EPILOGUE
One year later.
Eliot stood at the edge of the broadcast stage set up.
He looked out at the familiar surroundings.
The meadow looked the same. Same checkered blankets on the hill.
Same bunting between the poles. Same fairy lights waiting for evening, strung in the arcs he'd hung with Dalene the year before while she argued with gravity from a ladder and he'd held the rails and got lost in her freckles for the first time.
"As you know, I don't broadcast much anymore, preferring to spend my time behind the weather desk, filing reports of systems that need the attention, but today I'm back where it all began."
Eliot had given up the position at the National Weather Service in Washington and opted instead for the regional data collection division, headquartered in Great Falls.
It had a field station that needed someone to run the upper-air analysis program and cross-reference the historical atmospheric data for the western mountain corridor.
He drove to Great Falls three days a week. The rest of the time he fed data to the NWS regional network and, occasionally, to Earl Mackie, who had taken to calling him directly when he had questions about his fields, which was a thing Eliot had not anticipated enjoying as much as he did.
He didn't do broadcast anymore. Except today. Today was the festival, and he had something to say.
"Last year I stood on this stage and told the tale of the phenomenon witnessed every year in this part of middle America.
I had doubted it, that heart-shaped clouds repeatedly appeared each year in this small neck of the woods.
That lovers found each other on checkered blankets, proposals were made, love growing stronger.
I was proven wrong about all of it and you all got a front-row seat as my head got stuck up in the clouds over a woman. "
Dalene looked back at him with the open, unguarded expression that was his favorite thing in any weather condition, in any light, at any hour of the day or night.
She wore a blue dress this year. Light blue with white puffs of clouds.
Her hair was down and around her shoulders.
Her feet were bare as she'd been running through the grass, chasing Sarai's one-year-old who could barely make a few steps without falling down on his behind.
"I was wrong about the clouds. I was wrong about what I was looking for and where I was going to find it." He reached into his jacket pocket. "I have been right, every day for the past year, about one thing."
He opened the box.
It was a simple ring. White gold, a small diamond, and set beside it a tiny cloud-shaped detail worked into the band. He'd had it made in Great Falls.
Dalene's hand came to her mouth.
"Dalene Austen, you are the best forecast I never made.
You are the variable I didn't account for and couldn't have predicted and without which all my data is just noise.
I have cross-referenced every available data point, and the conclusion is unambiguous.
I simply have to marry you, if you will have me for the forecastable future. Will you marry me?"
Above the hill, moving in from the southwest on the light variable winds at six knots, a cumulus formation was coming in. Two rounded lobes. A clean taper at the base.
"Yes," Dalene said, ignoring the cloud above their heads. "Yes, I will marry you."
Eliot put the ring on her finger. Then, not being able to stand the distance when her lips were right there for kissing, he stood up and pulled her in. She came to him, without protest, without negotiation, without reservation.
Her face against his chest. His nose in her hair. The lavender warm and present and entirely not like soap.
The meadow erupted.
Above them, the heart-shaped cloud drifted on over the valley, patient and unhurried, moving through the sky on its own schedule, indifferent to the people below it and somehow, inexplicably, exactly on time.