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"I remember what you did."

"I'm not taking a house, Mama."

"Then take the money."

"No."

Edna let that sit about as long as she ever let anything sit.

"Say what you're doing, then," she said. "Out loud, to me, sitting here. I've a right to it. I've got a moving van Wednesday."

Olivia put the phone down on the step.

"I'm staying," she said. "I'm going to live in this house and I'm going to run this place."

"With what?"

"I don't know."

"That's not an answer, Olivia."

"That's all I've got." She heard how it came out and she didn't take it back. "I've got no cattle. I sold every head my daddy ever bred and I signed the sheet myself. I've got a well that's down six feet and dropping and a pump that runs four minutes before it catches. I've got a hundred and forty dollars a month I don't spend and a job that starts back the third week of August." She said it flat, with her hands still. "And I've got four sections of my daddy's grass with nothing standing on it, and I'm not handing it to a man from Big Spring so I can live behind a church in a house with a carport."

"You'd have a yard."

"I've got a yard."

"You've got a hundred and sixty acres of yard and no lawn mower."

"Mama."

"I'm agreeing with you," Edna said. "I'm doing it in my own way, so let me."

Olivia shut her mouth.

"Your daddy came to this place at twenty with two bulls and eleven cows and a borrowed rig," Edna said. "I've heard about it every day of my married life. He didn't have a well then either. He had a hole and a windmill and me."

"He had you."

"He had me telling him he was a fool. It's the same thing at that hour of the morning." Edna got her cane up under her hand. "I'll take the money to Midland and I'll leave it where you can get at it, and you'll not touch it, and that's fine, and it'll be there."

"Mama—"

"I'm seventy-one and I've a sister in Midland who has been waiting eleven years to say she told me so, and I'd like to hear her do it." She got herself up an inch at a time. "Get that sign out of my fence line before the van comes. I won’t drive out of here past it."

It took her twenty minutes and a shovel.

Nathan Greene's man had put it in properly in February. Two steel posts, a foot and a half down in dirt that had set around them like a floor. It didn’t want to come. She dug one side and rocked it. She dug the other and rocked it again. It moved on the fourth go, and she pulled it up out of the ground with both hands and the back of her legs.

She carried it up the drive and put it behind the barn where the panels were.

Then she went in, washed up, made a sandwich, ate it standing. There was still no table in that kitchen. Boxes on it, and one chair.

His truck turned in at six.

She was at the counter with the last of her mother's plates out of the newspaper and stacked in twos. She heard the guard and did not go to the window. Then the screen went, and she heard him take his hat off in her mother's hall.

"Liv."