She simply helped.
Margaret changed too.
The girl of twenty-five became a woman of thirty-five.
Then forty.
Lines appeared beside her eyes from sun and laughter.
Thomas loved them.
At sixty-five, Thomas began letting William accompany him on long rides.
At seventy, he turned most cattle management over to hired men.
At seventy-three, he stopped pretending his hearing was fine.
Margaret enjoyed that discovery tremendously.
“You have ignored me professionally for years.”
Thomas frowned.
“What?”
“Exactly.”
He glared.
She laughed.
They lost friends.
Gained grandchildren.
Buried Gerald.
Thomas cried more for that horse than he had expected.
Margaret wisely said nothing.
One evening, when Thomas was seventy-four and Margaret forty-four, they sat on the same porch.
The railing had been replaced twice.
The apple tree still produced eight worthwhile apples most years.
Margaret brought two slices of pie.
Thomas looked at his.
“September apples?”
“The good ones.”
He smiled.
Margaret sat beside him.
Thomas looked toward the cottonwood where Eleanor rested.
Then toward the fields.
“You ever regret it?”
Margaret knew what he meant.
“No.”
“Not once?”
“No.”
He looked at her.
“Even now?”
Margaret took his hand.
“Especially now.”
Thomas smiled faintly.
“You were foolish.”
“Probably.”
“And stubborn.”
“Certainly.”
“You chose an old man.”
Margaret leaned against him.
“I chose Thomas Calloway.”
That answer still worked.
He kissed the top of her head.
The sun lowered behind the mountains.
Thomas said:
“I almost missed you.”
Margaret looked up.
“No.”
“I did.”
“No.”
“Why no?”
“Because I had pie.”
Thomas stared.
Margaret smiled.
“And three years of patience.”
He laughed.
“Dangerous combination.”
“Yes.”
Thomas died at seventy-eight.
Quietly.
In bed.
Margaret beside him.
No long illness.
No months of decline like Eleanor.
One winter morning he simply woke tired.
By evening he was gone.
Margaret was forty-eight.
Exactly the age Thomas had once imagined with dread when calculating what their future might cost.
She sat beside him for a long time after his breathing stopped.
William found her holding his hand.
“Mother.”
Margaret looked up.
“He was right.”
William frowned.
“About what?”
“He said one of us would stand alone.”
William sat beside her.
Margaret looked toward Thomas.
“Still worth it.”
She buried him near Eleanor.
Some townspeople found that arrangement unusual.
Margaret did not care.
Two people had loved him.