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Dotty said out of nowhere. “Clarice’s eyesight ain’t what it used to be, and that computer screen gives her headaches. When she’s got a headache she’s plumb bitchy. I hate computers. They’re all going to fall apart one of these days and everyone is going to wish they had their old ledgers back like how we used to take care of things with an ink pen and lined pages.”
    “I’m not bitchy,” Clarice argued.
    Max filled his plate and laid a napkin over his knee. “I agree with Dotty about all this technical crap, but it’s the way of the world. Can’t whip it so we might as well join up with it. So tell us more about this Marvin fellow, Clarice.”
    “Marvin was stationed over in Korea during the war. I think they call it a conflict now, but it was a war back then,” Clarice said. “I was still in high school when we first started writing back and forth. The church ladies were given names of servicemen who would like to have pen pals. That was way back before cell phones, computers, and all this other stuff you kids have today. So I started writing to him when I was a senior in high school. And then the letters stopped coming and I didn’t know if he’d been killed in action or if he’d come home or what happened, until Emily brought the letters to me.”
    “That was before you met Grandpa, right?” Greg asked.
    Clarice smiled. “I’d met Lester. We lived on adjoining ranches, but he was off to college during the time I wrote to Marvin. The letters had stopped coming long before Lester started courting me. Marvin and I might not have even liked each other in person. It’s easy to make a soldier out to be a hero when all you have is words, one small black-and-white picture, and an imagination. We’ll never know because a letter got lost and we both took a different path.”
    “Crazy, ain’t it?” Max said. “After all these years, you find out that y’all were just a hard day’s drive away from each other.”
    “Fate,” Dotty said.
    “You think fate kept them apart and then brought them together again with that bunch of mail, Dotty?” Max asked.
    “That’s exactly what I think. Now Clarice won’t go to her grave thinkin’ that Marvin was a son-of-a-bitch who just used her for mail call and then threw her away,” Dotty answered. “And now it’s time for chocolate cake.”
    She disappeared into the kitchen and brought out a triple-layered chocolate cake with fudge icing.
    ***
    Greg took a shower, donned gray lounging pants and a T-shirt, and sprawled out in his recliner in front of the television in his room. NCIS entertained him for an hour before he switched it to CMT and watched several videos, but his mind stayed on the woman who’d been dropped out of nowhere onto his ranch and was now staying across the hall from him. He tapped his fingers on the chair arm while the Pistol Annies sang “I Feel a Sin Comin’ On.”
    “I wonder if Emily has sins in her past,” he muttered.
    Before his inner voice could remind him that everyone had a past, his phone rang. He pushed the remote button, checked the ID, and answered on the third ring. “Hey, Jeremiah, old man. What’s goin’ on?”
    Jeremiah chuckled. “I couldn’t leave it alone, Greg. Must be my line of business, but I’m not as trusting as you or as Clarice. There’s no charge. I was only on the phone thirty minutes. Talked to several people under the pretense of vetting Clarice’s new assistant girl for a job. She’s pure as the driven snow. Not a stain on her anywhere. Lived on the Shine Canyon Ranch her whole life. It’s not nearly as big as Lightning Ridge, but it wasn’t a two-bit, one-horse operation either. She had to sell off a lot of it to keep money coming in for her grandpa’s chemo, but there’s still some acreage left in the ranch. Only time she was away from Happy, Texas, was when she went to college, and then she was home every single solitary weekend and worked on the ranch during summers and