He broke the kiss first.
“You all right?”
She almost laughed.
“Yes.”
“Sure?”
“Yes.”
“You're crying.”
“I have noticed.”
He wiped one tear with his thumb.
She whispered:
“I think I’m happy.”
The cowboy smiled.
“That sounds dangerous.”
“It is.”
Outside, Wyoming disappeared beneath snow.
Inside, the woman in white finally stopped waiting for rejection.
And neither of them knew that before the storm ended, someone would arrive at their cabin carrying news that threatened the first real home either had ever built.
Months earlier, when the woman first found the matrimonial advertisement folded inside an old newspaper at the textile mill, she almost threw it away.
The advertisement contained no poetry.
No promises of wealth.
No boast about acres or cattle.
Only a few plain sentences:
Wyoming rancher, thirty-four, seeks a steady woman interested in marriage and a practical life. Small ranch. Modest home. Hard winters. No fortune promised. Honesty required and offered in return.
The women at the lunch table laughed.
One called it the least romantic advertisement ever printed.
Another said only a desperate man would admit poverty before meeting his bride.
The exceptionally plus-size woman read it again.
That was precisely why it interested her.
No fortune promised.
Honesty required.
She knew something about men who promised too much.
Her father had been one.
Before debt and illness took him, he promised her mother a larger house.
A shop.
A carriage.
A better town.
He delivered almost none of it.
After he died, her mother had worked herself thin repairing clothing.
Then the machine accident took the woman's younger brother.
Sixteen years old.
A belt slipped.
A guard plate had been removed because management said stopping production for repairs cost too much.
Her brother died before sunset.
The company sent thirty dollars.
The woman’s mother never truly recovered.
Within two years, grief had taken almost everything from her that illness had not.
The woman buried her beside her son.
Then returned to work the following Monday because rent did not care how many graves a person visited.
She learned independence because nobody else remained.
She also learned loneliness.
The two were not opposites.
A person could know how to survive alone and still desperately want someone waiting when she returned home.
She wrote to the rancher.
One page.
Carefully.
She did not mention her weight.
Not because she intended deception.
Because she was tired of beginning every description of herself with an apology.
She wrote about work.
Her mother.
Her brother.
The books she read.
The fact that she could sew almost anything but hated embroidery.
The fact that she had never ridden a horse.