A Blizzard Trapped Me in a Line Cabin With the Neighbor I’d Been Suing for Twelve Years

She’d been out looking for her own strays. Her horse had stepped in a badger hole and come up lame. She’d seen the smoke from my chimney.

She stopped about ten feet from the door and looked at me.

I looked at her.

“Well,” she finally said, “this is awkward.”

“Get inside before you freeze,” I said. “We’ll sue each other later.”

The storm lasted three days.

For the first evening, we barely talked. She sat on one bunk, I sat on the other, and we ate canned chili in silence.

On the second day, the boredom got to us.

It turned out Ingrid was a hell of a card player. It also turned out she had a sense of humor I’d never seen in a courtroom.

Somewhere around the fourth game of gin rummy, she asked me why I’d never just called her.

“Your lawyer said not to,” I said.

“So did mine.”

We both thought about that for a minute.

“How much have you spent?” she asked.

I told her.

She whistled. “I’m at about one-ninety.”

“So between us, we’ve given the lawyers almost four hundred thousand dollars,” I said. “Over a creek.”

“Over a creek,” she repeated.

Then she started laughing. And I started laughing. And we couldn’t stop. We laughed until we were wiping our eyes, two old ranchers in a cabin in a blizzard, realizing we’d spent twelve years and our retirement savings being stubborn.

That night, she told me about her husband, Lars. He’d been sick for the last three years of the lawsuit. She said the fight was the one thing that made him feel like he was still in charge of something.

“After he died,” she said, “I kept going because stopping felt like losing him all over again.”

I told her about my divorce. About how my ex-wife used to say I’d rather be right than happy.

“Were you?” Ingrid asked. “Right?”