with the big backyard. And he thought, with a hard, clean, almost pleasant certainty: No. Somebody has to say it. Better to say it straight and save us both the time. So he did not walk it back. He stood there with his hand up and his head still shaking, a little, and waited for the old man to turn around and go back down the steps.
The old man did not turn around.
He did not do anything at all, for a moment. He stood on the deck in the wind with the low sun behind him, so that his face was in shadow under the brim of the cap, and the light poured around the edges of him, around his shoulders and the line of his arms, making a kind of bright rim on the old canvas of his vest. Behind him, the sky over the plains had begun to change. The clouds had come up in the last hour from the southwest, enormous ones, piled up high and white on top and dark at the bottom, rolling slowly across the horizon like something being pushed. The light came through the gaps between them in long gold bars. Then, very slowly, the old man lowered his chin. It was a small movement, but it changed his whole face. With his head tipped down, the brim of the feed-store cap came down too, and the shadow of it fell across his forehead and his eyes, and from under that shadow he looked up at Tyler. He looked through the shade of the brim the way a man looks through a window. His eyes were pale, washed-out blue, the color of a sky that has been looked at too long, and they were set deep in a web of lines that went out from the corners of them like cracks in dry ground. They did not blink. A shaft of sunlight came sideways between two clouds and lit up one side of the old man's face, sharp, sudden, like a struck match. It caught the white stubble on his jaw and the deep creases around his mouth and the leathery, wind-scoured skin of his cheek, burnt the color of old saddle leather by fifty years of sun on the plains. The light flared at the edge of the brim, and for a second Tyler had to narrow his eyes against it. The old man hooked his thumbs into his belt. He did it slowly and deliberately, the way a man settles into a saddle, both thumbs sliding in behind the worn leather on either side of the big plain brass buckle, his hands hanging loose and easy from them. His shoulders came back a little. His weight shifted, and settled. He looked, suddenly, the way Tyler had seen men look in the old western movies his grandfather used to watch on Saturday afternoons: a man standing in the middle of a dusty street, not going anywhere, not in any hurry, perfectly comfortable with whatever happened next. The wind dropped. Just for a second. One of those strange sudden lulls you get in the middle of a gale, when everything goes quiet all at once, the flags falling slack, the grass in the planters going still. And into that quiet, the old man spoke. His voice was not loud. It was low and rough and very deep, a voice that seemed to come up out of his chest from somewhere a long way down, and it had a weight to it that his body did not. It was the voice of a man who had spent a great deal of his life talking over the noise of diesel engines and cattle and weather, and who had learned, at some point, that you did not need to shout to be heard over any of it. You only needed to mean it. " I didn't ask what you think I can afford. " Each word set down separately, like stones on a table. Then the wind came back, all at once, with a rush and a crack of flags, and the moment was gone. But Tyler had felt it. He had felt something, anyway — a small cold drop somewhere in the pit of his stomach, the feeling you get on a staircase in the dark when you put your foot down for a step that isn't there. He did not know what it was. He did not like it. And because he did not like it, and did not know what it was, he did what he always did with feelings he did not like, which was to turn them into irritation.
The old man had not stopped moving. While he spoke, he had shifted a step to his left, around Tyler's raised hand, and now he was standing at the side of the ESV Platinum, close enough to touch it. The long black flank of the car stretched away from him, gleaming, and the low sun ran along it and threw the old man's shadow across the door panel in a long dark shape, warped by the curve of the metal. The shadow of his cap lay across the side mirror. The shadow of his shoulder lay across the Cadillac crest on the front fender. Tyler turned to face him. Now they were both standing beside the car, a few feet apart, facing each other across the corner of the hood like two men at a fence line. Tyler shoved the clipboard under his left arm and clamped it there against his ribs, hard, the key fobs still dangling from his fingers. Then he raised his right hand again — not flat this time. One finger. The index finger, pointing, straight at the old man's chest. He jabbed it at the air between them, once, twice, in short sharp strokes, the way his father used to do when Tyler was eleven and had done something stupid.