Page 108 of Slow Hands Cowboy

Like he was looking at a timeline that he didn’t actually live in. An existence that might have been his, maybe, but wasn’t. A world where he came home, and his house wasn’t empty. A world where he could have a wife. A family.

He shut that down quickly, took a step away from her. “What did you make?”

“My specialty.”

“That didn’t answer my question.”

“I guess not. I learned how to make pot roast exactly how my mom made it. So that when she left, it didn’t hurt quite so badly.”

“Oh? Did that work?”

“No. It didn’t. But I didn’t have a mom, so I might as well get pot roast on Sunday. And I figure you might want pot roast on a Sunday, too.”

He laughed. “It’s not Sunday.”

“I know. But it’s just philosophically Sunday dinner, I guess.”

“I’m game for it either way.”

That moment from before clung to him. It created a kind of heaviness that he preferred to ignore.

“What did you do today?”

“The usual,” he said. “Just checking in on things at the ranch, I did some of my phone work out in my truck.”

“That’s right, you basically can have a whole mobile office set up in there if you want to.”

“That I can,” he said.

The dining area was set out all pleasant, plates on the table, a big roasting pan at the center.

There was a bowl of green salad, and a bowl of rolls.

“I did not bake those,” she said. “Brown and serve is as intense as I get.”

“Looks great to me.” He sat down at the table, and she presented him with a bottle of beer.

“Seriously,” he said. “This is a bit much.”

“I don’t think it is. I think it’s about right. You’ve been taking care of me here, cooking for me...”

“To be fair, you had a giant trauma.”

“I don’t choose to see it that way,” she said. “Not at this point. I choose to think of it as divine intervention that really needed to happen.”

“Well, fair enough. Doesn’t mean that it wasn’t traumatizing, though.”

She laughed. “Maybe.”

It was funny, to sit across from her at the dinner table. They had done it many times now over the last few weeks. But it was fascinating to be doing it now all the same. This woman who had been a stranger to him, basically, in spite of knowing her most of his life.

He had thought that he’d known her. But he hadn’t. She had thought she’d known him, but nobody really did. Nobody ever really had.

That was by design, but something about this, this little window into something like intimacy made him feel like he was missing something. And he had never felt that before in his life. And he hadn’t.

“Anything new with the campaign?”

“I had lunch with Anna today and we were talking about raffles. I know it’s close now, but I think we can get some donations from local businesses and we can use that for fundraising.”