Page 80 of Devoted

Olivia didn't move.

"He told Marge: the Royston boy fixed my girl's brake light on a Sunday and thinks nobody knows it. And I'm going to let him think it."

The fall she was seventeen. She'd driven that flatbed to the library three days a week with her hair up in a pencil, and Owen had sat across the table with a book he wasn't reading, and he'd been under her daddy's truck on a Sunday with a bulb in his pocket, and her daddy had stood at Marge's pass with his hat on and handed the whole of it to the one woman in town who'd never repeat it, and gone home, and said nothing. To her. Ever. He'd known what that boy was doing two years before he died, and he'd kept it the way the rest of them kept everything, and she'd carried egg cartons for a nickel and known nothing at all.

She put her hand flat on the step board and got her breathing level. Pearl let her, sitting in the good chair with her purse, looking out at the pens and asking her nothing.

"Did Mama ever know?"

"No. Marge to me, me to you. It never went another foot."

"Why'd he tell Marge at all?"

"That I can't tell you, honey. I carried it. I didn't write it."

Pearl stood up and got her purse on her arm, and Olivia stood too, because her mother had raised her, and the two of them faced each other on the porch with the pie on the rail between them.

"That's both things," Pearl said. "I'll leave you to your boxes."

"Pearl."

"You come sit at my counter before June, honey. The coffee's paid for as long as I'm pouring it."

She went down the steps and got in the Cadillac and backed the whole length of the drive with her arm over the seat, no hurry anywhere in her, swung onto the road, and was gone toward town.

The screen door went behind her.

"Well?" Edna said.

"She brought a pie."

"Pearl Whittaker put a church coat on to bring a pie."

"She wanted to say the place looks pretty."

Edna stood a second with her hand on the door frame. "All right," she said, and went back to her linen closet.

Olivia stayed on the porch and kept it, the same as every one of them had kept it. The pie sat on the rail with the thumbprint in the crust, plain as a signature.

Ainsley's truck came up the drive after dinner with her stock trailer behind it. She swung wide in the yard and backed the trailer toward the pens clean on the first try, and then she sat in the cab longer than a girl who backs a trailer that clean has any reason to sit.

Olivia went out. Down at the pen Duke had his head over the rail, watching the trailer the way a horse watches a trailer, with an opinion.

"Liv." Ainsley got down. She'd left her hat in the cab, and she came around the front of the truck and stood square. "I came about Duke."

"I figured, with the trailer."

"I'm not loading him yet. There's something I've got to say first, and you may want him off the place some other way once I've said it."

"Go on."

"You opened that envelope, so you know whose name's on the transfer and whose check it was. I'm not here to tell you that." Ainsley kept her eyes level and didn't dress a word of it. "I'm here to tell you when it started. In February, before the creek, Owen came and found me in our barn. He had cash and a number, and he asked me to buy your horse."

"Before the creek?"

"Four, five days before. He said you'd have to sell him by June, and he wasn't going to stand by while Duke went to a stranger's pen. He said give her your own reasons. Just don't give her my money."

"And you said yes."