Wes looked down at the two letters.
The third letter was signed Jack Rowan, in a big, loose, looping hand. The J swept down below the line like a fishhook and came back up into a circle.
The fourth letter was signed Jack Rowan too. But the J was straight. A single hard stroke, no loop, no circle. The R was smaller. The letters leaned the other way.
"I worked the teller window at a bank for thirty-four years," LaRue said. "Signature cards. Every check that came across my counter, I looked at the signature. You get so you can see a forged name from across the lobby."
Wes stared at her.
"I knew in March of 2025," LaRue said. "The week your fourth letter came. I knew it wasn't the same man."
Bonnie set the coffeepot down on the counter very carefully. Then she went into the kitchen and shut the door, which was the kindest thing anyone had done for LaRue in two days.
Wes sat down slowly on the stool next to her.
"You knew," he said. "For two years."
"I didn't know who," LaRue said. "I didn't know why. I thought maybe Jack had hurt his hand and somebody was writing for him. Or maybe he'd never written them at all, and a ranch hand had done it for a joke." She looked at the letters on the counter. "So I paid attention. That's what tellers do. I watched."
"And?"
"The man who wrote the first three letters was charming," LaRue said. "He told me about the size of his ranch three times. He told me about his truck. He called me 'darling' in the second letter, and I'd never met him."
Wes winced. "That was Jack."
"The man who wrote the fourth letter told me his dog had eaten a whole tube of saddle soap and had to be watched all night. He told me how it felt when the first calf of the year came out wet and steaming in the snow." LaRue touched the fourth letter. "He spelled 'beautiful' wrong four different ways in two years. He never once called me darling. He asked about my garden. Every single letter, he asked about the tomato stakes."
She looked at Wes.
"So I kept writing," she said. "Because I liked the second man better."
Wes did not say anything for a long time.
Outside the café window, the light was going blue over the mountains. A cattle truck went by on the highway, slow, its stock rack rattling. In the back of Wes's pickup, the black-and-white dog had stood up and put its front paws on the side of the bed, watching the café door.
"Is that Tuff?" LaRue asked.
"That's Tuff," Wes said hoarsely. "He's bad."
"I know. I read about the saddle soap."
Wes laughed then, a short, cracked sound, and put his hand over his eyes.
"Mrs. Simms," he said. "Why did you come? If you knew."
LaRue took the gray hat off the counter and turned it over in her hands. It was old felt, sweat-stained at the band, with a little feather tucked behind the ribbon that had seen better days.
"Because I wanted to see if the second man would tell me the truth," she said. "To my face. When he didn't have to."
She set the hat back down in front of him.
"He did," she said.
She did not take the bus back in the morning.
She stayed upstairs at Bonnie's for a week. Wes drove down from Haystack Creek every day at ten and took her somewhere. Up the Lemhi to see the elk on the winter range. Out to the ranch to meet the cows. To the little cemetery behind the Grange hall, where Jack Rowan was buried next to his wife and their parents, under a gray stone with a branding iron carved on it.
LaRue stood at Jack's grave for a long time.
"I'm sorry I never met him," she said.
"He'd have liked you," Wes said. "He never met a stranger. That was Jack's gift." He looked at the stone. "I was always the brother who stayed in the barn."
"I know," LaRue said. "I could tell from the letters."
On the last day, they sat at the kitchen table in the old ranch house on Haystack Creek. The table was scarred pine, and the kitchen smelled of woodsmoke and coffee. On the wall by the door, a calendar from the feed store hung open to December, with a date circled in red pencil.
The date the bus came in.
"I'd like to keep writing," Wes said. "If you'll let me. Under my own name this time."
"I'd like that," LaRue said.
"And in the spring," he said, then stopped, and started over. "We calve in March. It's the best time of year up here. If a person wanted to see a calf come out wet and steaming in the snow, March would be the time."
LaRue looked out the kitchen window at the mountains. The snow was coming down off the peaks like a curtain closing, the way he had written it once, in his third or fourth month of pretending to be his brother.
"I'll need to bring the cat," she said.
Wes looked at Tuff, asleep under the table with his nose on Wes's boot.
"Tuff's going to have opinions about that," he said.
"Tuff's bad," LaRue said. "I've read all about him."
She took the bus home to Joplin on a Saturday. Wes drove her to the café and stood beside the truck in his gray hat until the bus pulled out.
Ten days later, a letter came to the small brick house in Missouri. Same paper. Same envelope. Same lean, hard handwriting, leaning the wrong way, with a dog-food stain on one corner.
LaRue opened it at her kitchen table, with Mister in her lap.
She read it twice. Then she looked at the signature for a long time, the way she used to look at a check that had come across her counter, and smiled.
It said Wesley Rowan. Every letter of it, his.