Dean shook his head even as the doubt crept in. The might-have-beens. If they had gone with Pa, would they all be together now? Or even if Noah died regardless, would Alec still be around? Would they all be happy and—
Is this what Ma lived with every day? Might-have-beens could haunt you if you let them. Hell, even if you tried not to let them, they had a tendency to sneak in, anyway.
“Then he wrote a year in,” Ma went on. “Said life was hard out there, but it was the life for him. Said he missed us and it was time we came and joined him. We’d make do together, like we always had.”
Dean stared at her. He thought he’d seen every one of Pa’s letters, had all but memorized the ones from those first few years.
He’d definitely never seen that one.
“I never told you. Never told Cass. We could have gone, but I told him I wanted to wait. I was bolder in my letter than I was face-to-face. Told him outright that I didn’t want to be living in some rough shack in the middle of the gold fields, not when I had a solid home in civilization. Told him he had to promise me more than eking out a living before I’d throw all this away.
“Well, he didn’t much like hearing that, I could tell. But it’s hard to argue by letter. Your pa and me, we had our spats when he was here, but we could always talk each other down to quietness afterwards. I never went to bed angry with him in my life. But this… I almost wrote him two dozen times to tell him we were going to come, but I never quite could. I’m just as stubborn as he is, and we’d both dug in our heels thinking our way was best.”
Dean had never thought of his mother as stubborn before. She was just Ma, quiet and steady and there.
“Then Noah passed. And it wasn’t more than a month later, me still wrapped up tight in my grief, when we got word about John and Matthew.”
Grady’s pa and brother. It had been a terrible winter of mourning.
“After that… it was like neither of us could broach the subject,” Ma went on. “I couldn’t, anyhow. Didn’t feel right deciding because look how my decision-making had turned out the last time.”
I enjoyed this story very much. I relate to it in a variety of ways, several of which are, tangential but my liking of it is real. I was raised in Nebraska, though on a farm. I’ve had, indeed I have, decisions pushed on me by circumstance, that seem to have no “proper” choice: some gain, some loss with any decision. I’ve written a story, much, much different, with the same title, which is what got me to read yours. Turned out that, after reading yours, I’ve realized that the two stories have much in common, in spite of their differences. Still, the core of my response to your story is, well done. It moved me.