Our Souls at Night

by Kent Haruf

It’s some kind of decision to be free. Even at our ages.

But we didn’t know anything in our twenties when we were first married. It was all just instinct and the patterns we’d grown up with.

True that...

He won’t, though. He’s got his life all screwed down tight.

I love it, she said. It’s better than I had hoped for. It’s a kind of mystery. I like the friendship of it. I like the time together. Being here in the dark of night. The talking. Hearing you breathe next to me if I wake up.

I love the honesty of age

She had stopped going to any church because of her feelings about orthodoxy and the childish ways in which churches talked and thought about God.

Amen to that

Who does ever get what they want? It doesn’t seem to happen to many of us if any at all. It’s always two people bumping against each other blindly, acting out of old ideas and dreams and mistaken understandings. Except I still say that this isn’t true of you and me. Not right now, not today.

You can’t fix things, can you, Louis said. We always want to. But we can’t.

The one with the old man dying and the preacher.

Dad Lewis and Lyle!

But I can’t imagine two old ranchers taking in a pregnant girl.

The twins!

But it’s his imagination.

Haruf's?

It seems brave. You were taking a risk. Yes. But if it didn’t work I’d be no worse off. Except for the humiliation of being turned down.