Page 95 of Devoted

"The second of March," Owen said.

She knew it before he got the rest out. Her hand closed on the keys.

"Three in the morning. She called me and I came, and we pulled a live calf out of a heifer that was going to die." He didn't drop his voice for it. "Then she sat down in the straw with her hands still wet and asked me a plain question. And I looked at her and told her I didn't feel anything."

Nobody moved. Lauren set the lamp down on the path.

"That's a lie I told her. It's the only one." He said it to Edna, because he'd started this on Edna and he wasn't going to finish it somewhere easier. "Thirteen years, and I have told that woman one lie in the whole of it, and I told it in your straw at three in the morning with one of Mick's calves breathing between us and her hands still wet, and then I drove home and was back in my own alley on the Tuesday with a list of what she owed me for feed."

"Owen," Ainsley said. Just his name, from over by the boxes, and it came out wrecked, and she put her hand over her mouth after it.

He didn't look at his sister, because if he looked at his sister he was going to quit.

Ainsley came across and put herself next to him. She didn't say a word and she didn't look at him. She stayed.

"So." He looked at Edna, and then he looked at the step. "From today I talk in front of everybody, out loud, in daylight, for as long as you'll stand it."

Then he shut up.

She came down the steps.

All the way down and stopped in front of him with two feet between them. He'd had her closer than that twice in three months with no right to either time. He stayed where he was. Up close she wasn't as steady as she'd looked from the porch. She wasn't giving that away either.

"You said all that in front of my mother."

"I did."

"And your sister. And Remi. And Lauren, who’ll tell Mason any minute now."

"Yes."

"Why today?"

"Because I did it wrong last night."

"You did it wrong for thirteen years."

"Yes."

Behind her Mason and Brody set the chest of drawers down on the trailer floor without a sound.

"I want you to know something," she said. "What you just did is not nothing. You told six people the truth in my yard where I could hear you, and I'm not going to stand here and pretend that costs a man nothing."

"It's not enough."

"No. It isn't."

"Then tell me what is."

She looked at him a second. "You have never once asked me for anything."

"I've asked you plenty," Owen said.

"Which lot. How many head. Where's your gloves." She counted them off flat. "That's not asking and you know it isn't. And I answered every one of them inside a second, every time, for four months. You could have asked me anything on this earth standing in that alley and I'd have answered that too."

"Then I'm asking now."

"Not out here." She got her breath and kept it level. "Out here it's my mother and your sister and a man carrying my furniture, and every one of these people loves you already. There's a room in town that's been talking about the two of us since January. Earl's had you on that slate since the first week and he's got you at five to one against. Pearl has poured your coffee eleven years, and she knows every last piece of this, and she has never heard one word of it out of you."