Page 94 of Devoted

"You could have knocked on this door any winter of the eleven. There's coffee on in this house every day of the year."

"There is."

"Did you think I'd have run you off?"

"No, ma'am."

"Did you think Mick would have?"

He didn't get to that one fast enough.

"Mick thought a great deal of you," Edna said. "He said so at this table the spring before he died. He'd have told you himself if you had ever sat down at it."

Owen looked at the boards of her porch and didn't answer that one either.

"And in eleven years you never sat down." Edna sat back and let her hands lie on the cane.

"The catalogs," Owen said. "Every January since her daddy died."

"I've seen them. They come to my table."

"I mailed them from town."

"I know where the postmark is, Owen, I've had eleven of them." Edna's mouth went thin. "Why'd you mail it?"

"So I wouldn't have to put it in her hand."

"Four miles," Olivia said, from the step.

"Olivia—"

"No, Mama. I'm talking now." She didn't take her eyes off him. "Eleven Januarys I've taken that catalog out of the box at the end of that drive and stood there turning it over looking for a note. There was never a note. And you were four miles up the road with a pencil and a stamp."

"Liv—"

"Don't." Her voice went and she got it back and got her chin up with it. "You don't get to say my name and then quit. Keep going."

Owen looked at her a second. Then he went back to her mother, because that one was harder.

Brody got up off the step.

He came down the walk and stopped a little off Owen's shoulder, standing with him, facing the porch the same as he was, hands in his pockets. There was still a mark on his lip.

"He's telling it straight," Brody said, to the yard. "In case anybody's counting it up."

"Nobody asked you," Remi said.

"Nobody ever does."

"Brody—"

"One thing, and then I'll get back under that furniture." He said it light to his sister and then he wasn't light at all. "I said it first at that fire. I was drunk and I was seventeen, and I've had seven years to think about what it cost, and it didn't cost me a thing. It cost him. It cost her." He looked at the porch. "Miss Edna, I'd have got out of the way inside four hours if he'd asked me to. He never asked me."

He went back and picked up his end of the chest of drawers and held it, waiting on Mason, who wasn't moving either.

Owen looked at the step.

Olivia hadn't come down and she hadn't gone in. Keys in her fist, chin up, not crying, looking at him the same as she'd looked down that library table at seventeen.