One morning he was there. I lept out of bed, ripped my brush through my long, thick, tangled hair, threw clothes on, ran out to greet my fiance. He looked worn and stressed, but happy to see me. I wanted to jump into his arms, but Dad was there so I just fluttered happily around him. We offered him a chair, but he said no thanks, he'd been sitting a lot lately. I laughed at this combination of evasion and truth. He looked into my eyes, saw that I knew where he'd been sitting so much, that I was okay with it, and then we laughed together. His scent flooded my senses, I was in heaven. Then Dad insisted that he stank and needed to take a shower. Daniel was actually happy for the opportunity, ignored the insult behind it. At his little cabin, he could only take sponge baths in a little metal tub. I waited in my bedroom while he showered. I could hear him singing on the other side of the wall. He was always singing.

When he got out, we ran all over the farm, showing him everything there was to see. He hugged Fox, and Laddie, who wasn't afraid of him at all even though he was a man, and scrutinized my goat, declaring that she was a good dairy animal. We were deeply, thoroughly happy. We went in to eat breakfast. I served both him and Dad, showing that I was learning how to be a good wife.

After breakfast, he and Dad got into an embarrassing conversation about when we could be married. The conversation centered around when our first child would be born if I conceived as soon as we got married. Daniel didn't want me to be heavily pregnant in summer, said he'd seen how miserable that was. Dad had some other opinion. I was beginning to get irritated. They were talking about me as if I were some type of livestock to make a breeding plan for! I thought it was fairly offensive. For the first time, I was unhappy with something my man had said or done. I walked over to them both and told them that as far as I was concerned, birthing out in winter, when food was short, didn't seem like such a hot idea to me. Daniel looked shocked. Dad looked smug. I just wanted this horrible conversation to end! And, it did. Then Dad told me to go outside, with the other kids, while he had a man to man talk with the man I would marry.

I was near the goat pen and where Precious was chained up when I heard Daniel yell, "Fine!" and emerge from the house. I froze where I was, far enough away that he probably didn't see me. I watched him walk away without looking back, walk down the driveway. Something inside me choked with grief. I heard myself make a strangled sound, a sound only I heard. He was walking towards the highway, walking away, walking out of my life. Like my mother had. I couldn't bear to stand there looking at his retreating back, but I didn't want Dad to call me back. So I ran as fast as I could, around cover from where Dad was sitting, until I was in the jackpine seedlings which stretched from the highway to the grassy part of the pasture. I sobbed and gasped for air, not from the running, I was already ahead of where he was, although roughly parallel, he on the dirt road now while I picked my way through the trees. I shivered and cried, could see him now on the highway, putting his thumb out. He was only about 20 feet away from me, still unaware that I'd followed him. I wanted to beg him not to leave without me, please to take me with, but I knew he couldn't. I wanted to beg him to come back, not to go, but this would be too forward, not ladylike, too desperate. Agony wrenched me as I watched a yellow pickup stop and give him a ride.

Defeated, I walked slowly back to the house, anger building in me now. I stormed into the house Daniel had just left and gave Dad a piece of my mind. I screamed at him with all my might, told him exactly what I thought of him and his meddling, raged as I never had before. How dare he demand things of Daniel?! This was my choice, not his. I was still screaming, Eliyah looking rather taken aback and almost speechless for once in the face of my absolute fury, when the phone rang. It was Daniel. He called Eliyah "Daddy" and asked if he could come back.

He returned, apologized for his outburst of temper, made up with Dad. We sat outside together on the porch talking. Someone had mentioned my "seizures" to him; he was worried about that and wanted to know what was going on. I didn't know what to tell him. I just told him I was OK and changed the subject. I remembered how he'd selected Lassie, setting all the puppies side by side, rejecting the ones that were smaller or seemed weak to him, how he looked at Della with her deformed legs, as though we should cull her. I didn't want him to look at me that way, too, and decide that like any other kind of livestock, I wasn't fit enough for him to keep.

When he left, we walked down the driveway together, hand in hand. Rachel was chaperoning us. I went with him as far as the highway and then Rachel stood aside as we said goodbye. I nestled in his arms, feeling so at home, so right there, never wanting to be away from him again. I was scared to death to see him go, to be left alone without him. He murmured endearments and assurances to me, promises. And then, reluctantly, he held me away from him as he always did just when things felt right, and he walked to the highway and put his thumb out again.