Tolliver took his medicine, and we crawled into the bed. The sheets felt cold and almost damp, and I got back out of bed to turn the heater up. It made the curtains billow in an unpleasant way. I’ve run into that before, and I keep a big clip in my overnight pack for just such a situation. It came in handy tonight. As I got between the sheets, I realized that Tolliver was already asleep.

When I woke, the sun was up outside. Tolliver was in the bathroom, trying to take a sponge bath, and he was grumbling to himself about it.

“What are you talking about in there?” I asked, sitting and swinging my legs out from under the covers.

“I want to shower,” he said. “I want to shower more than anything.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I was. “But we can’t get the shoulder wet for a few more days.”

“Tonight we’ll try taping a garbage bag or a grocery sack over it,” he said. “If we tape it good, I can shower and be out before the tape starts to give.”

“We’ll try,” I said. “What should we do today?”

He didn’t answer.

“Tolliver?”

Silence.

I got up and went into the bathroom. “Hey, you, what’s with the silent treatment?”

“Today,” he said, “we have to go talk to my dad.”

“We have to,” I said, letting only a hint of a question seep into the words.

“We have to,” he said, absolutely positive.

“And then?”

“We’re going to ride off into the sunset,” he said. “We’re going to go back to St. Louis and be by ourselves for a while.”

“Oh, that sounds good. I wish we could skip the part about your dad and go right into the ‘be by ourselves.’”

“I thought you’d be straining to get at him.” He’d started working on his stubble, and he paused, one cheek still gleaming with shaving gel.

I’d thought so, too. “There’s a lot I almost don’t want to know,” I said. “I never imagined I’d feel like this. I’ve waited so long.”

He put his good arm around me and held me close. “I thought about leaving Texas today,” he said. “I thought about it. But we can’t.”

“No,” I said.

I called Dr. Spradling’s nurse that morning and told her, as I’d been instructed, that Tolliver wasn’t running a temperature, wasn’t bleeding, and his wound didn’t look red. She reminded me to make sure he took his medicine, and that was that. Despite the shocks of the previous day, Tolliver looked better than he had since the night he was shot, and I was sure he was going to be fine.