Page 88 of Devoted

Herrera swung the gate and pinned it and got his sheet out. She signed it against the side of the truck with a pen that hardly worked and printed BATEMAN under her name because the line said to.

"That's your copy."

"Thank you."

"You want me to leave the gates or take them?"

"Take them. There's nothing coming back."

"Ma'am." He put his hat on. "It was a good bunch of cows."

"They were my daddy's."

"I know it," Herrera said. "That's why I said it."

He got in. The truck went out the drive slow with sixty-one head standing in it. It slowed at the cattle guard and then it didn't, and she could hear it on the road a good while after she couldn't see it.

Forty years. Her daddy started the line at twenty, with two bulls and eleven cows off his own daddy's outfit, and built it the rest of his life. It took an hour and ten minutes to put it on a truck.

She stood at the gate until there was no reason to.

Edna had come out on the porch in a coat, in June, because she was not going to watch this through a window. She put her hand out when Olivia came up the steps. Olivia took it. It was cold and it was thin and it held on.

"Well," Edna said.

"Well."

"Your daddy wouldn't have watched this. He'd have found a gate wanted fixing."

"He'd have found four."

"He'd have found four and made me hold the wire." Edna let go and got her cane under her. "I'll put the coffee on."

"I've got the barn to do."

"The barn'll keep."

"Mama."

"The barn will keep, Olivia. Come in the house."

She came in the house.

Wednesday she caught herself washing a window.

The house was sold and the glass was going with it. She'd got a bucket and a rag from under the sink and done two panes before she noticed what she was doing. She quit. Then she did the rest of them anyway, because the other thing to do was sit down.

"That's a nice thing you're doing for the man from Big Spring," Edna said, from the table.

"He's getting a clean window and a dry well. One makes up for the other."

"You've not made a joke since May."

"I've been busy."

"You've been washing a window that's leaving." Edna turned a page of a paper she wasn't reading. "Charla rang. Ten o'clock tomorrow at Greene's. She'll bring the pen and you can stay home."

"I'll be in the room."