"He was married, then. Right?"

She turned and stared. "Since I was in kindergarten, the world has kept saying how pretty I am with one breath and how stupid I am with the other. Maybe they were right. God knows I heard it enough to believe it. Here was this guy-yes, an old married guy- who listened when I said something. It didn't have a thing to do with sex. He was just a nice person who happened to be a man. Maybe I've got it all wrong, and he wasn't listening at all-just staring at my boobs, and pretending to listen-but to me, it was what I was looking for." She thought a moment, and then saluted as a flag-draped collie passed them. "No, he really did listen. He'd ask me questions, and pay attention to my answers. Not just, 'what are you going to be when you grow up, little girl?' God, I sound like 'two o'clock, brought to you by Ivory soap, tune in again tomorrow.'"

"What did you talk about?"

She answered without a pause. "Ouray, Colorado. I don't know how it came up-maybe he asked where I was born-but when I told him, he said how he knew Ouray and loved it out here. It was like his Valhalla, his Shangri-La. He'd only been here once, years before, but he told me he owned land and one day he'd settle in the town. I figured he romanticized the place, built up in his mind how beautiful it was, but he didn't. It really is as spectacular as he described."

"You didn't marry him right away?"

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"God, no! I went off to college and messed around some-did all the stuff you're supposed to do at that age-but when I came back home ten years later, Paul's wife had died. I bumped into him and we recognized each other and had a cup of coffee. You'd think we were still sitting in the same high school bleachers where we'd met a decade earlier. It was a wavelength thing-we just meshed. Right then and there I decided I was going to marry him."

"Just like that?"

"Yup. 'Set my cap for him,' as they used to say. Isn't that funny? We dated, if you could call it that, for a couple of months and then we went to Vegas and tied the knot."

"No reservation on either side?"

"Nope."

"He must have made quite an impression on little eighteen-year-old Jennifer."

"Damn right! When we married, I was twenty-eight and he was fifty-two-nearly twice my age-two years older than my father! Boy, did the tongues wag! But neither one of us gave a flying fish. We couldn't have been happier, and it never changed for a moment for the whole twelve years before he died."




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