Jeb Caldwell does not move when his father gets up.
He is at the open refrigerator with one hand on the door and a bottle he never opens, and he stays there while the kitchen empties around him: truck keys, Cliff's chair scraping back, the screen door banging twice. The refrigerator light is the only light left in the room and it is not kind.
"You know where they are,"
he says to the room, and it is not a question, and nobody answers it.
He shuts the refrigerator.
He is not the one who tears out of the yard with his lights on high; he has never been that one. He goes out the back way instead, with a flashlight and a jug of coffee going cold in his other hand, and sets his shoulder against the gate post to watch the road where it comes out of the trees. Wind off the pasture. A cow complaining somewhere it should not be. He waits like a man who decided a long time ago that being right later is worth more than being fast now.
When the headlights come there are two sets of them, and he straightens up off the gate.
His father's truck first. Then Cliff's, pulled in behind it, coming up the drive at a crawl with the hazards on for no reason at all.
Jeb has the gate open before either truck stops.
"There she is,"
he says, quiet, mostly to himself. Then, louder, to the door already swinging open:
"Come into the light, darlin'. The coffee is bad, but I made it for you."