Page 50 of Devoured

She had errands in town at noon, and was coming out of the feed store when a woman held the door for her, stopped, and looked her over with frank, friendly assessment. Past fifty, put together in a way that took money and didn't advertise it, good slacks, a silk shirt, a watch with weight to it. The kind of woman who walked into a room already knowing where everyone in it belonged.

"You'll be Lara." She put her hand out. Firm, warm, brief. "Stephanie Royston. Clay's wife. I've been wanting to meet you."

Clay. The other side. The brother John didn't speak to, the whole invisible seam Lara had felt under every family scene and never been shown.

"It's nice to meet you, Mrs. Royston."

"Stephanie." A flick of a smile. "You've got John's books straightened out, I hear. And you're good to those children. Helen says so, and Helen doesn't hand that out." A small pause, weighted. "Levi was the spit of his grandmother as a baby. Kelly-Anne. Around the eyes. Did anyone tell you that?" Something crossed her face and was gone. "Anyway. I expect I'll see you at the fall barbecue. You'll come. Everyone comes." It wasn't quite a question.

"I expect I will," Lara said.

"Good." And she was past, into the cool dark of the store, with the air of a woman about to make four men's afternoons more organized than they'd planned on.

Lara walked back to the truck thinking: another Royston to learn, and that one runs things. She'd felt the steel under the silk plain as a struck bell. Wainwright money, somebody had said once. It showed. Not in the watch, in the certainty.

Pearl's was the worst of it, and Lara had known it would be, and went anyway, because the chicken-fried steak was the best in three counties and a woman had to eat.

"Well." Pearl had the coffee down before Lara's backside hit the vinyl, and the look on her face was the look of a woman who had been saving something up since approximately Saturday night and could not believe her luck that the subject had walked in under its own power. "Look what the cat dragged in. And glowing, too. Marge. Marge, come look."

"I am not glowing," Lara said. "I've been at the feed store. That's dust."

"Mm-hm." And here came Marge out of the kitchen, which Lara had learned by now was its own kind of event, the elder Whittaker sister rarely leaving her stove for just anybody, flour to the elbows, a dish towel over one shoulder, settling herself against the end of the booth to look Lara over with the warm unhurried thoroughness of a woman who said more with a raised eyebrow than Pearl managed in a paragraph. She didn't say a word. She just looked, and let the look do it, and the look said we both know exactly where you were Saturday night, sugar.

"It was a nice fundraiser for the volunteer fire department," Lara said, to the table at large.

"It surely was," Pearl agreed, refilling a cup that didn't need it just to stay in the conversation. "I heard the band was good. I heard the cobbler went fast. I heard"—she let it hang, savoring—"that Dean Royston walked in off that floor and cut in on a dance and didn't say one word, just took your hand, in front of God and the whole county." She set the pot down. "That boy. I’ve known that boy since he was knee-high and grieving and I’ve never seen his face do what I'm told it did Saturday night since before the good Lord took his mama." She looked at Lara, and under all the relish there was something genuine and fierce in it, something that had loved that motherless boy for thirty years. "Honey, a man hasn't looked at a woman like that in this town in longer than I can remember. If a man ever looked at me the way Dean Royston looked at you Saturday, I'd have booked the church before the band quit playing."

Marge made a low sound that might have been agreement and might have been laughing at her sister, and adjusted the dish towel, and kept looking.

"You two are as bad as each other," Lara said.

"It was a dance," Pearl agreed, in a tone that meant the opposite, and patted her hand once, warm and dry, and went to put in her order without being asked, because Pearl had known what Lara wanted since the third week and considered the asking of it a waste of both their time.

Lara ate her chicken-fried steak in the bright clatter of the place and found, a little to her surprise, that she didn't mind a bit of it.

Her sister called while she was driving back, and Lara put her on the speaker and let the familiar voice fill the cab over the flat gold country going by.

"Okay, I've decided, don't argue," her sister said, with no hello, which was how she'd opened every phone call of Lara's entire life. "I'm coming out there. I found a flight, it's already booked, I land Friday, you cannot stop me, I have already cleared it with work and lied to Mom about why."

"I wasn't going to argue."

A suspicious pause. "You weren't?"

"No."

"Who are you and what have you done with my sister." Another pause, sharper, the way her sister could go from clowning to dead-serious in half a breath, because they'd practically raised each other and there was no hiding inside thirty seconds of a phone call. "Lara. You sound…are you okay? You sound weird. You sound…oh my God. Oh my God. What's his name?"

"Friday," Lara said. "I'll have the room made up. Don't bring six bags, it's a one-room apartment over a garage."

"WHAT IS HIS NAME?"

Lara hung up on her, grinning, and let her call back twice and didn't pick up, which she'd pay for on Friday and considered worth it.

She was excited. Lit-up, can't-wait excited for her sister to come see the thing she'd built out here, the kids and the work and the man, the whole improbable shape of it. She wanted to show it off. She drove on toward the ranch and let herself want that, plainly, without picking it apart.

Nathan Greene came out late in the afternoon, which she knew meant something, because Nathan didn't drive out for nothing.

She was bringing coffee through to the kitchen when he and Dean came in off the porch mid-conversation, and she caught the tail of it ...approached the Hendersons, end of last week. About the rights under the north section. Same outfit, same shell, same patient money and Dean's "Let them try," dropped flat onto the counter as he reached for the cup she handed him.