River Hewn
“Who’s Madison?” the girl asks, lifting her head and shock of red hair from your chest.
You raise your bare shoulders from the floor of her parents’ van, the rough carpeting peeling from your skin, and hoist yourself up by the elbows.
“I’m sorry. What?”
“You just said Madison in your sleep. Twice, actually.”
You’re 18, and it’s barely spring in Michigan, but it’s decidedly humid in the back of the vehicle parked illegally at the trailhead of a forest preserve. If you answer truthfully — that you were dreaming about a river in Montana — she might believe you. You weigh an explanation against a faux confession. Chance it? If she takes you at your word, she just may be the one.
She wasn’t, of course, but Montana, with its distinctly feminine rivers, was.
We wed in high summer 1995, and I celebrate
