Page 92 of Devoted

She went out at dark and put him up. She got the wire off the saddle first, and her hands were not steady doing it.

CHAPTER TWENTY

He was up at four and there was no sense calling it work.

He fed in the dark, because cattle don't care what day it is. He drank half a cup of coffee at his own sink and got the notebook out of the kitchen drawer. The bull program in the front. The water in the back. One page in the middle he'd written on in March and shut the drawer on.

Four lines. It was the whole of what he wanted, laid out the way he'd lay out a breeding program, and it had sat nine feet from his own back door for three months while she packed her mother's house into boxes.

He'd put a roof on a line camp at twenty-four and told his father it was for winter hands. He'd hauled a bull to her gate eleven Aprils and stood there about ninety seconds each time. He'd gone through the catalog every January and marked the good ones in pencil and driven four miles to town to mail it, so it would come to her in the post.

Every one of them he'd done where she couldn't see him do it. Last night he'd hauled a board out to her yard, and she'd read it and gone in the house.

He put the notebook in his shirt pocket and got his hat.

There were five vehicles in her yard by nine and the front door stood open with the screen hooked back.

Brody's truck. Lauren's van. Remi. Ainsley. A rented trailer backed up to the porch steps with half a house in it. Mason was coming down those steps sideways with the end of a chest of drawers, and Brody was walking backward under the other end telling him where his feet were.

Owen shut his truck door. Nobody in that yard picked anything back up.

He'd worked it out on the drive. Find her, say it, go. Now there were six people between him and that porch and a trailer half full behind them, and every one of them had heard some piece of this spring from somebody who wasn't him. He got out anyway.

Remi straightened off the tailgate with a box in her arms. Ainsley set hers down. Lauren stopped on the path with a lamp in bubble wrap and didn't pretend she wasn't watching. Brody put his end down on the step and got his breath.

Somebody had carried a chair out onto the porch for Edna. She was in it with her cane across her knees, running the loading from where she sat.

Owen came up the walk and took his hat off.

"Miss Edna."

"Owen." She looked at his hands. "If that's about the horse, he's in my barn and he's been fed."

"It's not the horse."

"Then it's my daughter, and she's inside, and she goes to town at half past nine." Edna put both hands on the cane. "You'd want to be quick."

"I'd rather say it to you first."

"To me."

"Yes, ma'am."

"I've got a trailer to fill."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Then why me?"

"Because it's your house," Owen said. "I've stood at the edge of it eleven years and I've not come up these steps once and told you what I was doing there."

Behind him somebody set a box down slow enough to make no sound.

"Well," Edna said. "Go on, then."

Past her, through the open door, he could see clean through the house. There was nothing left in it. He had been coming up this drive since he was nineteen and he had never once been inside it.

So he told her.