Page 5

"You’ve already got one," Brody said.

"I’m driving."

"You’re always driving." He looked at Owen’s full warm bottle, took it off him, and replaced it with the cold one, which solved nothing and was very Brody. Then he climbed up on the tailgate and lay back flat in the truck bed with his boots still hanging off the gate, three beers past his limit and happy as a dog in a creek. For a while he didn’t say anything at all.

Then he put his forearm over his eyes, and said it up at the sky.

"I’m in love with Olivia Bateman."

The fire popped. Somebody down by the water was failing to start a dirt bike.

"Since ninth grade," Brody said, to the inside of his own arm. "First day. She had on a green shirt and she told Coach Hardy he’d spelled Wednesday wrong on the board, and that was it, that was the whole thing, I was done." He laughed at himself, easy, the way Brody could always laugh at himself. "I’m going to ask her to the harvest dance. Soon as I figure out how a man does that without dying."

Owen sat on the tailgate of his own truck with his speech going cold in his chest and did not say one word.

"You can’t tell anybody." Brody lifted the arm and looked up at him, and under the drunk he was seventeen and scared, and he was Owen’s best friend in the world, and there was nobody else on that tailgate he’d have said it to. "I mean it. Not Mason. Not anybody. Swear it."

"I swear."

"Swear it again."

"I swear it, Brody."

"Okay." Brody let his head drop back against the truck bed and blew out a long breath, a man who’d set something down. "Okay."

Across the fire Olivia stood up and dusted off her jeans and said her goodnights, and the two of them watched her daddy’s flatbed pull out of the pasture and up onto the county road. When she braked at the cattle guard one brake light came on, just the one, the left, and the right stayed dark.

"One brake light," Brody said. "Somebody’s going to run clean into the back of that girl someday."

"Somebody ought to fix it."

"You’d have to get past her daddy first. That old man would rather be hit." Brody grinned at the stars. "I’ll put it in the speech. ’Olivia Bateman, I love you, and your truck’s a menace.’ That’s romantic. Girls like a man who notices things."

Sometime that fall both lights worked again. Nobody ever asked who’d been under the truck, and nobody under it ever said.

Four days later he sat down across from her at the corner table with the retake test four weeks out and parts of it he still couldn’t do.

"Show me the second line," Olivia said.

"The second line’s fine."

"The second line is where you quit working and started guessing. Show me."

He showed her. She put her chin in her hand and read it upside down, which she could do, and made the small noise she made when he’d got there the hard way, and Owen had five months of this behind him and would have sat in that chair until they turned the lights off.

Then Brody came in.

He came in the way Brody came into anywhere, at speed and looking for somebody. He’d been sent to find Owen about a stock trailer. He got three steps into the room and forgot the trailer entirely.

"Olivia Bateman."

"Brody Royston."

"You going to the harvest dance?"

The librarian looked up.

Two tables over, one of the Simmons girls stopped pretending to read.