Page 58 of Devoured

"You look better than I expected," Clay said.

"That's not saying much."

"How many head you running this fall?"

"About the same. Maybe down a little."

"Drought hit you harder than us?"

"Your water table's deeper," John said.

"...I know." And there was a whole world in the way he said it.

"You ought to come by some Sunday," Clay said, eventually. "Stephanie'd like that."

John looked out at the yard. "Maybe in the spring."

And Lara understood instantly that spring meant maybe never — and maybe, also, a little, hope. Which seemed to be the nearest thing these two brothers had left.

Clay put his hat back on, stepped off the porch, and crossed the yard toward his truck. His path took him right past Lara at the corner. He slowed half a step, touched the brim. "Ma'am." And kept walking. She didn't move until the truck had pulled out past the gate and the dust had gone back down to the road.

Then she climbed the steps and set her tray on the rail.

John was still looking at the gate. "You see all that?"

"Most of it."

"...Hm." A long silence, the band going down in the yard behind them. Then, quietly, still watching the empty road: "He used to be the best damn brother a man could ask for."

Lara didn't say anything. There wasn't anything big enough.

John lifted a hand toward her, and she came, and he took her hand lightly in his and looked up at her a long moment.

"Thank you for staying," he said.

And the weight inside the word staying nearly undid her, because all at once she could feel everything this family had survived, all the leaving, the brother who'd just driven out the gate and the wife who'd driven off a road and the long line of people who'd come onto this land and gone. Thank you for staying. Not just tonight. Not just the barbecue. Here.

She turned her hand over under his and held it. Then she let the old man rest.

Dean saw it on her face the second she came back into the yard.

He stepped out of the conversation he was in without a word of apology and came straight to her. "You okay?"

She nodded once. "He said thank you for staying."

Something shifted under the easy public version of him, something rougher. "Yeah," he said, low. "Well. He's not wrong to."

And he pulled her in against him right there in the middle of the dying barbecue, his chin on the top of her head, and held her like he already knew she belonged there.

The terrifying thing was how much she wanted to.

The barbecue wound down in stages — the light going long, the trucks pulling out one by one, the trestle tables coming down — until it was just family and the wreckage and the smell of dead smoke on the air. The cousins helped haul tables. Remi was washing the last of the platters.

It was Lara who took the kids up. Nobody assigned it to her; it just happened, the way things had started just happening lately. Levi face-down and boneless with exhaustion, Giana rubbing her eyes and pretending she wasn't tired, and Lara peeling them out of barbecue-stained clothes and into pajamas and through teeth-brushing on autopilot. Levi was asleep before she got the second sock off him. Giana held out longer, the way she did, wanting one more minute, one more thing told to her in the dark, until her sentences went soft at the edges and trailed off mid-word and she was gone too.

Lara stood in the doorway of their rooms a moment longer than she needed to, listening to the pair of them breathe, and felt the size of it move through her, that this had become hers to do, and that she'd wanted to do it, and that nobody had had to ask.

Then she pulled both doors to and went back down.