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"Overworked. Some outfit's been pumping it since '09 faster than it can give, and now they want to know why it's quit on them, and they've sent me to tell them what they already know so they can say a man in a hat said it." A door shut, on his end. "You came out to the truck this morning."

"I brought you coffee."

"You walked across a yard barefoot in the dark to bring me coffee."

"You'd have bought that motel coffee. I've had motel coffee."

"I bought it at four this afternoon. It's terrible."

She'd stood in the yard after, with the house dark behind her and the old man's light not on yet, till his taillights went under the cattle guard, and she'd known then what the fourteen days were going to be like, and gone in and made breakfast for nine anyway.

"Sunny."

"What?"

"Nothing." She heard him lie down. The bed on his end made a noise, and then his breath, close, the way it was in the dark at the end of the hall. "Tell me about the house."

So she told him about the house. Levi had found a second lizard and was keeping the two of them apart in case they fought. Giana had finished a book with four hundred pages in it and started it again. Lara's feet. Remi had come in at dark and eaten standing up. The old man had gone around the table and not skipped anybody, because there was nobody to skip, and she'd watched him get to the empty chair and go past it, and it had taken him a second longer than the others.

"He went past it."

"Slowly."

He didn't say anything for a while. Then he said, "Tell me about the belt," and she said, "What belt," and he said, "Any belt. Tell me anything. I'll go to sleep to it," and she lay there with the phone on the pillow and talked about the chart until she heard him breathing slow, and then she said his name, and he didn't answer, and she lay there another minute listening to a man sleep in Odessa, and hung up.

She put the phone on the nightstand. She turned the fan up. She didn't sleep for a while either.

Indiana called the fourth night at nine-thirty, while she was in the office with Lara and the ledger.

She saw the number. Lara saw her see it.

“Somebody selling something,” Sunny said, and turned it over, and it buzzed against the desk, and stopped, and buzzed again, and Lara looked at it and looked at her and didn’t say a word, thoroughly, and Sunny picked it up and held the side button till it went dark.

“There,” she said. “Now they can’t.”

“Sunny.”

“It’s fine.”

“I’m not asking. I’ve never asked.” Lara put the ledger down. “But I’m thirty-four weeks and I’ve got a good deal of time to sit on a porch and think, and I’ve thought, and I’ll say this once and then I’ll go back to not asking. Whatever that is, it’s not a man selling something. And whatever it is, this house has five men in it and a sheriff twenty minutes off who’s never had a thing to do in his life and would like one. That’s all. Go get me some tea.”

Sunny went and got her some tea.

He called at eleven. He called at eleven and the phone was off, on the nightstand, dark, because she’d forgotten to turn it back on, and she found the missed call at six in the morning with the coffee on and stood in the kitchen and said “Fuck” out loud to the pot.

She called him back. He didn’t pick up; he’d be at the field. She left nothing. Then she typed phone died, sorry, tonight and deleted sorry, and sent it, and stood there with the coffee going and her thumb on the screen till it said tonight back.

One missed. Out of four. She counted. She’d have said she wasn’t going to count and she counted.

“How’s Brody getting on out there,” John said, on Tuesday, into his coffee.

The table stopped.

She’d been at the stove. She had the pan in one hand and the spatula in the other and she stood there and didn’t turn around, because if she turned around she’d see Dean’s face, and Chase’s, and Remi’s, and she’d have to do something with her own, and she wasn’t sure she could.

The old man had asked. About Brody. At his table. Lara had told her once, on the porch, that nobody in that house had heard John Royston ask one question about his second son since February, and it was October, and he’d asked it into his coffee the way he’d have asked about weather, and he’d asked her.

She turned around.