Francesca said nothing. She knew he could, indeed, settle the matter in short order. Richard was five years younger than him, but no match intellectually or physically for Robert Kincaid.

He slipped into his vest. Her mind was gone, empty, turning. “Don’t leave, Robert Kincaid,” she could hear herself crying out from somewhere inside.

Taking her hand, he walked through the back door toward the truck. He opened the driver’s door, put his foot on the running board, then stepped off it and held her again for several minutes. Neither of them spoke; they simply stood there, sending, receiving, imprinting the feel of each on the other, indelibly. Reaffirming the existence of that special being he had talked about.

For the last time, he let her go and stepped into the truck, sitting there with the door open. Tears running down his cheeks. Tears running down her cheeks. Slowly he pulled the door shut, hinges creaking. Harry was reluctant to start, as usual, but she could hear his boot hitting the accelerator, and the old truck eventually relented.

He shifted into reverse and sat there with the clutch in. First serious, then with a little grin, pointing toward the lane. “The road, you know. I’ll be in southeast India next month. Want a card from there?”

She couldn’t speak but said no with a shake of her head. That would be too much for Richard to find in the mailbox. She knew Robert understood. He nodded.

The truck backed into the farmyard, crunching across the gravel, chickens scattering from under its wheels. Jack chased one of them into the machine shed, barking.

Robert Kincaid waved to her through the open passenger-side window. She could see the sun flashing off his silver bracelet. The top two buttons of his shirt were open.

He moved into the lane and down it. Francesca kept wiping her eyes, trying to see, the sunlight making strange prisms from her tears. As she had done the first night they met, she hurried to the head of the lane and watched the old pickup bounce along. At the end of it, the truck stopped, the driver’s door swung open, and he stepped out on the running board. He could see her a hundred yards back, looking small from this distance.

He stood there, with Harry turning over impatiently in the heat, and stared. Neither of them moved; they already had said good-bye. They just looked—the Iowa farm wife, the creature at the end of his evolutionary branch, one of the last cowboys. For thirty seconds he stood there, his photographers eyes missing nothing, making their own image that he never would lose.

He closed the door, ground the gears, and was crying again as he turned left on the county road toward Winterset. He looked back just before a grove of trees on the northwest edge of the farm would block his view and saw her sitting cross-legged in the dust where the lane began, her head in her hands.

Richard and the children arrived in early evening with stories of the fair and a ribbon the steer had won before being sold for slaughter. Carolyn was on the phone immediately. It was Friday, and Michael took the pickup truck into town for the things that seventeen-year-old boys do on Friday nights—mostly hang around the square and talk or shout at girls going by in cars. Richard turned on the television, telling Francesca how good the corn bread was as he ate a piece with butter and maple syrup.

She sat on the front porch swing. Richard came out after his program was finished at ten o’clock. He stretched and said, “Sure is good to be home.” Then, looking at her, “You okay, Frannie? You seem a little tired or dreamy or somethin’.”

“Yes, I’m just fine, Richard. It’s good to have you back safe and sound.”

“Well, I’m turnin’ in; it’s been a long week at the fair, and I’m bushed. You comin’, Frannie?”

“Not for a little bit. It’s kind of nice out here, so I think I’ll just sit awhile.” She was tired, but she was also afraid Richard might have sex in mind. She just couldn’t handle that tonight.

She could hear him walking around in their bedroom, above where she pushed back and forth on the swing, her bare feet on the porch floor. From the back of the house, she could hear Carolyn’s radio playing.

She avoided going into town for the next few days, aware all the time that Robert Kincaid was only a few miles away. Frankly, she didn’t think she could stop herself if she saw him. She might run to him and say, “Now! We must go now!” She had defied risk to see him at Cedar Bridge, now there was too much risk in seeing him again.

By Tuesday the groceries were running low and Richard needed a part for the corn picker he was getting back in shape. The day was low-slung, steady rain, light fog, cool for August.

Richard got his part and had coffee with the other men at the café while she shopped for groceries. He knew her schedule and was waiting out in front of the Super Value when she finished. He jumped out, wearing his Allis-Chalmers cap, and helped her load the bags into the Ford pickup, on the seat and around her knees. And she thought of tripods and knapsacks.

“I’ve got to run up to the implement place again. I forgot one more piece I might need.”

They drove north on U.S. Route 169, which formed the main street of Winterset. A block south of the Texaco station, she saw Harry rolling away from the pumps, windshield wipers slapping, and out onto the road ahead of them.

Their momentum brought them up right behind the old pickup, and sitting high in the Ford, she could see a black tarpaulin lashed down tight in the back, outlining a suitcase and guitar case wedged in next to the spare tire lying flat. The back window was rain-spattered, but part of his head was visible. He leaned over as if to get something from the glove box; eight days ago he’d done that and his arm had brushed across her leg. A week ago she’d been in Des Moines buying a pink dress.

“That truck’s a long way from home,” remarked Richard. “Washington State. Looks like a woman driving it; long hair, anyway. On second thought, I’ll bet it’s that photographer they been talkin’ about at the café.”

They followed Robert Kincaid a few blocks north to where 169 intersected with 92 running east and west. It was a four-way stop, with heavy cross traffic in all directions, complicated by the rain and the fog, which had gotten heavier.

For maybe twenty seconds they sat there. He was up ahead, only thirty feet from her. She could still do it. Get out and run to Harry’s right door, climb in over the knapsacks and cooler and tripods.

Since Robert Kincaid had driven away from her last Friday, she realized, in spite of how much she thought she’d cared for him then, she had nonetheless badly underestimated her feelings. That didn’t seem possible, but it was true. She had begun to understand what he already understood.

But she sat frozen by her responsibilities, staring at that back window harder than she had ever looked at anything in her life. His left signal light came on. In a moment he’d be gone. Richard was fiddling with the Ford’s radio.

She began to see things in slow motion, some curious trick of the mind. His turn came, and… slowly… slowly… he moved Harry into the intersection—she could visualize his long legsworking the clutch and accelerator and the muscles in his right forearm flexing as he shifted gears—curling left now onto 92 toward Council Bluffs, the Black Hills, and the Northwest… slowly… slowly… the old pickup came around… so slowly it came around through the intersection, putting its nose to the west.

Squinting through tears and rain and fog, she could barely make out the faded red paint on the door: “Kincaid Photography—Bellingham, Washington.”

He had lowered his window to help him get through the bad visibility as he turned. He made the corner, and she could see his hair blowing as he began to accelerate down 92, heading west, rolling up the window as he drove.

“Oh, Christ—oh, Jesus Christ Almighty… no!” The words were inside of her. “I was wrong, Robert, I was wrong to stay… but I can’t go…. Let me tell you again… why I can’t go…. Tell me again why I should go.”

And she heard his voice coming back down the highway. “In a universe of ambiguity, this kind of certainty comes only once, and never again, no matter how many lifetimes you live.”

Richard took the truck across the intersection heading north. She looked for an instant past his face toward Harry’s red taillights moving off into the fog and rain. The old Chevy pickup looked small beside a huge semitrailer rig roaring into Winterset, spraying a wave of road water over the last cowboy.

“Good-bye, Robert Kincaid,” she whispered, and began to cry, openly.

Richard looked over at her. “What’s wrong, Frannie? Will you please tell me what’s wrong with you?”

“Richard, I just need some time to myself. I’ll be all right in a few minutes.”

Richard tuned in the noon livestock reports, looked over at her, and shook his head.

ASHES

Night had come to Madison County. It was 1987, her sixty-seventh birthday. Francesca had been lying on her bed for two hours. She could see and touch and smell and hear all of it from twenty-two years ago.

She had remembered, then remembered again. The image of those red taillights moving west along Iowa 92 in the rain and fog had stalked her for more than two decades. She touched her breasts and could feel his chest muscles sweeping over them. God, she loved him so. Loved him then, more than she thought possible, loved him now even more. She would have done anything for him except destroy her family and maybe him as well.

She went down the stairs and sat at the old kitchen table with the yellow Formica top. Richard had bought a new one; he’d insisted on it. But she’d also asked that the old one be stored in a shed, and she had wrapped it carefully in plastic before it was put away.