Bonnie, ah, Bonnie. How I’ve let you down. Aaron felt her hand on his forehead, opened his eyes, and took her hand, pressing his lips to her palm. “Thanks, but I’m good.”
Bonnie smiled; it was the same, sweetly beatific smile that had captivated him more than thirty years ago on that dirt football field in West Texas. No matter what had gone on between them—and the Lord God knew there had been a lot—he still loved her, and in moments like these, desperately so. It was just like her, Aaron thought, as he watched her put her book away, that in spite of their estrangement, she had come when he’d called. Her life in California had taken her down a new and different path, but they had never lost touch, neither of them able to completely let go, the bond between them amazingly resilient. She had, instinctively, felt his horror when he’d made that pathetic call to her, and had come to New York immediately to be with him through the surgery and first rounds of radiation and chemotherapy. She’d put the many years of discord and strife aside and had stepped into the old role of partner and soul mate. She had consulted with his doctors, had gotten up in the night to make sure he was okay, had filled him with comfort foods that he could not keep down, and memories and kindness that he could.
He would never have made it this far without her.
When the shock and trauma of aggressive treatment to his body had begun to wear him thin, it had been Aaron’s request that they come to the ranch to recuperate. Both of them had wanted some detachment from the world at large to put their minds and arms and hearts around the devastation of a sentence of six months to two years, and while they had not been at the ranch together for many years, it seemed the place to be. Aaron in particular needed to be in a place where he could be silent, in solitude, where he could think of all things that could not be left undone before he was gone.
And Bonnie, resolute, had come with him, her mouth set in determination as she gripped his hand on that interminably long flight from New York where he had, for the first time in his life, made use of the barf bag. Twice.
Fortunately, at the ranch, he had begun to improve, regaining some strength. They began every day as if it were his last. They did not call for the usual staff members to join them, preferring to spend the days alone. They took walks in the morning as far as Aaron could go, looked through old family albums and letters in the afternoon, drank from his cellar of very fine wines, and spent their evenings on the porch swing looking at the stars.
More importantly, they talked like they hadn’t talked in years. About all of it, their lives, their daughters. About all the things that they had seen grow and blossom between them, then wilt and die, and how exactly it had all happened, beginning with a clear and calm night on the Texas caprock. That was the night of the spring dance of their junior year at Ralls High, when Bonnie had willingly given herself to his wandering hands and neither of them had ever been the same again.
In fact, that night, and all its discoveries, had sparked the struggle within Aaron to be a man—he could still remember how fiercely he wanted to take Bonnie and all that she was, run away with her, find some place where the world did not exist except for the two of them.
Aaron’s father, however, saw a different vision for him. There was no one else to leave the family farm to, save Aaron’s sister and whomever she might eventually marry. The more Aaron struggled with that plan, the less anyone in his family seemed to understand why or how he could leave generations of farming behind. Only Bonnie had understood his need to see the world, to make his way by himself and escape the drudgery of cotton farming.
So in the weeks that followed their graduation from high school, when Bonnie had impulsively packed a bag and run off with him to Dallas to help him make their fortune, they had sealed their bond and their fate for the rest of their lives.
His father had died a bitter man and his sister’s husband, a no-account dirt farmer from Crosby, had reaped the reward of Aaron’s decision. It was, nevertheless, a decision Aaron never regretted.