"Then don't finish it," Walt said. "Leave the phrase open. Come back and close it."
She set the fiddle in its case, closed the latches, and hugged him hard enough to shift the sheepskin vest. "Teach the left foot while I'm gone. Don't let Margaret marry you off to somebody sensible."
"No danger," Walt said. "Sensibility and I aren't on speaking terms."
She drove west. He watched until the blue Ford was a speck and then nothing, and then he drove home to a ranch that felt louder in its silence than it had before she arrived.
The letters became their second language. Ruth wrote on whatever paper the studio left lying around—letterhead, napkin backs, once a takeout menu with grease stains that made Walt smile despite the ache. She described a vocalist who cried between takes and a guitarist who never spoke before noon. She described walking Denver streets at night and missing the sound of nothing, the particular nothing of a Nebraska field after dark. She asked about the cattle, the windmill, Margaret's latest campaign to organize Walt's sock drawer from a distance. Walt answered everything. He wrote about a coyote he had seen at dawn near the creek bed. He wrote about Dot at the diner asking after Ruth with the blunt affection of small towns. He wrote, once, three pages about Eleanor's birthday and how he had spent it mending fence and talking to the air, and how the air had not answered but the work had helped. Ruth's reply to that letter was only two sentences long: Thank you for trusting me with her day. I lit a candle in a Catholic church I ducked into between sessions, even though I'm not Catholic and the saint looked confused.