The Pioneer Woman

Introduction

Part One

1:
Once Upon a Time in the Midwest

2:
Young Hearts Afire

3:
Rebel's Return

4:
A Woman Called Hysterical

5:
Begone, Destiny!

6:
Into the Flaming Barn

7:
Chicago, Adiós

8:
Trouble at the Hitching Post

9:
Sweet Surrender

Part Two

10:
The Good, the Bad, and the Sweaty

11:
Along the Dusty Road

12:
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral

13:
High Noon

14:
She Almost Died with Her Boots On

15:
Tall in the Saddle

16:
Fire in the Western Sky

17:
Torment Trail

18:
So Long to Paradise

19:
A Fistful of Elmer's

20:
A Faceful of Dynamite

21:
She Wore a Lily White Vera

Part Three

22:
The Sick and the Dread

23:
For a Few Dollars Less

24:
Home on the Range

25:
Bad Day at Black Rock

26:
Dark Canyon

27:
The Misfit

28:
St. Nick in Chaps

29:
Terror at the Golden Arches

30:
The Plainswoman

31:
The Hills Run Pink

32:
Unforgiven

33:
Tombstone

34:
Tears Won't Water Steers

35:
Fair Blows the Wind

Recipes

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

O
NE DAY
a few years ago, I began jotting down the story of how I met and married my husband. I got as far as the middle of the first chapter, then abruptly stopped writing, stuck it in a drawer, and went on to other things. Sometime later, after waking up with an uncharacteristic case of writer's block, I pulled the roughly written story out of the drawer. A regular blogger, I was brain-dead that day, and while I was certain few people would find my love story interesting, I wanted to give the readers of my site something new. I said a couple of Hail Marys, hoped they wouldn't hate it, and posted it on my website.

To my surprise, readers responded…and asked for another chapter. I wrote it that same night. A second chapter led to a third, and then a fourth. Encouraged by readers of ThePioneerWoman.com, I began posting regular, weekly installments of my real-life online serial love story, complete with romantic tension and cliffhangers at the end of each episode. It became an integral part of my writing routine for over eighteen months, and my friends and readers were there with me every step of the way. I loved the entire experience. I loved going back…and remembering.

By the end of that time frame, I'd written over forty installments and had only gotten as far as our wedding day. I decided to end the online ver
sion at that point, then immediately began writing the next part of the story, which continues through our first year of marriage.

This book is the complete, combined story—both the rip-roaring romance novel–style saga that I posted on my website (with some new material), which begins the night I met my husband and ends when we leave for our honeymoon, and a new section, which documents the early days of our life as a married couple.

I hope you love the story.

I hope it makes you smile.

I hope it reminds you of the reasons you fell in love in the first place.

And if you haven't yet found love, I hope it shows you that love often can come to find you instead…probably when you least expect it.

F
ORGET THIS
,
I said to myself as I lay sprawled on the bed in which I grew up. In my Oklahoma hometown on a self-imposed pit stop, I was mired in a papery swamp of study guides, marked-up drafts of my résumé, listings of available Chicago apartments, and a J. Crew catalog, from which I'd just ordered a $495 wool gabardine winter coat in olive, not chocolate, because I'm a redhead, and because Chicago, I reminded myself, is a tad more nippy than Los Angeles, which I'd just left weeks earlier. I'd been at it all week—searching, editing, shopping, ordering—and I was worn smooth out, my eyes watery from reading, my middle finger pruney from licking and flipping through pages, my favorite fuzzy socks dingy and rank from languishing on my feet for two days straight. I needed a break.

I decided to head down to the J-Bar, a local dive where some of my friends were meeting for a Christmas break drink. I'd begged out earlier in the evening, but by now that glass of chardonnay seemed not only appealing but necessary.
Mandatory
. But I was a disheveled mess, the downside of not leaving one's bedroom for over forty-eight hours. Not that I had anyone to impress, anyway. It was my hometown, after all, the place that had raised me, and though relatively picturesque and affluent, it wasn't exactly the kind of town that required getting dressed to the nines to go out for wine.

With this in mind, I washed my face, threw on some black mascara—an
absolute must for any fair-skinned redhead with light eyes—and released my hair from its tired ponytail. Throwing on a faded light-blue turtleneck and my favorite holey jeans, I dabbed some Carmex on my lips and blew out the door. Fifteen minutes later, I was in the company of my old friends and the chardonnay, feeling the kind of mellow buzz that comes not only from your first couple of sips of the night but also from the familiar contentment of being with people who've known you forever.

That's when I saw him—the cowboy—across the room. He was tall, strong, and mysterious, sipping bottled beer and wearing jeans and, I noticed, cowboy boots. And his
hair
. The stallion's hair was very short and silvery gray—much too gray for how young his face said he was, but just gray enough to send me through the roof with all sorts of fantasies of Cary Grant in
North by Northwest
. Gracious, but he was a vision, this Marlboro Man–esque, rugged character across the room. After a few minutes of staring, I inhaled deeply, then stood up. I needed to see his hands.

I casually meandered to the section of the bar where he stood. Not wanting to appear obvious, I grabbed four cherries from the sectioned condiment tray and placed them on a paper napkin as I caught a glimpse of his hands. They were big and strong. Bingo.

Within minutes, we were talking.

He was a fourth-generation cattle rancher whose property was over an hour away from this cultured, corporate hometown of mine. His great-great-grandfather had emigrated from Scotland in the late 1800s and gradually made his way to the middle of the country, where he'd met and married a local gal and become a successful merchant. His sons would be the first in the family to purchase land and run cattle at the turn of the century, and their descendants would eventually establish themselves as cattle ranchers throughout the region.

Of course, I knew none of this as I stood before him in the bar that night, shuffling my Donald Pliner spiked boots and looking nervously around the room. Looking down. Looking at my friends. Trying my best
not to look too gazingly into his icy blue-green eyes or, worse, drool all over him. Besides, I had other things to do that night: study, continue refining my résumé, polish all of my beloved black pumps, apply a rejuvenating masque, maybe watch my VHS tape of
West Side Story
for the 3,944th time. But before I knew it an hour had passed, then two. We talked into the night, the room blurring around us as it had done at the dance in
West Side Story
when Tony and Maria first saw each other across a crowd of people.
Tonight, tonight, it all began tonight.
My friends giggled and sipped wine at the table where I'd abandoned them earlier in the night, oblivious to the fact that their redheaded amiga had just been struck by a lightning bolt.

Before I could internally break into the second chorus of song, my version of Tony—this mysterious cowboy—announced abruptly that he had to go.
Go?
I thought.
Go where? There's no place on earth but this smoky bar….
But there was for him: he and his brother had plans to cook Christmas turkeys for some needy folks in his small town.
Mmmm. He's nice, too,
I thought as a pang stabbed my insides.

“Bye,”
he said with a gentle smile. And with that, his delicious boots walked right out of the J-Bar, his dark blue Wranglers cloaking a body that I was sure had to have been chiseled out of granite. My lungs felt tight, and I still smelled his scent through the bar smoke in the air. I didn't even know his name. I prayed it wasn't Billy Bob.

I was sure he'd call the next morning at, say, 9:34. It was a relatively small community; he could find me if he wanted to. But he didn't. Nor did he call at 11:13 or 2:49 or at any other time that day, or week, or month. Throughout that time, if I ever allowed myself to remember his eyes, his biceps, his smoldering, quiet manner, which was so drastically unlike those of all the silly city boys I'd bothered with over the past few years, a salty wave of disappointment would wash over me. But it didn't really matter anyway, I'd tell myself. I was headed to Chicago. To a new city. To a new life. I had zero business getting attached to anyone around there, let alone some Wrangler-wearing cowboy with salt-and-pepper hair. Cowboys ride horses, after all, and they
wear bandanas around their necks and pee outside and whittle. They name their children Dolly and Travis and listen to country music.

Talk about my polar opposite.

 

S
IX MONTHS
earlier, I sat with J over sushi, telling him I was leaving Los Angeles. “I'm just going home for a pit stop,” I told him. He took a nervous bite of sea urchin.

I'd been in L.A. for years and had spent four of them with him. Since blowing into the city as a college freshman, I'd spent my time in the sprawling city, breathing in all the culinary, retail, and urban pleasures the city had to offer. Having come from the relative calm of the Midwest, I was an absolute kid in a candy shop in Los Angeles. My four years at USC had been marked not just by classes, exams, and essays, but by celebrity sightings, delicious cuisine, and boys. I'd experienced it all—partying on the Sunset Strip, running into Sean and Madonna at a movie, kissing James Garner in an elevator, and surviving the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict. And strangely, suddenly, as I sat at the sushi bar with J that night, I knew I'd had enough.

Not with Los Angeles. With J.

The sweet Southern California boy sitting before me had no idea any American land existed east of the Mojave Desert. We'd been joined at the hip since college, and now, four years later, I was announcing in between mouthfuls of cucumber rolls and tamago that I was leaving Los Angeles and heading home instead of following him to San Francisco, where he'd accepted a new engineering job the week earlier. He'd taken the job because it was a great opportunity, and because he assumed I'd move there with him; this seemed the logical next step for a couple who'd dated four years. Initially, I thought I'd go, too. But somehow, in the week after he'd taken the job, my better sense had shaken me violently by the shoulders.

I didn't want to stay in California. I didn't want to stay with J. I wanted
out of there; I wanted to leave. It had been building for a while, starting with a tiny ache, for life as I'd known it before, and culminating—once J accepted his new job—in a full-blown resolve that I wanted to head back to the Midwest. Chicago probably. It would be closer to home—one short plane ride away rather than two, sometimes three legs and an entire day of travel. I'd be closer to friends, closer to family.

I'd be in a climate more suited to my complexion.

Most important, I'd be away from the chokehold of what I'd realized was a textbook dead-end relationship. If I didn't leave now, it would only get harder.

“I'm not going,” I told him. “It just doesn't feel right to me.” The onslaught of one-liners commenced.

“I just can't follow you up there like this.”

“I have to learn to stand on my own two feet.”

“I just don't know what I'm doing here anymore.”

The pathetic clichés spewed from my mouth as thick as the wasabi paste I stirred into my soy sauce. I hated the way I sounded.

“I'm just going home for a while…to clear the cobwebs,” I continued.

“But you'll be right back, right?” J asked. He took a healthy shot of sake.

J.

He'd never quite gotten it.

 

A
FEW WEEKS
later I walked through the front door of my parents' house, my normally fair and freckled skin a forced golden brown from walking to and from my car in L.A. for the last several years. Throwing down my California bags in the foyer, I darted upstairs and plopped facedown onto the bed of my youth. I fell asleep almost immediately and hardly left the solace of my 300-thread-count faded peach sheets for a week. My beloved family dog Puggy Sue cuddled up next to me and
didn't move for days, her soft velvet ears the perfect security blanket for my confused, in-limbo heart.

My brother Mike sat with me sometimes, too. Eighteen months my senior, he had nothing better to do. His developmental disabilities allowed him to be perfectly content patting my head, telling me how pretty I was, and sharing with me whether he'd had biscuits and gravy or a
“ch-ch-ch-cheese omblett”
for breakfast that morning. I'd take it all in as if I were listening to the State of the Union address. It was just so good to be home. Eventually Mike would ask me to give him a ride to Fire Station no. 3, his regular hangout, and I'd tell him no, I was way too busy. Then he'd leave in a huff and I'd go back to sleep for a while. It was glorious.

I'd wake up occasionally, long enough to thumb through the hilariously dated magazines on my bedside table—one
Seventeen
magazine had Phoebe Cates on the cover—and work on my cuticles and just lie there and stare at my taupe floral wallpaper, mentally rearranging all the delicate white flowers, as I'd always done as a little girl.

I cried sometimes, too. The truth was, I'd given J so, so much. As strong and self-assured as I'd always wanted to believe I was, I'd somehow pathetically allowed myself to become uncomfortably dependent on him in California. I was ashamed I'd allowed myself to settle into that groove—that deep ditch of insecurity and fear into which so many young women are doomed to plunge at least once in their lives. Once…if they're lucky. I also cried as a response to the sheer relief I felt, as if 80,000 pounds of com-pressed emotional air had been released from my gut. I exhaled for days and days; it kept coming out in a steady, hissy stream. I cried because I'd left J, not the other way around, which really would have sucked.

I cried because he was cute, and he'd become a habit.

I cried because I missed him.

 

T
O KILL
time, I began having dinner with my grandmother, Ga-Ga, and her small circle of close friends in their small town twenty miles away. They had a standing Tuesday-night dinner date at the Ideal Café, and had invited me to tag along. My first dinner with Ga-Ga, Ruthie, Delphia, and Dorothy turned out to be grueling and brutal; I ordered vegetarian side dishes of mashed potatoes and canned green beans and watched the ladies eat horrible things like liver and onions, chicken fried steak, and meat loaf as they talked about the upcoming banquet at the church, how much the Retired Teachers' bake sale had raised, and how much the neighborhood kids had grown. Then they'd all split two pieces of pie—always rhubarb and lemon meringue—while I ordered another Diet Coke and looked restlessly at my watch. I couldn't believe how important they considered all of this to be. Didn't they know how small their town was? How large Los Angeles was? Didn't they know there was a whole world out there? Didn't they ever get bored? I loved Ga-Ga so much, but her small-town scene was almost too much for me to take. I was meant for larger things than these.

Much larger things.

When their pie was finally finished, we'd all bid one another farewell, and I'd go home and get in bed for two more days.

Finally, one morning a couple of weeks later, I sprang out of bed and never looked back. What did I have to mope about? I had a little money in the bank and no real expenses, thanks to my new cushy, rent-free digs in my parents' home on the golf course. I could take my time planning for Chicago. And J, my constant companion for the past 1,460 days (give or take an hour), was nowhere in sight. It didn't take long before the reality of my youth hit home and I began to realize, in all my midtwenties freedom, that I was a free agent.

Even if J didn't quite know it yet.

 

T
RACY
a hunky blond attorney from my hometown, was my first voyage into Post-J Dating. We had four dates and laughed the whole time, but he was way too old—nearly
thirty
—and probably found me flighty. After Tracy came Jack, a British assistant tennis pro at the country club. He was gorgeous and I loved his accent, but at two years my junior, he was
way
too young. Next came an old boyfriend from church camp who lived in a faraway town and heard I was back in Oklahoma. Sweet, but a no-go for the long term. A couple of other miscellaneous, unremarkable dinner dates followed.