"Meatloaf."
"You got any more of that meatloaf?"
"Not for you, I don't," Neva said, and poured his coffee, and the counter laughed, and that was all anybody said about it that day.
The house on Pioneer Road was a three-bedroom brick ranch with a carport and a chain-link fence that Boyce had bought in the spring of 1981, eleven months into the boom, with a down payment he'd made in cash from two months of overtime. Neva had loved it the way you love a thing you never expected to have, the dishwasher she was afraid to use, the carpet that went all the way to the walls. She had loved it for about fourteen months, and then the rig came in on a truck, and now she walked through it in the evenings turning off lights.
Boyce was in the den when she got home at three-thirty. He was sitting in his recliner with the television on and the sound off, and the classifieds from the Elk City Daily News open on his knee, and a can of Coors on the table beside him that he had not opened. He did that now. He'd take one out of the refrigerator and set it beside him and not open it, and at bedtime he'd put it back. She didn't know what it meant and she was afraid to ask, because she thought it might mean he was trying not to, and if she asked, it would become a thing he had to answer for.
"Anything?" she said.
"Halliburton's hiring in Odessa. Supposedly. Gaylon says they got four hundred applications in two days."
"You could call."
"I could call," he agreed, and looked at the silent television, where a man was cutting a tin can with a Ginsu knife. Boyce Haskett was forty-one years old and had been working on drilling rigs since he was seventeen, worm to roughneck to derrickman to driller, and for the eighteen months of the boom he had been running a crew of five men on a deep-gas rig in the Anadarko Basin, twenty-two thousand feet, making more money than his father had made in the best five years of his life put together. He was big and blond and red-faced, and since August he seemed to have gotten smaller, the way a house looks smaller when you come back to it after you've moved away.