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hand he’s not holding, maybe (she thinks later) for balance, but he wraps his arm around her, too, and they kiss again.
    Sweet, that’s all she’s thinking, there among the meadowlarks and cattails, her toes digging for traction in the sandy creek bed.
    There’s quite a lot of kissing after that. When she gets in the car in the alley, she scoots over close to him. Sometimes she rests her hand on his thigh while he’s driving. She waits for his call eagerly. They broaden their activities beyond the farm, long drives in the countryside, supper in Scottsbluff, always out of town, nothing to get the gossips wagging. She’s grateful for his discretion. She wonders if she should cook him a meal, but it’d be awkward, sneaking him in and out the back door, hoping nobody sees. She keeps up her activities, the card group on Sunday afternoons, Bible study on Tuesdays, shocked to realize how much open time there must have been in her life before. She doesn’t worry aboutEsther, who’s dead and not coming back and would never begrudge the living a moment of happiness. No, it’s not Esther that prompts them to this secrecy. Their—what is it exactly, not affair (good heavens), nor relationship—well, special friendship, feels somehow sacred. A private space they’ve created, like children who carve a haven out of hay bales, away from prying eyes of the adult and disapproving world. Janet tells only her sister that she’s been riding with a man on a three-wheeler.
    Her sister, who lives far away in Ohio and has been married fifty-seven years, asks, “Where’s this going?”
    “We’re friends.” Janet clamps her lips to keep the lilt out of her voice.
    “Are you sure that’s all?”
    “Oh, yes,” Janet says, that breathless feeling coming over her again.
    She does entertain—thoughts. No, she doesn’t want to get married again. They’re too old. One or the other of them will take sick. Or die. She doesn’t want to go through being widowed again. She doesn’t want that kind of pain. She doesn’t want to put another man to bed, like she did Carl, who died a long slow death from a combination of emphysema and corrosive arteries.
    Plus, she’s used to living alone. She and Carl found each other too late for children. He was a bachelor farmer, and she a spinster schoolteacher from down by Ogallala. They met at a dance at the Legion, and he stepped all over her feet. His embarrassment won her heart, long before he spoke of any affection for her. They’d made a good life together, though they only had ten years before he took sick. They moved to town, then. Sold the farm to his distant cousins. She nursed him until he died. Too young for Social Security, she went back to teaching history until she could retire. With her pension, Social Security, and proceeds from the farm sale, she’s doing all right.
    Without Carl or anyone else to answer to, she’s made the house her own. The year after Carl died, she painted the kitchen ceiling red. She gets some looks from the women in the Bible study, but she’s never tired of that ceiling. It speaks to her of possibility. When she got interested in Civil War history, she hung a corkboard on the dining room wall and charted the battlefields, marking each site with different colored flags according to who won; blue for Union, red for Confederate. She loves opera, unheard of among her friends out here on the prairie, and she cranks up the volume on her old (but plenty good) record player, the walls humming plaintive song. She doubts very much if Leland would tolerate a red ceiling, and she knows for a fact he has no appreciation for opera.
    But, where is this going? If he asks, she would have to consider marriage, wouldn’t she? Otherwise, what is she doing? She’d forgotten how lovely and invigorating the feeling that you matter to someone in a special way. She does care for him. It’s too late to pretend otherwise, and she’s not going to lie to herself about it. Growing