"With Margaret it's usually both."
"Walk me to my truck when this is over?" she asked. "The Sanders place gets dark, and I've got a fiddle that seems determined to break strings on important nights."
"I can do that," Walt said.
They did not dance again immediately. Ruth played two more sets, and between them she sat with Walt on a hay bale and asked about the ranch—acreage, cattle, the way a Nebraska winter could turn a man into a ledger of feed costs and frozen water troughs. He told her about the spring calf that had been born during a thunderstorm and lived, against all odds, because Eleanor had sat in the barn with a blanket and a thermos until dawn. He told her about the fence line along the west pasture that always needed mending and the old windmill that sang in a high wind. She told him about playing in bars where the floor stuck to your boots and churches where the acoustics made every note sound like forgiveness. She told him she was thirty-four and tired of being asked why she was not someone's wife yet, as if a woman without a ring were a riddle the world was owed an answer to.
"I don't need an answer," Walt said. "I need another dance, if you're offering."