "She's not going to make this easy on you and she shouldn't. Whatever she says to you next is going to be exactly what she means. I've never seen that do a man one bit of good."

"No. I don't guess it will."

Owen put his bad hand on the rail and let the pipe be cold on it, and said it to the pen. "I said it in a lot," he said. "Where nobody could hear. She was right that it was the wrong place. I don't know how to say it anywhere else. I've been at it since I was seventeen. I've said it to a windshield and a bull and one time in a lot, and I'm going to have to learn how to say it out loud where a person can hear me, and I don't know how."

"That's the most words I've heard out of you since the shop."

"It's all there is."

Brody didn't say anything for a minute. He looked out at the dark past the pen where the county was, and then he turned around and put his back against the rail.

"I'm going to say one more thing and then I'm going home."

"Say it."

"You're my best friend." He said it flat, the way a man says a fact he's tired of nobody knowing. "You've been my best friend since before either one of us could ride, and there is not one thing I have ever wanted for you in my life but for you to be happy. That's the list. There's nothing else on it and there never was, not at seventeen, not on that fence, not in seven years of phone calls." He turned his head. "And if it's her, then good. I'm not being big about it and I'd not have you thanking me for it either. I'm glad. I'd stand up at that wedding in September and mean every word of it, because I care about that woman too, and she's been out on her daddy's place waiting on you since she was seventeen for the same reason you've been standing at her gate. Me. A drunk kid who quit wanting it years before either one of you noticed."

Owen had his eyes on the bull and he wasn't seeing him.

"You asked how to say it out loud," Brody said. "You start with her. In the daylight, where somebody can hear you, and you keep on saying it till she believes it. That's the whole of my advice and it's free, and I'm going to charge you for it the rest of your life."

"Brody."

"Don't." He pushed off the rail. "You'll say something quiet and true and I'll have to drive home with it."

"All right."

"Well." Brody looked at what was left in the bottle, an inch and a half of it, then turned it over and poured it out on the ground between the posts, slow, all of it, into the dirt. He stood the empty bottle on the rail.

"I'm not quitting him," he said. "I'm going to make him quit me. It reads better."

"It reads about the same."

"Not on paper." He stood the empty bottle on the rail. "If I quit, I'm a man who walked off. If he puts me out, he's a man who put out the geologist that filed on him. One of those is worth something to somebody later."

He went back across the yard to his truck. Owen stayed at the rail. Brody opened his door and stood in it a second with the dome light on his face, the lip black in it. Then he shut the door, came back across the yard, put his hand on the back of Owen's neck, once, hard, took it off, got in the truck, and went down the drive without his lights on till he hit the cattle guard.

Owen took the empty bottle off the rail and went in the house and turned on every light in it.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The tape gun was the loudest thing in the house.

Olivia ran it down the seam of another box and the sound tore through rooms with nothing left in them to soften it, no curtains in the front room, no rug in the hall, and in the kitchen her mother stood at the open cabinets with her cane hooked over one arm, sorting fifty years into two piles.

"Midland," Edna said, and set the white platter on the table. "Church sale." The green one went in the box at her feet. "Church sale. Church sale. Midland."

"That's the good bowl, Mama."