He and his wife, Dana, had moved to our county eighteen months earlier. About the same time as Pastor Shay. They were so new in town that most folks still called them “the young couple renting the old Petersen place out on the gravel.”
Cole worked the loading dock at the grain co-op.
Dana was expecting their first baby in the spring.
She went into the hospital in Grand Island on a Tuesday with what the doctors first thought was a bad headache.
By Thursday, she was gone.
An aneurysm. The kind that gives almost no warning and takes almost no time.
The baby didn’t make it either.
Cole had no family in the county. His mother died when he was in high school. His father lived three states away and hadn’t spoken to him in years, over some old grievance Cole never talked about. Dana’s people were from Ohio. Too far, and too short on gas money, to come for anything but the service itself.
