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“And you?”
“I think it’s obvious what I wanted with my life, isn’t it? I got married when I was eighteen. You don’t do that if you don’t want... That same thing. That thing your parents had. You don’t do that if family isn’t your dream. But I don’t have it anymore. So... I guess maybe that’s why I asked. How long you’re going to do the bull riding. And when it ends, then what?”
“I don’t know. And I’m not really sure I get how it connects.”
“Because I’m living in this...and then whatspace. The first thing I wanted is gone. So what do I do now? And I don’t know the answer.”
He didn’t know why she’d chosen to ask him that. Maybe because they were relative strangers. Maybe because he was something entirely different to her, and to her family. Maybe just because the steak was good, or because the stars were bright.
Maybe to scare him off, because she felt the same heat burning between them that he did.
Whatever the reason, he found himself wanting to give her an answer. And he didn’t have one. He wasn’t deep. Not by any metric. But he wished that he had something to offer her.
“Maybe that’s the secret,” he said. “Maybe nobody knows what to do with that second choice. Because the fact of the matter is, we all end up living with the less-ideal scenario at some point. Whether it’s work or family or... We all have to face it at some point. And maybe you never quite know what to do with that part of your life as clearly as you knew what to do with the first part.”
That cut close to his bone. But it had nothing to do with bull riding.
“Eventually everybody loses someone. And the older we get the more someones we lose. And you’re always living in that and after. Always.” He shrugged. “It takes away little pieces of the life that you knew. Of the things that you imagined. And the more of those pieces you lose, the more you have to rebuild. I’m not sure that the answers ever get clearer or easier to see.”
“So what then?”
He looked at her then, and he noticed a necklace around her neck. Made with fine little beads. “Did you make that?”
“Yes.”
He did something he knew he might regret, and took a step toward her, reaching out and touching the center of the necklace. “And how do you make something like this?”
“With a thread, a needle and these little seed beads and...”
“Right. But do you throw them all on all at once and see the big picture?”
“No. You go one bead at a time. But you have some idea about where you’re headed.”
“Right. But maybe in life sometimes we just have the one bead. We don’t know how it fits into the bigger picture. So we just have to keep going. One bead at a time. One step at a time.”
“I didn’t realize that you were a philosopher,” she said, her breath quickening as she looked up at him.
“Neither did I. But you suddenly made me want to try it out.”
She cleared her throat and turned away. “Don’t overcook the steak. I like it medium.”
He cursed and went over to the grill, poking one of the steaks with a fork and slicing it so that he could get a look at the color inside.
“Not overdone.”
He stuck the meat on plates, and they went back in the house, where he added the baked potato and salad. “Want to eat outside?”
She nodded.
They went back outside and sat opposite each other on the patio furniture, the plates in their laps.
“I guess my worry is that maybe it’s not making a picture. I haven’t done much of anything for the last few years. Maybe I haven’t added a bead at all. You know. So to speak.”
“Well, grief is like that. And that’s different. You need to give yourself time.”
“Right.”
“You know about my sister.”
