THEY LIVED HAPPILY ever after. Could it really be true? After three years (or ten years, or more than half our lives, depending on how you counted) of waiting?

When I saw Drew running across the Heart of Texas Fairgrounds, when he wrapped his arms around me right there in the middle of the field, when he waltzed me around and around, shouting into the air, I knew he had done it.

“I told her,” he crowed. “I told her I was leaving.”

When he whirled me around again, lifting my feet off the ground, I kissed him, full on the mouth, right there in plain sight of anyone. Oh, Lord.

We’d talked about it—his leaving, my leaving, us, Drew and Cile—about almost nothing else, since that first time we made love with hail big as walnuts beating down on the roof of his old farmhouse. Or, really, since that first time we’d got back out on the dance floor again, amazed that nothing at all had changed since high school.

It was Wind Day, and everyone in our part of town, our part of the world, was flying kites. My two girls, middle-school Amazons, were far across the grassy expanse, letting theirs rise into the blue of the March sky. They’d brought homemade, ecologically sound newspaper box kites, tied with twine, anchored with rag tails made from scraps of old shirts and pajamas. Beyond theirs overhead were hundreds of brighter, newer kites: taloned see-through dragons; segmented fish; wide-winged butterflys in paint-box colors; sleek Mylar sharks; Czech, Japanese, Indian, Chinese, Mexican, German, Korean banner kites of spinnaker nylon; tissue paper and balsa wood throwaways. All diving and dipping like sea gulls into the surf, like ships’ sails snapped by sudden gusts. Like dancers leaping against gravity.

The faces of the children, gazing upward, were as multihued as the kites themselves. Here in central Texas near the confluence of two rivers on a faultline, it was easy to believe the school district’s statistics: that by the turn of the new century a scant fifth of all our students, K through twelve, would be white.

I’d been looking for Drew, knowing that on Wind Day he’d be there with his sweet boys, the three of them flying model planes on another part of the Fairgrounds. I’d heard the loud aggregate hum of small motors like Judgment Day locusts, and strained for the sight of him, longing to see him.

Wind Day was a happy time for us; we loved the kite fliers all trying to get their hopes airborne. We joked that the Saturday got its name from the fact that it was the one day of the year in this town I called Weather, Texas, when the wind was calm enough not to rip kites to shreds and splinters, or blow topsoil under your eyelids, or spiral your car right off the ground and land it in one of our dammed-up lakes.

We’d come every year since we’d found each other again, every year when the sky was this fine cerulean blue, and the gentle nudging wind pushed at our shoulders and legs, shoved us into one another, tumped toddlers on their behinds, sent dogs scurrying off, coats ruffed as if chasing rabbits, blew hair into wide-open mouths and ice-cream scoops off cones, tugged strings from slippery little fists, sent plastic killer bees and yellow happy faces into high wires and treetops, dumped biodegradable tatters into vacant lots.

We waved to my daughters, who were looking our way. They waved back, pointing to their recycled kites bobbing like corks high in the sky. They’d be fine, about the news. His mild-mannered sons would be, too.

“Where are the boys?” I asked him, looking toward the whirring sound that reached us from the athletic field.

“They said I was old enough to fly my own model planes now.” Drew looked momentarily glum. “They don’t mingle with the masses anymore. They’ve got a tennis match. Besides, their momma thinks they’ll get Pasadena tick disease standing in the grass.”

“Oh, don’t do that.” I hated it when he got down on his two. We went a long way back together, his boys and I. Back to when they were almost lap babies; back to “Ring Around the Rosy Rag.” They were different from their tall, long-legged daddy in his stovepipe jeans and boots, his heavy longhorn belt buckle reaching my rib cage. They were a smaller, more gentlemanly breed.

“Yeah,” he said, giving me a casual public arm around the shoulder. “You get on with them, Cile.”

“Should I tell Eben tonight?” I was, in truth, hesitant to tell my husband I was leaving him, not so much because, a pastor, he had the authority of the church behind him and the approbation of his flock, rather because I knew from long experience that he’d put his prying fingers on my news. He liked to appropriate my surprises; to confiscate my secrets. I’d have preferred to say nothing to him until after Drew and I had moved to the farm together. But that was wistful thinking: another name for cowardice.

“Sure, tell him you’re gone.” Drew looked up at the sky and shouted out, “She’s gone,” and then, “She’s mine,” amazed at the utter wonder of saying it right out loud, his voice blown away on the wind with hundreds of others, parents calling their young, kids calling to friends.

“Maybe I should wait until after Easter? You know Easter in the church.”

“You’ve got to tell him, honey. I did it. I told her. The rest of them can wait. His whole congregation doesn’t need to know yet; most of all my mother, the preacher’s biggest fan, sure doesn’t need to know yet.” He looked anxious just talking about her. “It’s going to take a while, anyway, to get my things cleaned out of that half acre of carpet, to move everything up there.”

We’d planned this for so long—our living together in his tin-roofed old farmhouse, north of Waco and east of West, on the rolling blackland acres that had been in his family as long as there’d been a state of Texas. On the plot of ground where his bones felt at home.

That was as far as we ever got making plans. Then he’d start talking about how his great-granddaddy had almost lost the farm to flooding, his granddaddy to drought, his daddy to the tornado of ’53, which wiped out the downtown here and cleared a path up through the countryside. How he, Drew, was damn sure not going to be the one to lose it, no matter what kind of bribe the federals came up with next as an excuse to grab the grasslands for themselves.

“I can’t believe it yet,” I said, joy sinking in. “That we’re really doing it.” I looked at the lightness of shapes scudding the sky.

“Believe it,” Drew said, grinning, scratching his cropped red hair as if he was just getting used to it himself. He looked the way he had at seventeen, back when we used to dance our legs off to country music on sawdust floors. “Believe it.”

“And the kids?” I asked him, looking off toward my big girls. “They’ll be okay, won’t they?”

“They’ll be great, honey. Every last one of them will be great. Nobody will even notice we’re gone.”