The Choice

Alden Frost was gentle the way rich things are gentle, Pearl said — nothing in his life had ever needed to be sharp. He was two years older than Cass, serious, decent, quiet in rooms, and he courted her the way you'd court the county: patiently, with respectability, by showing up. Vic threw them together at every opportunity and glowed. Lenna, dying by then in the slow way, told Pearl she thought Cass was being sold and hated herself for not saying so louder.

And Dane? Dane heard about the courting and said nothing, worked, watched, and kept his own counsel, and Pearl — who loved the boy then, she admitted it, though she came to have reasons not to — believed he was waiting for Cass to end it.

Cass ended it, all right. On an afternoon in August, on the ridge, with the wind running hard out of the west, she sat with Pearl in the kitchen of the bunkhouse and said the sentences that turned the whole story onto its axle. She was going to marry Alden Frost. She said it, and Pearl said, careful as a nurse: does Dane know?

And Cass — Pearl had the exact words, because they went through her like a nail and never came out — Cass said that it would degrade her to marry Dane Corso. That he was lower than her by everything the county measured. That Alden Frost could give her the whole valley and Dane could give her the wind. She laughed at herself a little, and said she knew what she was, that her soul was made of the same dirt as his and always would be, that the thing in her chest that answered him answered nothing else on this earth — and that she was marrying Alden anyway, because she was seventeen and her brother was selling and degradation was a price the world had told her all her life she could afford.

Dane was behind the door. Pearl never established how long he'd been there, or how much he heard before the last of it, and she told Jonah she had given up believing it mattered. He went out the back without a sound. Cass ran after him into the yard into the rising storm, and what passed between them there was said in voices Pearl couldn't hear over the wind, and it ended — this much carried — with Dane gone down the ridge road in the dark in a flooded truck, and Cass standing in the rain until dawn.

The fever had been building in her for a week of fence-line riding before the rain; standing out all night in it finished the job, and the Frosts nursed her at Fairhill as if she were already theirs, and in the spring she married Alden Frost in the Fairhill parlor with the windows open, because she liked the wind, she said, even indoors.

She had three years of it, Pearl said, and here was the strange thing: they were not unhappy years. Alden was kind, and the kindness never once reached the place it was aimed at. She lived at Fairhill like a queen in a museum, wanted for nothing measurable, and every neighbor's wife reported the same puzzle — that Mrs. Frost was pleasant to all and intimate with none, and spent hours, whole hours, standing at the north windows looking at the ridge.

And then, in September of the third year, a stranger walked into the Fairhill yard off the ridge road, dressed like a bank, tanned like a field hand, and asked to see the lady of the house — and it was Dane Corso, grown into himself, with money in the bank and forty acres of the county already quietly bought, and Cass heard his voice from the north window and came down the stairs too fast to be a queen, and Pearl watched Alden Frost watch his wife cross his own parlor toward the man from Windrow and understood, with the clarity of the ruined, that he had married the wrong decade of her life.