Dakota Born. Debbie Macomber

truth was, she’d been hoping for a romantic afternoon—just the two of them. The grandfather clock chimed midnight, the sound as bleak as her thoughts. It was useless to try to sleep. Not that their disagreement seemed to bother Brandon, who’d been asleep for nearly two hours.

      She’d asked him to come into town with her. It was a small thing, but they had almost no time alone these days. Sage and Stevie were attending Billy Nobel’s birthday party in Bellmont, which gave them a rare free afternoon. She’d been the one to suggest they buy groceries and then stop at Buffalo Bob’s for a beer.

      All either of them did these days was work. Joanie had planted a huge, ambitious garden, and found herself spending hours every day looking after it. What had started as an experiment, a pleasure, had developed over the years into a necessity and now a chore. It made sense to raise as much of their own food as possible, seeing that they had the land. Then there was Princess to milk and chickens to feed and in the past year they’d added pigs. Thankfully Brandon did the butchering, but the care of the animals had become part of her duties.

      The animals tied them to the farm, so it was unusual to get away for more than a few hours. In the last four or five years, Joanie had come to feel isolated, to doubt her own sanity and lately her femininity, her attractiveness. It’d been weeks since they’d last made love, weeks since they’d done anything but fall into bed at the end of the day, too exhausted to even kiss. Whatever romance had existed in their marriage now seemed dead.

      Their argument that afternoon had started out as an innocent conversation on the drive into town, a mere mention of the washing machine, which was about to give up the ghost.

      “We can’t afford a new one,” Brandon had snapped.

      Her mistake, Joanie realized, was mentioning the two-hundred-thousand-dollar combine Brandon had purchased two years earlier. They couldn’t afford an eight-hundred-dollar washing machine, but forking over six figures for a combine was done without blinking twice.

      That remark had sent their afternoon on a downward spiral. By the time they reached town, she’d walked over to Hansen’s Grocery on her own while Brandon headed for Buffalo Bob’s. He’d had three beers before she joined him.

      Despite his sullen demeanor, Joanie had tried to make the best of the situation. Hoping to put the argument behind them, she’d asked Buffalo Bob about the karaoke machine he’d recently purchased. He’d been eager to have someone try it out and so, with everyone watching, Joanie had gotten up to sing an old Beatles song. Her singing voice was halfway decent and she’d earned a hearty round of applause. Soon others, their inhibitions no doubt loosened by several beers, were taking their turns, and Buffalo Bob had thanked her for getting things rolling.

      Then, on the drive home, Brandon had accused her of flirting.

      “With whom?” she’d cried.

      He’d been silent for a long moment before he said, “Buffalo Bob.”

      The idea was ludicrous and she didn’t know whether to laugh or act insulted. Instead of doing either, she said nothing. When they got home, Brandon had stormed off to the barn and she’d left almost immediately to pick up the kids.

      Her appetite was dismal and the kids were filled up on excitement and birthday cake, so she’d just made a chef’s salad for dinner. Brandon had taken one look at it and claimed he wasn’t hungry. Joanie had sat at the dinner table alone with her children.

      “Is Daddy mad?” Sage asked. Her daughter had always been sensitive to her parents’ moods.

      “Of course not, sweetheart,” she’d assured her, wanting to lay the eight-year-old’s fears to rest.

      “How come he isn’t eating dinner with us?”

      “Well, because …” Joanie groped for a believable excuse. “Because we went into town while you were at the birthday party and had a little party of our own.”

      The excuse satisfied their son, who’d shown only minor concern over Brandon’s absence from the dinner table, but Sage didn’t look convinced. “Maybe I should make Daddy a sandwich and take it out to him.”

      “If he wants something to eat, he’ll say so,” Joanie insisted. She wasn’t going to pander to Brandon’s moods, and she wasn’t about to let their daughter fall into that trap, either. Joanie felt she’d put together a perfectly good salad, and if he wanted something else, he could damn well cook it himself.

      After dinner, the kids watched a favorite Disney video. By nine they were ready for bed, tired out from the day’s activity. Joanie tucked them in, listened to their prayers and came back downstairs.

      Brandon sat in front of the television. His gaze didn’t waver from the screen when she entered the room. The show was a rerun of Walker, Texas Ranger and she didn’t want to waste her evening sitting with an embittered husband watching a show she’d already seen.

      Without a word she’d set up her sewing machine on the kitchen table, intent on making her daughter a new dress for church. It was a hundred-mile round trip to the closest church. A priest came to Buffalo once every two weeks to say Mass, but Joanie wasn’t Catholic. Brandon had stopped attending services with her three years earlier, so she made the long drive alone with the kids. Her husband had given up doing a lot of the things she considered important, another sign of the growing discontent in their marriage.

      As she worked, Joanie had brooded, alternating between resentment and despair. She deftly ran the flowery fabric beneath the frantic needle, but the task didn’t calm her, the way it usually did. This sewing machine had once belonged to her mother. Joanie had inherited it when her mother purchased a newer model, but God help her if she were to hint at buying a new sewing machine. Look what had happened when she’d asked about a washer.

      At ten, Brandon had wandered into the kitchen, glanced around, said nothing, then gone up to bed. It didn’t take Joanie long to follow. She waited until the room was dark before she climbed beneath the sheets.

      Brandon lay next to her, as cold and silent as a corpse.

      “I’m sorry about this afternoon,” she whispered, staring up at the ceiling.

      He didn’t say anything for long minutes, then finally, “Me, too.”

      “What’s happening to us?” she asked, her heart breaking. At one time they’d been so much in love. Neither of them would have allowed anything—a disagreement, a misunderstanding—to come between them. But these days they almost seemed to invent excuses to argue.

      Their courtship had been wildly romantic, but even then her mother had seen problems looming. When Joanie announced that she wanted to marry Brandon, her parents had advised against it. As a result, Brandon had never gotten on well with her family. Her parents didn’t dislike him, but he chose to believe otherwise. If she wanted to spend holidays with her mother and father, she and the children went alone.

      “I guess your parents were right,” he mumbled in the dark.

      “What do you mean by that?” she demanded, angered by the comment. She wanted to end this tension, not heighten it. Brandon couldn’t seem to let their disagreement drop, and it annoyed her.

      “You’d have done better marrying Stan Simmons, like your mother wanted. He could buy you ten washing machines if you asked. Hell, he’d take them off the showroom floor and not miss a single one.”

      “I wasn’t in love with him. As it happens, I fell in love with you. As for those washing machines, I don’t need ten. Five will do.” She expected Brandon would chuckle, roll over and hug her, but he didn’t. “That was a joke,” she said.

      “I know.”

      “Then why didn’t you laugh?”

      Brandon sighed. “The answer should be obvious.”

      “Apparently not.”

      “Okay, if I have to say it, I will. I didn’t happen to find your little joke all that amusing.”