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“I’m thirty years old.”

“I know how old you are.”

“I’m not seventeen. I’m not going to ride around in your truck to make a man look at me.”

“You sure?”

“It’s beneath me.”

“Is it?”

"I told him in that barn I was done letting him kiss me and call it a mistake. And this is just another way of letting him, it's letting him with a bow on it."

“It’s that too.” Brody said. “Every word you’ve said is true. You want to tell me no, I’ll go in and thank your mama for the pie and drive home, and it’s the last you’ll hear of it. You asked what I wanted to do with it. I told you.”

The calf gave up on the bag and lay down in the grass. She watched it do that. She thought about the barn, and the quiet, even, dead way he’d said it, and the sign at the gate, and June, and the box of her daddy’s things in the front hall she still hadn’t taped shut.

He’d told her he felt nothing. She was leaving in June. She’d played every honest card she had, at seventeen and at twenty-two and in a barn at thirty, and this was the only card left on the table, and it was a low one, and she knew exactly what picking it up made her, and she picked it up.

“What’s in it for you?” She said. “Straight. Don’t do the thing with your face.”

“I want to see him confess. He’ll never come straight out and say it.” No hesitation. “I’ve been gone seven years. I came home to a family that’s got along fine without me, and I’d like to be useful to somebody for a change. And I owe you one. I left you standing at a fence.”

“You were kind at the fence.”

“I was kind for a whole day and then I left the country. It’s not the same thing.”

She heard it. There was something under the three true things he’d said that he wasn’t saying, and it was about Owen, and it had been on his face since Friday, and she stood at her own fence and let it go by, because she wanted the card more than she wanted the truth about the man dealing it.

“Wednesday,” she said. “I’ve got school till three. Not Harvey’s. Not yet.”

“Lamesa, then.”

“Lamesa. The steakhouse. And Brody.” She looked at him. “You don’t touch me past what it takes.”

“Bateman,” he said, and the grin came back, all the way this time, into his eyes, “I’ve never touched a woman past what it took in my life.”

“That’s the least true thing you’ve said today.”

“Yes ma’am. Wednesday. I’ll bring the truck.”

“You’ve only got the one truck.”

“I’ll bring it anyway,” he said, and went up to the house to thank her mother.

The steakhouse in Lamesa sat on the highway with a gravel lot and a neon steer in the window, and on a Wednesday at six it was half full, so every table could see the door.

He’d driven. His truck, his radio, his hand off the wheel now and then to point at something on the road that didn’t need pointing at, and she’d sat in the passenger seat with her taped hands in her lap and her stomach where it went before a parent conference. He came around to get her door and she was already out, and he said, “You’re ruining my whole approach,” and put his hand flat on her back, between her shoulder blades, and walked her through the door with it.

Every head in the room came up. She felt them come up. She felt them go back down, and then half of them came up again, slower, and stayed.

“Two,” Brody said, to the girl at the stand. “Somewhere he can see us.”

The girl looked at him. She looked at Olivia, and her whole face changed, and Olivia knew her by the change before she knew the face. It was Delia Voss all over again at twenty, the same long jaw, the same eyes that missed nothing at church.

“Miss Bateman,” the girl said.

“Kenzie.” It came up out of some drawer in her head. “You’re home.”