Clara laughed.
Tomás looked at her.
“I was terrified.”
“Of me?”
“Of everything.”
He stared toward the tracks.
“I thought you would see me and realize I had lied.”
“You didn’t lie.”
“I wrote about a ranch that still had grass.”
“It did when you wrote.”
“I wrote about cattle.”
“You had cattle.”
“I wrote about building a family.”
Clara took his hand.
“You did.”
He smiled.
“When you stepped down, I thought you would look at me and see failure.”
Clara leaned against him slightly.
“I saw patched boots.”
He laughed.
“Cruel.”
“And a man who removed his hat.”
“That impressed you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Respect is visible in small things.”
Tomás looked toward her.
“What did you think when I nearly dropped the trunk?”
Clara smiled.
“He’s honest but not especially strong.”
Tomás laughed so loudly two people turned.
Years later, when Tomás died peacefully at seventy-eight, Clara buried him on the hill overlooking the north spring.
Not beside the house.
He had asked for the hill.
“Why there?” Samuel had asked.
Tomás answered, “So your mother can charge me water rights forever.”
Clara told him it was not funny.
Then laughed harder than anyone at the funeral.
Grief returned.
Different from childhood.
Different from Chicago.
Different from the fear of becoming extra in someone else’s home.
She and Tomás had been married forty-three years.
His absence changed the physical shape of rooms.
For months she woke expecting to hear him complain about coffee.
Sometimes she still made two cups.
She did not consider that weakness.
Love had occupied space.
Of course its absence did too.
Clara lived eight more years.
Long enough to see grandchildren.
Long enough to see women vote in Wyoming, something she celebrated with unusual emotion.
Long enough to watch Rose become part owner of a mercantile business and Samuel expand cattle operations without borrowing recklessly.
Long enough to tell the story of Dry Creek so often that her grandchildren began correcting details.
“You said Grandpa fired the rifle twice.”
“No, once.”
“Last time you said twice.”
“Last time I was testing you.”
Nobody believed her.
Near the end of Clara’s life, Rose found her sitting on the porch holding Tomás’s old bank release.
“You still keep that?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Clara looked toward the north pasture.
“Because people remember success and forget how close they came to losing.”
Rose sat beside her.
“Were you afraid when you came here?”
Clara laughed softly.
“Terrified.”
“You didn’t act like it.”
“I spent fifteen years in Chicago. Acting afraid was expensive.”
Rose smiled.
“Did you ever regret coming?”
Clara looked toward the hills.
“No.”
“Not once?”
“Many times.”
Rose laughed.
Clara continued.
“Regret can last an hour.”
She folded the paper.
“A decision can still be right.”
Rose became quiet.
Then asked, “What was the moment you knew?”
“Knew what?”
“That Dad was the right man.”
Clara thought.
Not the wedding.
Not the first kiss.
Not the bank.
Not the railway.
Then she remembered the dead field.
Seven cattle.
Tomás broken.
Her hands pressed against the warm hide of an animal that would never stand again.
He had looked at her with humiliation and said she had come expecting a husband but found a man losing everything.
Clara had taken his hand.
“At the beginning.”
Rose smiled.
“The train?”
“No.”
“The wedding?”
“No.”
Clara looked toward the alfalfa field.
“The cattle.”
Rose frowned.
“When they died?”
“Yes.”
“That seems terrible.”
“It was.”
Clara smiled.