Too big to be wanted, not enough to be worth wanting." She said it without apology and without drama. The clean, flat statement of a fact she had lived with long enough to look at directly. "I don't know how to just step out of that. I don't know if I know how to be someone who gets to have things."
He said, "You don't have to know how yet." She looked at him. He said, "You just have to come back next Sunday." A beat. Same as always.
She breathed out. Same as always. She said, "All right." She drove home that night through the cold and the dark and the wide Montana sky, and she thought about Eleanor Brooks baking bread on Sundays in a kitchen that now smelled of venison stew and children, and the slow, careful work of a man who had spent 5 years putting one foot in front of the other towards something he hadn't known how to name yet. She thought about Rose leaning against her arm with the easy trust of a child who had simply decided.
She thought about Emily reading aloud about the French pastry chef with the complete confidence of a girl who assumed that the people around her wanted to hear what she had to say. She thought about herself. Margaret Dawson, 30 years old, driving home from dinner at a rancher's table with $40 of prize money in her strong box and a first place ribbon on her wall and the knowledge certain and strange and terrifying that she had not protected herself well enough. And now it was too late because she had gone and wanted something after all. She thought all right.
She thought all right. Then she crossed the property line onto her own land and unhitched the horse and saw to her for the night. And she went inside and put the kettle on and stood in her kitchen with her hands on the cold counter and looked at her mother's recipe book on the shelf. The worn spine, the handwriting visible. Even from here on the pages she had read so many times they opened to themselves. she said aloud to this kitchen to her mother, to the particular silence of a house that had only ever held one person.
"I'm scared." The kettle began to warm, she said. I'm going to do it anyway. Outside, the Montana night was enormous and cold and indifferent and beautiful. The way the land out here always was, it did not care about your fear or your past, or the 30 years you had spent being told you weren't enough.
It was just land. It was just sky. It went on regardless. And you either moved forward into it or you didn't. And Margaret Dawson had driven to the market before sunrise every Sunday for 4 months.