Just eighteen months ago, she’d watched her husband ride his horse across the face of the moon. It was a daylight moon, setting full but faded in the southwest, pausing on the ridge top long enough for the man and his horse to pass in front. From a distance, she watched the crown of her husband’s Stetson graze the moon’s north pole, its orb framing his entire torso, the southern regions eclipsed by the horse’s body. Then the mare carried him beyond the moon, and a minute later, man and horse dropped from sight behind the ridge.

Maybe he’d noticed her, maybe he hadn’t. His eyes weren’t so good these days. When they went out to count cattle, he could make the animals out as brown dots scattered across a pasture, but his counts were off. He’d come to rely on hers. “I got thirty four,” he’d say. “What’d you get?”

She could have blown the horn to get his attention. Even if he couldn’t see as far as the road, he’d have known the sound of her truck’s horn, sensed trouble, and ridden down from the ridge. On the other hand, having seen her man ride across the moon seemed to make it worth the five mile walk home.

The moon tagged along behind her husband, loping down behind the ridge like a lost calf being led back to its mother. When the three of them were out of sight, she lingered, in no hurry to get home. Hood up, driver’s door open, she sat absorbing the silence of the rangeland, enjoying the strong slanting gold of the late afternoon sun, a woman alone on land half hers, behind the wheel of her very own truck, with a pint of Seagram’s and six seized cylinders.

When she figured there was just enough daylight left to get her home at sunset, she capped the whiskey, left it on the seat, and set off walking. Galen would beat her home, and he might be worried she wasn’t there, but her story would cheer him up. He’d be going around for days telling everyone he knew how him and Gertie had ridden across the moon. Galen was dying of cancer, but he still liked to laugh.

*

The day Galen went, he went quickly, resting as best he could with a tube down his throat and two more up his nose, with wires and other tubes poking into him and running off him like his body was nothing more than a house being rewired. She sat beside the bed in the dim light, thumbing her Smartphone, skimming emails from grandkids. She looked up, sensing a change in him, like something unseen was welling up from his insides. A breath rattled softly from his lips. She thought she heard him mumble, “Come to me,” and then he was gone. She laid her phone on the nightstand, let go a breath of her own. Her eyes ran down his long, emaciated body. She’d never felt so strong, knowing she’d seen him through. Under the thin hospital sheets, she knew he was already little more than a skeleton, but he’d fought for every pound he’d lost. That day, frail and dying, he’d never seemed stronger, fighting the cancer, one last time, to earn himself the night time, so he could die at rest.

She did not call a nurse, one would come by soon enough. She switched off the only light, a bedside lamp. Moon light filtered through the partly closed blinds, falling across her husband’s withered face. She reached with hesitant fingers not so much to touch him, but to touch the moonlight that lay gently on his cheek. “You’re too late,” she said, “but it was nice of you to come.” Then she apologized because, of course, it had been with them all evening.