The Widows of Wichita County. Jodi Thomas

to be the ugliest place on God’s planet. The very air smelled of cow manure. She had left a beautiful country villa in Italy surrounded by rolling land rich in color and entered a world painted only in brown hues. A Coming Soon Wal-Mart sign was the most colorful thing in this place named after a creek that had dried up years ago.

      Her new husband had described his home in Texas as a place with wide-open spaces and an endless sky. But he forgot to add that the countryside and air were dusted in dirt so thick Anna could not tell where the land ended and the sky began.

      As if the flat brown country was not ugly enough, the people of this place had dotted the landscape with monstrous drilling rigs for oil production. She had not seen Davis’s ranch yet, but the farther she got from the airport the more homesick she felt. At twenty-one she suddenly was not ready for the changes she had thought were so romantic only days ago. The whirlwind courtship, the huge wedding, all the gifts and well-wishers had been replaced with silence, and she felt more alone than she ever had in her life with her new husband sitting only a few feet away.

      “Clifton Creek,” she whispered trying to become familiar with the words. But they felt foreign on her tongue, as alien as everything around her.

      She smiled slightly, her mood shifting for a moment when she remembered something her mother said once. “When all are strangers around you, you are the one in the wrong place. You are the foreigner.”

      Anna had wanted to come to America slowly, by boat, with the horses Davis had brought from her father’s ranch. But Carlo, her brother, had traveled with the fine animals while Anna had flown alone with her new husband. Rocketed into a world she did not understand beside a man she hardly knew.

      The change had been too abrupt. She felt like a freshwater fish splashing down in the ocean and expected to survive. She could not breathe.

      Anna slipped into the car and reached for her husband’s hand, but he only brushed her fingers away as he turned a page of the local paper. “Don’t worry.” He gave her a quick glance. “You’ll get used to it here. Before long you’ll love it. This place settles in your blood.”

      Anna wanted to scream. No, this place would never be a part of her. When she had agreed to marry Davis, she thought she would be flying away to freedom. She had no idea freedom would look this desolate.

      Old-timers say that in the oil fields trouble rides the wind, but death explodes in the silence of routine.

      Five Years Later

       October 11 Sunrise Clifton Creek, Texas

      The chrome streetlights rocked with the rhythm of the dawn wind as Meredith Allen crossed Main and headed toward Clifton Creek’s only elementary school. She was an hour early. She always arrived an hour early. It had become her routine over the dozen years she had taught school.

      Meredith told herself she needed to be up and out of the way to allow her husband, Kevin, to dress without them constantly bumping into one another in the bedroom and bath of their tiny house. She refused to admit her leaving early might be because they had little to say to one another in the morning. After a day apart, they would talk of the news and who they saw or the changes in the weather. But at dawn, conversation had somehow grown as stale as morning breath. She told herself it was to be expected. After all, they had grown up together, and after a decade of marriage they were bound to run out of things to say from time to time.

      Parking in the empty school lot, Meredith stared through the cracked windshield of her old Mustang. The sunlight sparkled off the grain silos just beyond the Wal-Mart store and the city limits sign. When she had been a child her father told her the silos were the castle of an evil king who had been forever banned from Clifton Creek.

      Meredith smiled. He also told her the oil rigs were dancing to a tune they heard deep in the earth. The huge rigs kept dipping to the beat, trying to pull the melody to the surface so that all could hear.

      Her father had been a dreamer. The rigs were no more than ugly mosquitoes, sucking the earth’s blood. But that blood had built the town and had kept it alive when many other small communities in West Texas had dried up like wild gourds and blown away. Clifton Creek had survived amid the rocky soil just as she had. This was not just her hometown, this place was a part of her. She belonged here, as native as the cottonwoods and coyotes.

      Meredith collected her school bag and purse then climbed out of the Mustang, excited as always. She would have plenty of time to get everything organized before the first student arrived. Her house might be a mess—sometimes her life seemed disjointed—but in her classroom everything had its place. There, a magic happened that only teachers understood.

      If her existence were an art gallery, teaching would be shown with colorful brush strokes and her home with careful line-drawn prints.

      Not that she hated home. Home was just home and Kevin just Kevin. She could never hate her small town or him; they were both as much a part of her as bone or blood.

      At first Kevin had told her how lucky she was to be his girlfriend, and then his wife; as though she needed reminding from time to time. Lately the words had changed; now she should count herself fortunate if he stayed around. As if there were other places he might go. Meredith would just laugh and remind him they belonged here, together. They always had, they always would.

      As she walked to the school building she wondered what he was thinking, for he had been moody for weeks. The only blessing she counted each day was the twenty-three smiles looking up at her inside the sanctuary of her second-grade classroom. Kevin would work through his melancholy state, he always did. In the meantime, she had the children.

      She waved as Helena Whitworth passed by in her long white Buick, driving toward downtown. The older woman looked every inch the queen in her small kingdom of Clifton Creek.

      Helena Whitworth did not wave back. In fact, she didn’t even notice Meredith or the grade school. With the precision of a general about to go into battle, Helena organized her thoughts, rehearsed her orders and prepared her defense on several fronts.

      She had dreaded this day all week. Talking to the city council about increasing the budget would be not only boring, but time-consuming. She needed her wits sharp and alert. Her husband, J.D., had already made her late by joking about what he would like to do this Thanksgiving instead of going over to one of her daughters’ homes and being assaulted by grandchildren. He told Helena over eggs Benedict that he planned to take a weed whacker instead of a cane this year. Maybe that would keep the little devils away.

      For the hundredth time, Helena wished she had married J.D. first, or even second. Then, maybe they would have been young enough to have children together. Everyone in Clifton Creek thought of him as The Colonel, a hard, career Marine, who married the richest widow in town. But J.D. had taught her to laugh and to love. Despite all her duties and projects, J.D. was her core, the center that made everything else worthwhile.

      Helena patted the wheel of her Buick as though the horsepower would respond to her touch. If she planned to get anything accomplished in the council meeting today, she had better stop thinking of J.D. and his jokes and start concentrating on what she planned to say about adding roadside parks at both ends of town.

      Another year, maybe two, and she would turn loose her civic responsibilities and travel with J.D. They would go to places she did not know how to pronounce, eat food she had never heard of, and make love like they were still in their fifties.

      For the past year J.D. had tried his best to get her to reduce her workload, but he did not understand. Helena needed work like she needed air. She was a workhorse, loving the challenge of each day. She had not slowed down in the forty years of running her own business and today was not the time to even start thinking about it. Maybe tomorrow she would watch the birds a little longer, or take a walk with him hand in hand. Maybe tomorrow there would be more time.

      Helena forced her thoughts back to the problems of the day. The meeting should be over by noon. She could still do the final buying for the holiday season if she ate lunch with her secretary in their office above her store. Helena’s Choice had not become a quality dress shop by neglecting details. The last