He smiled.
“Your children seem difficult enough.”
She laughed.
“They are.”
“Good.”
He died that night.
The frontier woman cried harder than she expected.
Grief did not care whether a relationship had been simple enough for a good obituary.
By sixty, the frontier woman's hair had silver running through the dark.
Her body remained large.
Her movements slower.
The cowboy remained annoyingly handsome in a weathered, gray-bearded way that caused younger widows to smile at him in town.
His wife noticed.
He pretended not to.
One afternoon:
“The widow at the feed store likes you.”
The cowboy almost dropped his coffee.
“What?”
“She smiles.”
“People smile.”
“Not like that.”
“I didn't notice.”
“Liar.”
He looked terrified.
The frontier woman laughed.
“I’m teasing.”
“That isn't funny.”
“Very.”
He leaned toward her.
“I spent thirty years learning how not to anger you.”
“And failed regularly.”
“Exactly.”
They sat on the cabin porch.
Children grown.
Daughter managing cattle operations with a business partner she had chosen herself.
Son teaching in Helena and returning summers.
Grandchildren beginning to appear.
The cowboy looked toward the mountains.
“Do you ever think about that night?”
“Which?”
He stared.
She smiled.
“The contract.”
“Yes.”
“Sometimes.”
“If you had said no?”
She looked toward him.
“To the child?”
“To everything.”
She thought.
“I might have left.”
His face tightened slightly even decades later.
“And?”
“You might have followed.”
“I would have.”
“Maybe.”
He smiled.
“You doubt me?”
“I doubt twenty-nine-year-old you.”
Fair.
The frontier woman continued:
“Maybe we would have found each other again.”
“Maybe not.”
The cowboy looked toward her.
“Does that bother you?”
“No.”
That surprised him.
She explained:
“I don't need every possible version of our lives to end together in order for this one to matter.”
He sat with that.
Then:
“You got philosophical.”
“Old age.”
“No.”
“You were always like this.”
“True.”
He took her hand.
Their hands looked different now.
Veins.
Scars.
Age spots.
Her fingers still broad.
His still strong.
Both slower.
The cowboy whispered:
“I’m glad you made me burn it.”
She looked toward him.
“I didn't.”
“What?”
“I took it from you.”
“Yes.”
“And I burned it.”
“Yes.”
“That was my choice.”
He smiled.
“Still correcting me after thirty years.”
“Someone has to.”
The school her mother once dreamed of expanded.
A second building.
Then boarding rooms for children traveling from distant ranches.
The frontier woman became less involved operationally.
She disliked retirement.
Her daughter told her so.
“You're becoming Father.”
The frontier woman stared.
“Cruel.”
“Accurate.”