Read The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning for Free Online Page A

evening. I could call my friend Diane and ask her to stay another night at my house. After Jake had skipped work when I was away in August, I’d resolved not to leave him home alone again until he’d proven he was responsible.
    Behind thick curtains in his darkened room, Ward kissed me deeply and deliciously, as he had the night before. But much sooner than I expected, he began undoing my buttons. He pulled his T-shirt over his head, then guided me onto the bed and took off my jeans and underpants, tossing them aside like weeds. Quickly, he took off his own jeans and lay down beside me.
    Here was the reality of him. The wiry, gray-blond chest hair, shoulders broad as a truck making his belly irrelevant. A thrilling shock, this sudden nakedness. The reality of both of us. A little embarrassed to be making love in daylight, I reached for an embrace. He rolled on top of me.
    I tried to slow him down through body language—a hand on his forearm, messaging, “We have time,” but he was oblivious to my signals. Even his kisses were hurried and incomplete.
    How to convey the shock of this suddenness? It was like being invited to dinner and having the food thrown at me, or finding that I was the dinner and my own appetite was not even secondary but inconsequential. I hadn’t experienced such selfishness in a male since I was sixteen. His hotel room might have been my first boyfriend’s Chevy Impala on a gray road between square wheat fields. I might have been lying on a cold vinyl seat, trying to feel what I wanted to feel—passionate, in love—while my boyfriend had sex.
    I had, in fact, been falling in love with Ward just moments before, but the feeling evaporated under this onslaught. After he rolled off me, I got up just as perfunctorily. Glimpsing confusion on his face, I feigned cheerful regret. “Got a plane to catch.” My hands shook as I buttoned my blouse. “I’ll go pack.”
    In my room, I threw all visible items into my suitcase and didn’tbother to look behind the shower curtain or under the bed. I wanted to get out of the hotel before he caught up with me—if he was planning to do that, if there was any pretense of love left in him at all. If so, I thought, Let him wonder. Let him rot. I flagged a cab, paying thirty dollars for a ride to the airport that would have cost five on the bus, and went through security—again, before he could catch up with me. Beyond the checkpoint, I did feel more secure than I had before, on his terroristic side of that line. How dare he!
Bastard!
my mind shouted as I rode the train to the gate.
    I sat in the empty waiting area, two hours early for my flight, sorrow welling up like slow poison. It was truth rising in me, time for a reckoning. I’d lowered myself for a man who didn’t warrant a second glance, and now I would have to go through the recovery period and return to a reality that looked grim after entertaining fantasies of transformative love. With a Kansas guy, no less. Had I forgotten why I’d left, at eighteen, and again at thirty-seven? Going back would retrace every step of my evolution, erasing each gain. But this reasoning didn’t prevent me from hugging myself and folding double. I sat up only as I realized that the waiting area was beginning to fill. A child sitting in the bank of molded-plastic chairs opposite me grabbed his mother’s sleeve, then pointed at me as if to say, “What’s wrong with that lady?”
    How had Ward become so important to me so quickly? Now it was as if I’d never been disappointed before, as if he were the first cad I’d ever met. What a fool I’d been!
    •   •   •
    A T THE TINY AIRPORT IN L ARAMIE, THE sky was spitting snow bullets sideways. Why today? Why couldn’t the sun shine, as the state boasted it did more than three hundred days of the year? I wanted to see the luminous peaks of the Snowy Range rising above a panorama of soft-green, short-grass prairie. I needed to breathe the high valley’s sunny