On a Saturday in October, before the wedding talk had hardened into plans, they drove to Kearney for no reason more urgent than a change of scenery and a bookstore Ruth had loved as a girl. The highway unspooled through corn stubble and low sky. Walt drove with one hand and let the other rest on the seat between them; Ruth's fingers found his without commentary. In the bookstore she bought a collection of poems and a used atlas with someone else's underlining in blue ink. Walt bought nothing but watched her browse as if the sight itself were a purchase worth the trip. They ate lunch at a cafe where the waitress called them honey and assumed they had been married for years. Neither corrected her. On the drive home Ruth read a poem aloud that was about rivers and time, and Walt said he did not understand poetry but understood the feeling of something moving forward whether you were ready or not.
"That's most of poetry," Ruth said. "And most of ranching, from what I can tell."
"And most of loving somebody after you've already loved somebody else," Walt said, surprising himself with the clarity of it.
Ruth closed the book. "Say that again when you're scared. I'll say it back."
They did say it back, more than once, in the months that followed—in the dark of early chores, in the bright of a crowded feed store aisle, in the soft argumentative hour before sleep when old fears put on new clothes and tried the door. Each time the sentence did not fix everything. Each time it kept the door from becoming a wall.