She sits in the middle seat of an oversold DC-9, Carhartt jacket and watch cap pulled tightly over her hair, a blond wisp slipping out the side. She cradles on her lap a tawny brown Stetson with a tooled leather and silver hat band. “It’s never goin’ in an overhead, my fiancee’d go up there first.”
She is from Jamestown, a small town in the nowhere middle of North Dakota. They have 70 head of horses, a donkey and a goat. She grew up in Michigan, outside Detroit. “North Dakota suits me,” she says, “I’m not much for people, ‘less I’m buyin’ or sellin’ a horse.”
She is amiable. It is an odd word but fits her like a good pair of work boots. She talks about tending horses, dealing with the four babies, three colts and a filly who wants nothing in this world to do with anyone, not even her. She understands this, and isn’t the least bit surprised, and feels a certain kinship although she would never put it that way.
She says it’s a bit harder with Travis now deployed to Iraq fueling Apaches and Cobras. It’s his second deployment in the Guard. Last year he did three months state duty after the floods, and now Iraq.
It all the same to her, she says. She talks easily about the future, about how when she and Travis get married next summer they’ll have the Flogging Mollies’ “With a Wonder and a Wild Desire” as their wedding song and first dance as newlyweds. She does not admit the possibility Travis might not come back or come back only part of what he was when he left. That part only steals into her dreams when she can’t keep up her own guard. She cannot think those thoughts, the pain would be too great and deep. Inside herself she’s afraid that by unwishing it, it might happen out of spite.

First Published in A Gathering of Poets and Writers, Legal Studies Forum Vol XXXIV, No 2, 2010