Cody won with a full house he didn’t really need because the next-highest hand was Lars’s pair of nines. “Sorta feel like I went bird hunting with a cannon.” Cody pulled in his chips, smiling that warm smile of his that reminded Leo of Chick Donovan.

“Who you calling a birdy, cuz?”

“A bald birdy,” Ryder said.

“I have never, balled, a birdy.” Lars said it with his face so composed, his voice so solemn, Leo thought at first he’d missed something. Then everyone laughed, including Jim, and Lars went right into a joke about a truck driver and a horny parrot and a rig full of chickens.

31

Allie Donovan switched off the headlights of her mother’s car, turned down Saunders Hill Road, and parked well back from the Suthers’ cabin. She sat there a moment. The trees were silhouetted in the light from the house and she could see the tops of three cars. Behind her belly button, a cramp turned over and let go. The cramps were better today, the tenderness in her breasts was gone, and by Sunday, the lady had said, there would probably be no more spotting in her underwear. Today was her first shift back at the UFO Show and she only felt a little queasy and that was from the fireflies in her stomach every time the door opened and she looked up hoping to see and hoping not to see Leo. And she thanked God she was out back helping Sidney make hamburger patties when Leo’s father walked in and bought a cake from Beatrice. He glanced through the food tray hole once, but Allie turned her back in time, almost dropping her new patty to the floor.

Now she took the small wrapped box beside her and walked down the gravel drive in her white uniform dress. She heard laughing and so stepped into the woods, creeping over pine needles that stuck to the soles of her shoes. When she was just outside the spray of light from the kitchen she leaned one shoulder against a wet pine trunk and she saw Leo, framed there in the first window, sitting next to his father laughing terribly hard at something a large bald man was saying. They were all laughing, and it was terrible, for it was the last thing she could have imagined Leo doing just two days after that standoff behind Spoon Hill, when he had looked so hurt and she had felt so dirty, then angry for feeling dirty, then guilty for feeling angry when Leo was so hurt. Now she watched him laugh. He sipped from his beer can and was still smiling as his father dealt cards around the table.