Ruth listened without interrupting. When he finished, she set her coffee down and touched the edge of the hay bale beside them, tracing the twine. "My father died when I was nineteen. Car accident outside Council Bluffs. My mother remarried a man who thought music was a hobby for people who couldn't find real work. I left Iowa with a fiddle and two hundred dollars and spent a decade learning that grief doesn't get lighter. It just gets quieter, until something—like a snapped string—makes it loud again."
"Why Thanksgiving?" Walt asked. "Why here, alone?"
Ruth's glossy terracotta lips pressed into a line that was almost a smile and almost not. "Because my sister in Des Moines invited me to a dinner where her husband's family would ask when I was going to settle down and stop living like a traveling circus act. Because the man I almost married in Denver decided last spring that he wanted a wife who stayed home and baked, not one who drove three counties for a Saturday night gig. Because I told myself a winter in a quiet place would help me write, and then I got here and discovered quiet has a way of shouting. Mrs. Henshaw's bulletin board felt like the least lonely option available."
"That's a lot of because," Walt said.
"Grief collects them," Ruth said. "Like spare strings."