So Dear To My Heart

“Oh, hey, I’m sorry.”

“Mom was forty-one when we were born, Dad nearly nine years older. I think they’d given up. Then suddenly they had twins.”

“Must’ve been a double shock.”

“You might say that,” she admitted. “Dad always thought he was too old. Maybe he was. He had a stroke when we were seniors in high school. Mom had just been diagnosed with a serious melanoma, and she always felt that brought it on. She fought the cancer, long and hard, then right after we graduated from college, she let go.”

“Man, that’s tough,” Winston said. “I don’t know what Jamesy and I would do without my folks. We almost lost dad in a freak accident a few years ago. Hay baler shot a piece of baling wire about eleven inches long straight into Dad’s chest and right through his heart.”

She sat up straight again, obviously intrigued. “Good grief! What did you do?”

“We called the doc in Rawlins and headed that way with him, baling wire and all. Doc called the hospital in Cheyenne, and they sent a helicopter to meet us. We intersected about an hour south of here. That pilot set it down right in the road, they loaded him up, and by the time we got to Cheyenne, he was in recovery.”

“Thank God you didn’t try to pull out the wire!” Danica said.

Win nodded. “We started to. We really did, but none of us had the nerve. He started to do it himself—he was conscious through the whole thing—but we stopped him.”

“He’d have died if you hadn’t.”

“We know that now.”

“How is he? Fully recovered?”

Winston wiped a bead of perspiration from the beer bottle. “No, not really. The angle of the wire insured maximum damage. He lost a lot of heart tissue. But we all know that it’s a miracle he survived at all, and we’re thankful for what we got.”