Although he can’t remember a time when he didn’t love her, Walter has been almost losing Kate since the beginning of their lives. They grew up on adjoining farms in the Slate River Valley; her father kept cows and pigs, and his father grew potatoes and corn, and the two would often trade meat for vegetables when the summer turned into fall. Walter’s memories of the farm are hazy – it was his older brother’s birthright, and Walter had never thought there was much point in showing any interest. But even now he can still recall the sound of the wind rustling the cornstalks, the night’s silence in the expansive land around him, the rhythmic pulse of the creek that ran between the Parker and Babiak farms underscoring the clear, melodic voice of Katie Babiak calling to him from the other side. The creek would freeze in winter, solid enough to walk over, and dip so low in the summer that you could easily skip across it. But in the spring, when the water was high, Walter was afraid to cross the creek, and he would stand on one side and wait for Kate, who was utterly fearless, to leap across at the narrowest point, her rain boots squelching into the mud on the bank as she landed.

“Waiting Walter,” Kate called him, as in “I’m crossing the creek to be with my Waiting Walter.” There were worse things she could have called him then, things that Walter called himself in his darkest moments. He supposes he is glad that she didn’t, although who knows what she really thought behind those sparkling eyes and bright smile?

He and Kate would wait for the school bus together, although the schoolhouse was just down the road, and if the weather was nice they would walk. Sometimes on the way Kate would question him about a book they were meant to have read for class, or ask him to go over a history lesson that she should have studied the night before. It wasn’t that Kate wasn’t smart. “She doesn’t apply herself” – that’s what his mother used to say, as if she were a piece of adhesive tape that was meant to be stuck to some particular piece of homework, or maybe to the idea of work in general. Kate always thought she was being sneaky and subtle when she quizzed him, but in everything she did Kate was always about as subtle as a freight train.

“So when was the Battle of the Plains of Abraham again?” she asked him one morning, kicking a pine cone with the toe of her Mary Janes.

“September 13, 1759,” Walter replied.

“And it was part of the…Seven Years’ War?”

“Yes.”

“And who were the generals again? I forget.”

“Oh, you forget, do you?”

“Yes, I do! I forget.”

“Well, you’d better start remembering. We have a test today.”

“Maybe you could just…remind me?”