His Kind Of Cowgirl. Karen Rock

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      If you’re reading this note it means I’m gone and this is my last chance to say how much I love you. Maybe that makes me a little lucky. Not everyone gets to tell the person they love how they feel before they go.

      I’m not much of a writer. But you know that. Always was better with my hands. If I could build something to show you how I feel it’d be the Eiffel Tower. Then I’d take you all the way to the top and give you everything as far as we could see.

      Remember how we’d do that when we were kids? Put our fingers over the top and bottom of the sun, or a cloud, or a mountain and give it to each other? You gave me everything, Claire, and I gave you my heart, young as it was. Didn’t matter that I was a kid, I always knew you were the only one for me. Even when someone else came into your life for a spell, I never lost hope.

      And I was right not to give up because you came to love me back. Even more, you gave me a son who’s mine in my heart, where it counts. Jonathan is our boy and I know you’ll raise him to be the man we’d want him to be. Please tell him his daddy is always proud of him, even when he sticks up for himself but gets knocked down, even when he drives his first miles and dings up one of my trucks, even when a girl crushes his heart but he goes on believing because I did and look what it got me. Two of the most loving people a man could ever be blessed to have.

      Sure, I’d wish for more years, but some people live an entire life and never find the love I found. Guess that’s the luckiest part of my life. Having you and Jonathan at all. Know that I’ll always be with you. I give you the moon, the stars and most of all, my heart.

      Your loving husband,

      Kevin

      P.S. I hope they make potato salad as good as yours in Heaven. I’ll miss you, baby girl.

      She read it twice more before lowering the paper. A steel vise wrapped around Claire’s chest and squeezed so hard she felt as if she was suffocating. She turned from the bureau and fell back on the bed, burying her face in Kevin’s pillow. It would never hold his head again, and neither would she.

      She was pure liquid loss then, sobbing into that pillow, the band around her chest tightening. Her husband. Gone forever. Though she could smell his cologne on the fabric she hadn’t washed since he’d deployed. Someday she’d die, too, and that clamp of grief would still be around her. She didn’t want it to go away. It’d be as if Kevin had never existed, and she couldn’t bear that. Not after everything he’d done for her. Given her. The moon. The stars. The world. A second chance when she hadn’t thought she deserved one.

      Did you call for me, Kevin?

      The thought was like the tip of a knife twisting and turning at her very core.

      But the chaplain had said it’d been instant.

      No suffering.

      Not so for her. Nor for Jonathan. He’d now lost two dads, though she’d make sure he’d never learn about the first. Kevin would be the only father Jonathan knew and Claire’s one true love.

      They would honor Kevin that way.

      Always.

      She rolled onto her back and pressed the heels of her palms to her wet eyelids. Losing Kevin felt like an actual breach between her ribs, a tear at the bottom of her lungs.

      “Momma?” Her son’s voice quavered from the doorway.

      She swiped her eyes, sat up and held out her arms. Time to think about Jonathan. She gestured when he stayed still, his short nose scrunched, green eyes wide, as if he sensed the bad coming his way.

      “Come here, honey. Momma’s got some sad news.”

      He glanced over his shoulder at a scratch against the back door. “Can Roxy hear it, too?”

      Claire dug her fingernails into the soft fabric and nodded. “Of course. Go on and let her in.”

      Jonathan flew down the hall, one sock half off his foot, trailing from his toes like a streamer. A chasm cracked open in her chest. How to make sense of this to her son? Cushion its blow?

      Their silver-haired terrier rocketed into the room and leaped onto the bed, lavishing Claire with tongue kisses. Jonathan hitched up his slipping shorts and climbed next to her and the squirming dog.

      “How come I had to go to my room?”

      Claire smoothed back his cowlick. Kevin loved—had loved, she painfully corrected herself—ruffling it.

      “Is Daddy okay?” Jonathan grabbed Roxy and pulled the writhing dog to his chest.

      Kids. Never underestimate them, she marveled. He climbed into her lap and buried his face against her neck. His little body was warm and heavy. She pressed her lips against the silken skin of his cheek and protectiveness surged. After this, she’d never let Jonathan hurt again. Would keep him safe always.

      She took a deep breath and began explaining the inexplicable... How their life would be now, even though, deep down, she hadn’t a clue.

       CHAPTER ONE

      Two years later.

      “HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, DARLIN’,” Claire murmured as she drove past a Route 36 sign just outside of Coltrane, Texas. A car’s lights flared in her rearview mirror.

      She adjusted the mirror, the only thing she ever changed in the vehicle. Everything in her husband’s vintage truck stayed as he’d left it. All but the paint job. She’d added the teal body coat when he didn’t return from Afghanistan to finish its restoration...or take her on that promised first ride.

      Her eyes stung and she cranked the volume dial on her radio. An old country tune played and Claire hummed along, feeling as if she knew the heartbroken singer...or, at least, what she’d gone through. The years since her husband’s death had been tough, and she still felt the need to commemorate their wedding anniversary and talk to him, strange as some might think her.

      “Can you believe this would have been nine years?” She twisted her wedding ring then picked up her coffee thermos.

      A sports car flashed its brights then sped past. Her gaze dropped to the speedometer. Thirty miles per hour in a forty-five zone. Slow, but not slow enough to make this annual trip last as long as she wished.

      The countryside loomed gray wherever her headlights touched, bluebonnets waving in thick clusters from the roadside, their sweet fragrance carrying on the warm March wind through the open windows. The road unrolled in front of her and she felt its thrum in her bones.

      “Jonathan’s doing well. Got all A’s in homeschool. He’s smart, like his daddy.”

      Her voice cracked at the end, evaporating in the back of her tight throat. She recalled Jonathan’s hushed voice when he’d admitted to being bullied and had begged not to return to public school. To spend his days on her father’s ranch, the home they’d moved to after she’d been widowed. He’d always been small for his age and she’d hated thinking of him being pushed around by the bigger boys.

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