A Wedding To Remember. Joanna Sims

one of the many pastures where some of the herd of black Angus were lying down after a day of grazing. They would have held hands—they always had—but this time, she didn’t reach for his hand, and he couldn’t bring himself to reach for hers.

      Silently, they walked together, side by side, until they reached the pasture fence. With a sigh, Savannah leaned on the fence to admire the view. Perhaps he was biased—most likely he was—but Sugar Creek Ranch was heaven on Earth. A landscape seemingly touched by God’s hand, it featured flat pastureland abutted by an expanse of gently rolling hills leading up to the base of royal Montana mountains far off in the distance. Tall grass on the hills swayed, almost imperceptibly, in a calm breeze floating across the hills, and the soft echo of the water flowing over rocks in the wide stream that crossed the ranch like a snake uncurling itself. It was the kind of landscape that would inspire painters like Winslow Homer or Georgia O’Keeffe to unroll their blank canvases and take out their brushes.

      “I never get tired of this,” Savannah mused. “It never gets old.”

      “For me, either.”

      There was much that he resented about his father—Jock was harsh, cold at times and unable to admit wrongdoing or express regret—but he’d gotten it right when he’d bought this land. And though maybe Bruce hadn’t gotten everything right in his own life, either, he knew, as he admired his wife’s profile in the early-evening light, that he had gotten it right when he married Savannah.

      “I need to go back, I think.”

      “You okay?”

      She nodded, her arms now crossed in front of her body as she turned away from the view. “I suddenly feel so tired. It’s been a long day.”

      “You overdid it.” Bruce fell in beside her. “Cooking me dinner.”

      A shake of her head. “No. That was fun. It’s not that. It’s that I seem to be going from one appointment to the next to the next now. I can go years without so much as a cold, and yet now, it seems, that’s all I’m doing.”

      Bruce whistled for the dogs playing in the pasture to follow them back to the house.

      “Your limp is less noticeable,” he told her. “Already.”

      The bruises on her face had faded to a light yellow and a faint green, a sign of healing, but her speech was still affected, a little slurred and slushy, and as far as he knew, Savannah hadn’t had any memories, not even flashes, of the last several years. All of her childhood memories, the memories of her young adulthood, and even the early years of their marriage were still, thankfully, intact. But Savannah still did not have recent memories about the darkest period of their marriage.

      “Don’t get me wrong—I’m grateful for the help.” She ascended the stairs, holding on to the railing, much more slowly than she had descended. “I just wish I didn’t need the help.”

      * * *

      The first time she mustered the nerve to drive herself into town after she was cleared to drive by her neurologist, Savannah decided to meet her friends from work at one of their favorite spots on Main Street.

      “How are you?” her friend Maria, a speech-language pathologist at the elementary school where Savannah had worked before the accident, asked after the waitress took their orders.