Julie Haskell expected the hang up, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t frustrating. Hundreds of miles to the west, and one time zone away, she peered out at the flat farmland that began where the small town ended and stretched off a million miles to the horizon. Where Rachel watched people play with their dogs, Julie strained to make out the static black dots in the distance as the cows she knew they were. Brow knotted, she went out the back door and stood on the small deck. The silence was broken only by the wind whispering past her ears. She gazed off into the distance and wondered if this was the dead end Martha told her it probably would be.  

Who would want that horrific episode dredged up after almost twenty years? It wasn’t as if anyone hadn’t tried to interview Rachel Porter before, she simply just didn’t talk about it. And it wasn’t as if Julie herself was a household name with a million dollar offer on the table. It was a dead end. She would have to proceed with the book without her, and the research she’d done so far would have to be enough.  

The prairie had a way of sucking all sense of time from someone. She stood gazing at nothing for twenty minutes before realizing she was late for work, even this early in the morning. Todd, up before sunrise, was already gone, hours ago. The screen door rattled shut behind her as she went back inside to grab her keys. She left for work, kicking up a cloud of yellow dust.  

The Armour Herald was a small building in a small main street. The kind that hasn’t changed since the 30s, existing in a permanent state. The parking spots were of the kind that angled toward the shop fronts, not parallel to them, and were a mix of mostly pickups and SUVs. Julie had come to despise what passed for a main street. With ten shops on either side, a traveler would drive through the middle of Armour and likely never know it, on his way to a more interesting place. She hated those parking spots, she hated the crumbling curbs and the weeds that poked up through them. She hated the hardware store with its antique ironware hanging under the canopy. She hated the barber shop with its sun-faded pole and its old-timey font. She parked her Acura outside the building of the The Armour Herald, next to Wilma’s battered Ford Ranger and pushed open the door. The little bell tinkled above her as she stepped into the wood paneled interior. It had been a few things over the years, but had been the headquarters of the little county newspaper for the last twenty. The faint reek of decades of cigarette smoke permeated everything, even though neither she nor Wilma had the habit.   

“Morning,” she called out. Wilma’s voice in the main office replied with the same. Julie grabbed a cup of water from the cooler and gulped it down before entering the office. Wilma was seated at one of two ancient metal desks, peering over the top of her glasses at the screen of her new laptop and pecking away at the keyboard. “I wouldn’t get too comfortable, Hon,” said the older woman, finally looking at her. “I just got wind of a great story over in Copper County.”  

“Yeah?” Julie tried to sound enthusiastic, but to Wilma, “great” could mean that a farmer had managed to grow a 500 pound pumpkin. She unslung her laptop bag and put it before her on the table.  

“Well it’s just the darndest thing! You know Swede Baker? Well, I bumped into her last night and she told me her sister’s cousin over in Longview knows this woman who’s got just the biggest collection of cows in her goshdarned house.”  

“Cows, huh?”  

“Not real cows of course. Figures, stuffed animals, plates. Just about any other kind of cow you could think of. They’re everywhere! That would make a great little human interest piece, don’t you think?”  

“Could be a real winner,” Julie said.  

“I’ve already taken the liberty of setting something up, so get going! It’s about a three hour drive there and back.”  
 “Seriously?” Julie said. “A cow collection?”  

“Well, I know you didn’t get your college degree in journalism to cover little stuff like this, but these kinds of stories are real important to the folks here. They already have real newspapers to give them the bad news. What’s wrong with us giving them the good news?” It was hard to argue with Wilma for a couple of reasons. The first being it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. The other being no matter what Julie thought about Armour, South Dakota, its dilapidated crumbling buildings, its blink-and-you-miss-it main road, and its population of 900 people, Wilma was one of the nicest people she’d ever met. It was hard to put her in the line of fire and open up with both barrels. She threw her laptop bag back over her shoulder, got the address, and got back on the road.  

As it turned out, the story was quite interesting. Not so much for the cows – and there was a formidable collection in the little farmhouse – but for the woman who owned them. Never married, she’d harboured dreams of taking an agriculture class in high school at a time when girls were refused such classes, and later was denied entry to the Future Farmers of America because of her gender. Small town minds and small town life. So instead she began her collection, that now took up the entire house. It was a pleasant visit. The woman turned out to be a real feminist – or as close to a feminist as you could find in the middle of nowhere. Julie left with a few pictures and enough story to take up a page of The Armour Herald, and a sense that the woman was happy to have her story finally told. In a strange way, it made Julie happy too. True, Chicago was a long way off, but what was being a journalist about, if not to inform and entertain? The story could easily be about the injustices of the past slowly being erased by the changing world. Until Wilma pared it down to being a story about an elderly spinster with a giant cow collection, that is.  

Julie was back on the road around noon, and with the newspaper shutting down for the day at three there wasn’t a lot left to accomplish. Armour’s big day, the annual Beefmaster festival was gearing up, and she would be covering the setup of the display booths and food stands for the Herald once she got back in town. This was her sixth, and it wasn’t going to be any different than the last five. Todd, her husband, was already putting together the stand for his own employer’s display. She was in no hurry to be back. She had to spend time with him and their friends at the pre-show barbeque in the fairgrounds later that afternoon, and like all the previous years, that lasted long into the night, with crazy amounts of beer being drank. She was tired of it all. She’d been tired of it all for years.  

As it turned out, Longview had a small shopping mall of sorts – she’d been there a number of times over the years – and it was lunchtime. She turned off the highway at the 128th St exit and headed for the north end of town. It was unremarkable – built probably in the mid sixties, and hardly updated since. The biggest store was a JC Penney’s, but there were numerous other smaller name brand places; Radio Shack, GameStop, and a handful of the ubiquitous fast food chains. Rumour was that Monsanto were canvassing the area with plans on developing a huge parcel of land nearby. It was all Todd had talked about in the last few months. If the rumours panned out, it would mean a few hundred new jobs, and Todd aimed to get one of them. It might, he’d told her, even mean a move to Longview. A quantum leap from Armour, for sure, but no closer to civilization.  

She parked at the food court and saw scaffolding framing what looked like a new addition to the mall. It was pretty big. Heavy plastic sheeting kept the blowing dust out, and there was already a large skeleton of girders in place. Maybe the rumours weren’t rumours after all.  

She ate at Arby’s, but she hated eating alone. She’d been doing too many things alone for too long. It bothered her – she was never so solitary. It seemed that her only connections to reality were electronic ghosts; the people who responded to her blog; Martha, her long-suffering agent; and her parents. Occasionally, a couple of her old friends from Chicago would post something on her Facebook wall, but she was slowly disappearing from their lives.  

Across from her a young mother pushed her stroller up to one of the tables in the food court. She was young and pretty with luscious, long hair, small and slender too. Julie watched the woman make sure her baby grasped the bottle before settling down to eat her own lunch. She was directly opposite. Julie looked under the desk. The woman was wearing a knee length skirt and cheap flats. Above the table, she ate a sandwich delicately, small fingers tipped with red nails gingerly holding her food, that she ate with small bites. The woman looked up suddenly and they accidentally made eye contact. Julie smiled at her, but the other woman looked away unaffected. Suddenly oversensitive, Julie wadded up her go-to bag and left the area. She strode away from the food court, deeper into the mall, before she realized she was running away again. She slowed down and caught her breath and saw a small Barnes & Noble some doors down. As she walked to it, she was a mess of useless self-analysis, the kind she had tried to prune from her life over the last year and largely, had succeeded.   

The book store was sparsely populated. Mostly with stay at home types; mothers, young children, and the elderly. She walked around aimlessly before settling on the Literature section. One of the times she’d been here in the past, “Sitting Ducks” by Julie Haskell was on the shelves. It would have been a nice stroke to her ego to see it there now, but it was gone. She turned absently and looked down to the store front where another woman entered, looking to and fro. Julie’s heart stopped, and when it started again, it fairly thumped. She ducked back behind a row of shelves. It was Molly.  

The rest was comical, a lame cat and mouse game. Julie wasn’t completely sure who it was – the hair was different – until she was able to circle around to within a few feet. She looked at the woman from the side. She could not mistake that profile.  

Don’t say anything, she thought. Leave now, and say nothing. Her leading foot pointed in the direction of the storefront, but her mouth said, “Molly?”   

The woman turned at the sound of her name, but when she saw Julie, her eyes turned to stone. “Molly,” Julie repeated?  

“Oh. Hi, Julie.” Molly’s eyes darted to the storefront. “Brad’s next door. Maybe you should just –“  

“When did you get back? I thought you moved to Rapid City.”  

“We did,” Molly said, curtly. “It’s Brad’s mom’s birthday. We’re here for the weekend.”  

Julie retreated into the shelves and motioned Molly to follow. The other woman did, but reluctantly. She stood, awkwardly looking at anything other than Julie. “I gotta go, Julie.”  

“You didn’t even say goodbye,” Julie blurted out, too loud. “I didn’t know you were leaving until you’d already gone.”  

“You know that Brad – he found out, Julie. Jesus Christ. I don’t know if you can imagine what it was like for me.”  

“What about me?” Julie pressed. She could feel tears welling up in her eyes, burning. Molly’s remained of stone. “I really … I really thought I loved you.”  

“Will you stop? Please?” Molly fidgeted. “I have to go. He’ll kill me if he sees me with you.”  

Julie reached out and snagged Molly’s sleeve, pulled her closer into the shelves, deep into the corner, by Tolstoy. Molly didn’t resist much. “I think about you all the time,” Julie said. “I miss you. I really miss you. I miss your face, I miss your body.” She sniveled, and wiped the wetness from the tip of her nose. “I miss everything about you.”  

Molly’s bowed head hid her lips as she whispered, “I miss you too.” But when Julie’s fingers reached up to brush her cheek, she stiffened again, defiantly. “I have to go, Julie. Please. Don’t make this hard for me.” Molly turned, but she stopped again when Julie tugged on her sleeve. Both women looked at an old man who was poised to enter the section they were in. He paused, and walked on. It’s now or never, Julie thought. She put a hand on Molly’s waist and looked down at her, held some of Molly’s hair in her other hand. “I told you before I’d leave Todd for you. We can still do that.”  

“Listen to yourself. Just like it always was. All about you you you. I have a family, Julie. That doesn’t mean anything to you. I can’t leave my family.” She pulled away, hard this time. “And besides, I’ve changed. I’m not like that anymore. Brad and I have been through counseling, the whole bit. We both made a lot of mistakes. He admitted his, and I admitted mine.”  

“And now you’re happy?”  

“I’m happier.”  

Julie’s mind was spinning, her focused dwindled. “Look, the fact you’re here, now. I’m here. I’m never here, but I am today. It’s fate, right?”  

Molly’s expression turned from stone to befuddlement. “Fate?” She shook her head. “You need to start living in the real world, Julie. It’s not all rainbows and butterflies.”  

Molly looked to the storefront and whipped her head back, and befuddlement had turned to panic. “Jesus Christ, he just walked into the store. Julie, I gotta go. I’m sorry we had to see each other, but we’re done. It’s done.”  

“Molly, please …” Julie whined. She loathed the sound of her voice, detested her outstretched hand as it clenched on empty air. This was not her at all.   

“I gotta go, Julie. Goodbye, okay? Don’t make a scene.”  

In the movies it never ends with a whimper. In the movies it rarely ends at all. The hero always finds a way to keep the heroine from leaving. This was, Julie knew, the end of act two. The moment when all is lost. She watched Molly walk to the storefront where Brad was scanning the inside, looking for her. He smiled at her. They left together. Molly never looked back. And just like that, it was over. The coda to a small affair that threatened, at one time, to be so much more.