Of course she knew her momma and daddy prayed for her. Grammy too, and most likely, her brothers, but she didn’t know for what. Since she didn’t talk to them very often, she could only assume their prayers were more generic, while Cash’s were specific.
He’d prayed over the fact that her roommate had borrowed one of her favorite sweaters and Lark wanted to get it back before she came home for the holidays.
He’d prayed for her memory to be sharp during her finals and to remember his pajama pants when she came back to the house. No matter what, every text he sent made her smile, and while he’d worried about being irritating to her, he never once had been. They’d agreed that they would both answer when they could, as they both had a lot going on, especially this week.
Today is my last final, she said.I’m heading out for it now, and then I’ll be at work all afternoon. I’m surprised you’re up this early, to be honest.
River’s practice time is in a half hour, Cash said.Not our best draw, and he’ll be riding tonight. If you want to watch, it’s an obscure channel on TV, but they broadcast it online on the NPR YouTube channel.
Oh, I’m planning to watch, Lark said. She needed to do her laundry too, and start her end-of-semester checklist as well. Since she’d be gone from the apartment for almost a month, she wanted to make sure all of her cleaning was done, so the apartment manager would be able to pass her off without causing a problem with her roommates.
Only one of them would be staying—a woman named Charlotte, who came from Maine and didn’t have family to return home to for the holidays. Lark had briefly consideredinviting Charlotte home to Coral Canyon with her, but she wasn’t particularly close with that roommate, and she didn’t want to have to entertain her for a month when she had Cash waiting for her.
All right, go slay it, Songbird, he said, and Lark tucked her phone away and went to collect her backpack. His texts lightened the weight of the day, but they didn’t keep it at bay for very long. Lark had not enjoyed the last ten days in Idaho without him, and she started her circular thoughts about whether she should return to school in January once again.
She’d already registered for classes and paid tuition, but she’d checked the drop dates multiple times and knew that if she dropped by December twentieth, she could get a full refund, minus a few hundred dollars in fees. She had no idea how she’d explain dropping out of her last semester to her parents, who’d been so proud that she’d chosen to go to college four years ago. Her daddy had a degree, but Momma didn’t, and neither of her brothers had any form of higher education.
Lark enjoyed learning, but she simply wondered what the point of it was. She didn’t know what she’d use this degree for if she ended up with Cash. Everything ended with Cash, and Lark’s mind blitzed and splintered into several directions after that.
She didn’t need a degree if she married Cash. She could work the cutting horse operation with the knowledge and skills she had right now. He would teach her what she needed to know, and they would live happily on that seventy-seven-acre plot of land he’d purchased with Boston.
Boston and Cora would work twenty acres of it, leaving the other fifty-seven for Lark and Cash. Not only that, she’d be closer to Grammy—and her parents once they returned from their service mission—and as Lark braved the chilled temperatures outside in Pocatello, she really saw no reason to be here any longer.
She managed to set her thoughts aside when she reached the testing center, and she made it through her exam with a calm mind and a normal heartbeat. She grabbed lunch from a little kiosk in the foyer of the testing center and looked down at the plastic container of barbecue chicken salad.
Everything felt so bleak, and dry, andgray, and Lark hated everything about this meal and her life in Idaho. “I don’t want it,” she whispered, but she sat there on a bench where a couple of other girls came to sit and eat their boxed meals too. The testing center had floor-to-ceiling windows, and she looked outside at the bare tree branches bending in the wind, and the occasional flurry of snow as it got picked up off the ground. Lark loved winter, and she didn’t mind the cold, but she could have both of those in Wyoming.
She’d called her grandmother every afternoon since leaving Coral Canyon, just to make sure she knew Lark wasn’t only a call away, and that if she needed help, she should call Cash. To her knowledge, Grammy had not done so, and she was still alive, as were all of her cats, so maybe Lark’s worries over her grandmother were unfounded. Maybe she couldn’t use her as an excuse to drop out of school and go home.
Why do you need an excuse?she asked herself. She let the question sit there as she thought through it, the way she’d been doing for the past couple of weeks. Since starting her relationship with Cash, really.
God had done one thing for her since she’d left Coral Canyon: He’d blessed her with the calmest, slowest thoughts she’d ever possessed in her life.
She got up and threw her now-empty plastic clamshell in the trash and returned to get her backpack. Something seethed just under her skin, and Lark started telling herself strong statements, so she could make decisions from a place of rationality and not pure emotion.
It’s okay to want to have a home, she thought as she left the testing center.
It’s okay to admit you want to be with Cash.
It’s okay to drop out of college. Not everyone needs a degree.
It’s okay to want to be closer to your grandmother, whether she needs help or not.
And finally,it’s okay to do what you want to do.
She thought of Cash telling her that he’d finally taken steps to do what he thought was best, and he’d employed his faith to rely on God to tell him if those steps were wrong or not. But he’d stopped waiting for God totellhim if they were right.
Lark needed to do that.
By the time she stepped into the Agricultural Sciences Department to do her four-hour shift for the day, Lark knew what she wanted and what she didn’t want.
One, she didn’t care about this degree and didn’t want to continue it.
Two, she wanted to be in Coral Canyon, where she was accessible to her grandmother and she could see Cash each and every day, explore a real relationship with him, and continue to fall in love with him hour by hour.
She didn’t want to disappoint her parents, but she felt no duty to finish college, and she was an adult. She needed to start having an adult relationship with her parents instead of a subservient child attitude. She could explain to them her thought process and her feelings, and they got to decide if they accepted it or not.
Of course, they might not let her live in their house, but once again, Lark’s mind turned to Cash and Cash alone. When she returned to Coral Canyon—permanently in only three days—and if she and Cash got married next year, she wouldn’t need to live in her parents’ house.
