"She's coming back," Dale said finally.
"You a prophet now?"
"I'm a man who watched you not dance for three years and then dance. Prophets have done more with less."
April's waiting was a particular kind of work. Walt planted the sunflowers and felt foolish and kept planting. He painted the porch rail. He took Eleanor's fiddle to a shop in Kearney for a cleaning he had deferred for years, not to play it, but to keep it from quietly decaying—an act of care that felt like the opposite of forgetting. The shop owner, an old man with magnifying glasses, said, "Good instrument. Somebody loved this." Walt said, "Yes," and took it home wrapped in soft cloth.
February was a long corridor of gray days and sharp nights. Walt worked. He mended the west fence properly for the first time in two years. He fixed the sagging porch step. He opened Eleanor's fiddle case once a week and dusted the wood and told her, out loud, about Ruth and Denver and the strange arithmetic of loving two truths at once. Margaret checked on him with casseroles and interrogations. Mrs. Henshaw asked after "that fiddle girl" every time Walt bought nails at the hardware store. Letters arrived from Denver—Ruth's handwriting slanted and impatient—describing studio lights and producers who talked too fast and a city that never went fully dark. She missed the sound of the windmill. She missed two-stepping between the stove and the table. She did not say she missed him in so many words, but the spaces between her sentences were full of it.