She said, “I was a schoolteacher and twenty-four years old and I washed my face with lilac soap and read novels by William Dean Howells. I spent my evenings grading papers on the porch or cooking in the kitchen, spooning melted wax into jars of apple jam. The only man I knew was landlord of what I rented. He was odorous and decrepit and he spoke ever so solemnly of the weather. He proposed marriage to me once and it took me a week to say no. Then I got my senses and knew I didn’t want a wooden ice chest or Chippendale furniture or the crawl of a husband’s issue in me each night in our four-poster bed. I didn’t want to be one of those sullen wives who glare at the camera from the front of a plain sod house.”

“I can understand that,” he said.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty.”

“How old is Emmett?”

“Eighteen.”

She rolled her dress up over her knees for the cool night air. She said, “I saw your name on a wanted poster nailed to a telegraph pole in Dodge City, Kansas. The picture had not the neighbor of a resemblance to you but I subscribed to unsavory thoughts just the same. I thought of all the sweet favors I’d do this man Bob Dalton whom they’d given five hundred dollars for.”

They talked until the town was quiet and then they walked to her narrow room above the grocery store. They took off their clothes and Bob washed himself in her porcelain bowl, looking into the round spotted mirror. His face and neck and hands were red, the rest of his skin was milk white. He saw her crouched up under a Navaho blanket staring at him with half a smile. He walked over to her with his hand disguising his manly condition. She was wearing a yellow flannel nightgown that she allowed him to push up over her breasts when he called upon her body.

The next morning she cooked coffee in the fireplace, spread biscuits with comb honey, sliced oranges from California, and they ate naked and cross-legged on top of the sheets, discussing their ambitions.