In June, on the anniversary of the day Walt and Eleanor had gotten engaged—he remembered because Eleanor had always marked it with strawberry shortcake—Walt baked a poor imitation and set a piece on the porch rail for the birds and a piece on the table for Ruth. He told her the date. She listened. She did not try to replace the shortcake with a better story. She simply said, "She had good taste in men and fruit," and Walt laughed until his eyes watered, which was another kind of prayer.
Summer deepened. The sunflowers grew taller than Ruth. Cattle fattened. The west fence held. On the Fourth of July they sat on a blanket at the edge of the frosted field that was no longer frosted—now a green expanse under fireworks that bloomed over Lexington like brief, fierce flowers—and Ruth leaned against Walt's sheepskin vest and said, "I used to think home was a place you left to become someone. Now I think it's a place that lets you keep becoming."
"That's a lot of philosophy for a woman with sparklers in her hair," Walt said.
"I multitask."
August brought a dry spell and a county fair. Ruth entered a fiddle contest on a dare from Margaret and came in second to a sixteen-year-old prodigy with fingers like lightning. She claimed the ribbon was prettier than first place anyway. Walt won a ribbon for a calf and pretended not to be proud. They ate funnel cake and walked among the lights and the livestock barns, and for a moment Walt saw the whole stretch of his life—boy, husband, widower, man learning again—and felt it settle into something that could hold both sorrow and this warm, improbable joy.