Page 11

"No," she said.

"No what?"

"Just no. Generally." Lauren picked her coffee back up, and there was something new in her face, something with a plan in it, and Olivia had been a teacher long enough to know exactly what a face with a plan in it meant and to fear it. "You came to my county line in November, all of you, and hauled me out of the worst year of my life whether I liked it or not. Pearl fed me. Your mother sent tomatoes. You talked to me at things when I stood in corners. Nobody asked my permission." She shrugged. "I’m not asking yours."

"Lauren. No."

"You said that already."

"I mean it. Whatever’s assembling behind your eyes, stand it down. I’m not a— I don’t need the county on this. There’s nothing to be on. I need to sell a herd and pack a house and finish a school year, and in about four months this is going to be a thing that almost happened once, a long time ago, to somebody who’s since moved."

"Okay," Lauren said, in the exact tone Edna had used at the stove, the tone that agreed to nothing.

Pearl arrived back at the booth with the pot, refilled both cups without being asked, and stood there half a beat longer than the coffee took.

"Whatever you two are settling," she said, "I’m in."

"Nothing’s being settled," Olivia said.

"Course not." Pearl and Lauren did not look at each other, which after thirty years of watching Pearl work a room was the single most alarming thing Olivia had seen all morning. "Eat your eggs, honey. Marge is watching through the pass."

She ate the eggs. They were, of course, perfect, and the pie after them, peach, in January, from fruit Marge had put up in the summer, and Olivia sat in the window booth of the diner she’d eaten in her whole life, in a town that had watched her not-happen at Owen Royston for thirteen years and said nothing to her face and everything to each other, and finished every bite.

At the register, Pearl had the phone tucked under her ear.

She was dialing.

CHAPTER FOUR

The sign went up on a Thursday, and Owen drove past it twice before noon without needing to.

FOR SALE, it said, white on green, with the agency’s number under it, planted at the Bateman gate where the school bus turned around, and the first time he passed it he was hauling feed to his own heifers by a road that wasn’t the short way. The second time he had no reason at all that would have survived a question, so he made sure nobody was there to ask one.

Sixteen days since she’d stood in his pens. The listing had taken Nathan that long to paper, and the county had spent every day of it talking, and now it was official, nailed to a post, facing the road. He read it at forty miles an hour, both times, and both times it said the same thing.

He went into Earl’s just before dinner for chute supplies. Earl’s at midday was full of the county, four trucks nose-in at the dock and a stove going in the back corner. Owen took a case of ear tags off the shelf, a jug for the sprayer, and a box of the long gloves that only get bought for one job, set it all on the counter, and Earl came out from behind the parts cage wiping his hands and rang it without a word until the last item, which he held a second longer than the ringing took.

"Big spring coming," Earl said.

"Big enough."

"Mm." Earl bagged the gloves. "Ticket?"

"Cash."

Earl looked at him. Everything that went through a man’s ticket at Earl’s was county property by supper, and everybody knew it, and a man paying cash at a store that had carried his family for forty years was a man hiding something, and that got noticed harder than anything on a ticket. Earl took the bills and made change and said nothing at all.

The board was behind him, up on the wall by the calendar where it had hung as long as Owen could remember, chalk on slate, the county’s open questions written out in Earl’s tilted hand with the odds beside them. Rain by Easter. The school board race. And under those, fresh, the chalk still bright:

BATEMAN PLACE GONE BY JUNE. 3 TO 1 YES.

Owen looked at it while Earl counted quarters into his palm. "Three to one," he said.

"It’s good grass and a bad year to sell grass." Earl closed the register. "June’s tight. Anybody wants the yes side of that, I’ll take their money."

Over by the stove, Wes Fewell was holding forth to two men about it the way Wes held forth about everything, and Owen heard the tail of it whether he wanted it or not. The herd, Wes was saying. Hundred and sixty head and no man on the place. Nobody’d papered those cattle since old Mick died, no records, no sort, and a buyer’d be a fool to pay better than kill price for a mystery. Shame, too. Mick’s cows. That old man could breed a cow.

"Kill price," one of the others agreed, comfortable, the way men agree about a thing that costs them nothing.