Wyoming Nights Read Online Free PDF

has taken me 4 years to get back up and try to forgive myself for not telling any of them often enough how much I loved them,” she told him.
    Krysten said nothing as the two talked. The conversation between Darry and Darlene took on a tone that was not her expertise and she excused herself to go to the ladies’ room.  She did not return to the table.
    As night time eased in, Darlene and Darryl walked along the beach, not hand in hand, but thought in thought as they communicated about how to move forward in life.
    “Come over here, let me show you my shanty,” he said to her. It wasn’t a crude little building, but more of a beachside store front that he could close up in the evenings.
    “I am closed this evening because you are here, but on the weekends, I do pretty well selling my art,” he said.  “I couldn’t work anymore after Lois died. There were too many memories for me. You know what I mean?  I knew what time each day she would call, so I would set my schedule to make sure I was free...we would have lunch every Thursday... I couldn’t go back in that building....back to that life...I had to find a new purpose.”
    “So your purpose is now collecting seashells to make art?”
    Darryl punched her playfully in the arm. “No, I am going to open an art gallery kind of thing.  Right now, I am building up my inventory.  I am making friends with some of the other local artists and I am going to rent them booth space or do commission pieces... a place on the beach.”  He stared out at the water. “It is going to be nice,” he said with a smile.
    Darlene asked, “May I inquire as to how long Lois has been gone?”
    Without looking at her he said, “Two years, four months, 16 days, and twelve hours.”
    “Does your family worry about you, wandering the beaches, being alone all the time?”
    “My family worried about me when my wife was alive, because I worked all the time, or I was always in meetings, never spending enough time with my children, and barely saw my grandkids,” he said as he looked over at her.  “The funny thing is Darlene, I am more accessible now than I have ever been, but they no longer want to be around me.”
    A tug came at Darlene’s heart so strong that she reached out and touched his arm. “I am sorry,” she whispered.
    “No need. I have recently stopped feeling sorry for myself and focused on what I wanted to do with the next 25 years of my life.  My kids know me through my wife, because I worked all the damned time to make money to buy braces, and pay for lessons and team sporting events that I rarely got to see.  Irony is mean and spiteful.  I worked hard to give them a great life filled with opportunity and for it, they don’t know me.  The man my children see now, they think is some crazy person who is suffering a mental breakdown.”
    Her hand was still on his arm. “Are you suffering a breakdown?”
    His smile was bright enough to cast a new light in her world. “I have never felt better. I always wanted to be an artist.  My kids don’t know that.  I always wanted to have a gallery.  They don’t know that either.  I had to go back to who I was before Lois in order to find Darryl again. When I found him, I found peace.”
    After last week with Cornell, she had a personal question for candidate number three. “Darryl, have you found a way to be intimate again with another person?” she asked.
    “Why? Are you offering?”
    She laughed. “No...I was curious, that’s all.”
    He turned to face her.  It was possibly the most alive she had felt in many years as he placed his hands on the tops of her shoulders and stared deeply into her eyes, “Darlene, sex is sex. Intimacy is intimacy. One does not preclude the other,” he said to her.
    A spark shot up her leg as she gazed back into his eyes, “and if you had a preference...”
    He pulled her into his arms and held her tight against his svelte body. “I am a grown ass man. Intimacy is far more