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I sucked in some air. First Mabel Walker and now Mindy. Until she came back, that left me the only woman out here. I’d have to go five miles to Interior just to see another woman, and I didn’t have anyone there that called me her friend. That left me with nothing but the Indian women what passed by on the road.

“Surprised me too,” Isaac said. “Told Al I’d see to his cattle until he gets back from France. But he says that after the war he wants to give the Colorado Rockies a try. He’s had it with the Badlands. This drought’s made the decision easy for him.” Isaac shook his head. “Hate to see them go. I’ll miss them.”

I slumped back in my chair. I hardly knew what to think. I couldn’t imagine the Badlands without Mindy. She was my friend; I didn’t know what I’d do without her. She had stood by me when Isaac Two died, and she had been with me when Alise was born. I had done as much for her. I’d helped her when her boys were born. Once, when her middle boy, Will, had a fever so high that Mindy was sure he’d die, I sat up with her all through that long night. Together we kept cool, wet rags on Will until his fever broke and the glaze left his eyes. Usually every winter, about February, when Mindy didn’t think she could stand her house a minute longer, Al brought her and the boys over for a visit. Me and her’d quilt for the day, the children playing around our feet. Every Independence Day in July we went to their place for a picnic. The Walkers came too. Me, Mindy, and Mabel put food out on a table while the men and the older children played baseball. When it got dark and everybody was filled up with potato salad and roasted chicken and German chocolate cake, the men built a big fire and we’d sit around it, our way of saluting the country’s birth.

Mindy hadn’t always been in the Badlands. Al had staked his claim during our second summer there. He was a boy then, just turned eighteen, but he was broad shouldered and his beard was thick. With a wink and an extra five dollars, he convinced the man at the land office that he was twenty-one. Isaac helped him build his dugout and then, three years later, his wood house. That was just before Al went home to Des Moines to visit his folks. When he came back to the Badlands in the spring, he brought his redheaded bride, the seventeen-year-old Mindy.

I took to her right off. I liked the way her green eyes came close to disappearing whenever she smiled, and I liked how she laughed over the least little thing. She didn’t seem to care that me and Isaac were Negroes. The first time I met her she said how grateful she was that Isaac had helped Al build his house. She was happy to have me for her neighbor. Knowing I was nearby, she’d said, was a comfort. Al liked to roam, she said, and that was true. He had a tendency to disappear in the Black Hills for a few weeks at a time, sometimes longer. Al was living the wrong life, Mindy once told me when we were quilting. She laughed over it. He should have been a mountain man, not a rancher.

Now he wasn’t either. He was going to be an army man. And I’d never see Mindy again.

“When?” I said to Isaac. “When are they leaving?”

“Mindy’s going by the end of the week, Al a few days later.”

So soon. I said, “They’re coming by so I can say good-bye, aren’t they?”

“Don’t think so. I asked her to, but Mindy said she’s not good with that kind of thing. Said she’ll write as soon as they’re settled in Iowa.”

It was all I could do to keep from breaking down and crying. There was going to be nothing around me but falling-down ranch houses and miles of empty country. Not that I blamed Mindy; I’d do the same. I pictured how it’d go for her. On her last morning, ready to go, there wouldn’t be anything left to do other than wash and pack the breakfast dishes. That done, she’d close the front door behind her and climb up on the wagon, where Al and the boys waited for her. They’d pull away from the house and Mindy wouldn’t look back; that wasn’t her way. At the depot in Interior, Mindy