by Leslee Green
“Ok, I’ll make it short. My dad knew he was going to die, and I was a lot younger then, so he wanted me to have a family. It’s a small town and he didn’t have a whole heap of options, but there was this woman who was single and had kids too and they got married. She had all this money, later I found out it was because she had had five husbands, my dad never found that out, and she helped my dad restore the grounds a little bit by putting some money into it, of course she only agreed to it after she found out he was going to die and she had him sign something.
“He wouldn’t give her the stables, those he for sure wanted to go to me, so the deal was that all the money that comes out of them goes to her until she’s paid back in full, and then I inherit them. But after he died, she immediately took out massive loans against the place and spent the loan money and now every penny this place makes goes to the mortgage loans instead of to her loan so it’s not getting paid off, not at all. I keep it from going under practically by myself because otherwise the bank will take it and then I’ll for sure never get it.”
“That was the short version?” Blake said, teasing.
Linda felt bad after explaining things. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I can’t go to college, I can’t buy a horse, I can’t do anything but stay here and do their laundry and shovel manure or I’ll lose this place and it’s kind of all I have.”
Blake felt concerned with Linda’s problem, understanding it now. He put his hand on her back and rubbed across it and she remembered how good it felt when he had first touched her when she was lying face first in the sawdust.
“That probably sounds stupid. You think I should just let it go.”
“No, no, not if it’s important to you.”
Her emotions were mixed, and she was reminded of how much she wanted to tell him how big of a fan of his she was. How when she watched him ride, it reminded her of being with her father at the rodeo and she was grateful he kept at it and gave her something to root for and to hope for after he died. She turned to tell him and, when she did, he kissed her.
When they came apart, there was only silence and the sound of horses chewing grass. There was no one else in the world.
He took the hat off his head and she could see the outline of his hair blowing in the breeze and the sparkle in his eye from the sliver of moon.
She felt like she was made of clay and she put her arms around him and kissed him again. She felt safe. She put her hand on his face to feel his stubble and the wagon made a weird creaking sound and they both froze to prevent it from collapsing.
"Guess we shouldn't hop in the back seat," Blake said after a moment.
“That’s illegal.”
“Is it?” he asked, a little worried.
The hand on his cheek gave him a couple firm little pats and she stood up to get off the wagon.
He got down first and she yelped in surprise as he reached up and lifted her down by her waist.
He left his hands on her hips and they stood facing each other in the dark.
“Maybe I can help with your problems,” he said.
“What problems?”
“Getting the stables back. Getting out of the house with your stepmother.”
“Are you asking me to move in with you?” she joked.
“First of all, no, and second of all, I don’t have my own place.”
“Where do you stay when you’re home?”
“At home! With my parents.”
“You live with your parents and you’re like thirty?”
"I'm twenty-seven! And I'm only there a few weeks at a time. I'm not stinking rich, yet. After touring, I get out and pick up work as a wrangler."
“Oh, I didn’t know you were a real cowboy.”
“What the heck else would I be?”
Linda chuckled through her nose and understood his point, but she was reminded of the idea that, as wonderful as it was being with Blake, it could never last. He was not here to stay. She released her arms from around him. “I just want to watch you ride a bull, Blake.”
“We can make that happen.”
He gave her a meaningful hug and it felt good. They mounted up and returned the horses to the stable and Blake drove Linda to her house, pulling his truck up in front of it.
She checked the time; it was almost midnight.
“I’ll walk you up.”
"No, that's okay," Linda said.
“Why not?”
Linda sighed and examined her house through the truck window. “If they suspect I’m having a good time they’ll just try to put a stop to it.”
A look of concern came onto Blake’s face. “Is it really that bad?”
Linda didn’t know how else to respond. “Yes.”
Blake thought for a moment, got an idea, and got out of the truck.
He came around the side and opened Linda’s door and helped her out.
In front of the many blackened windows too dark to see into, he pulled Linda into his arms. “Hello stepfamily!” he said quite loudly.
“Shh!” Linda shushed. He ignored her.
“Linda and I had a great time tonight, and I hope to see her again very soon!” Linda was bright red, embarrassed but also scared. She prayed in her heart that there was not an onlooker in the dark behind one of those windows. “And we really like each other!”
Upon hearing this, Linda turned from the windows back to Blake, who was closer than she had noticed.
“We do?” she asked.
“Don’t we?”
Linda only responded by greeting his lips with hers as he leaned down to kiss her.
“That was a good KISS!” Blake practically screamed.
Linda was laughing but also felt a terrible cold in her stomach, and Blake could tell.
“Linda, they can’t do anything about it. There’s nothing they can do to stop us. You’re your own woman.”
Linda didn’t know how to explain it to him. She kept her head lowered, unable to come up with any words.
“They can’t hurt you,” he said, and her head shot up and their eyes met and he could see that was what she was afraid of. He pulled her close, putting himself between her and the dangers of the world. “No one’s going to hurt you.”
Linda sensed by his expression and his body that Blake felt protective of her. She didn't know if it was because she was so much younger, or because she was so pathetic, or if he was starting to really care about her, but after half a lifetime of abuse, it only made her feel guilty.
“Everyone gets hurt,” she said, with tears pressing on the backs of her eyes.
Before the tears could come, Blake took Linda’s cheek in his hand and pulled her towards him and kissed her again.
For a moment, she melted and her anxiety drained away, but she pulled herself away from him, holding onto his hands.
“Thank you, Blake, but I really must go inside now. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“Today.”
“What?”
“It’s past midnight so technically we’ll talk later today.”
She grabbed his wrist and turned it to see his watch and, seeing the time, quickly began moving towards her front door, stopping herself from bursting into a full sprint. She hurried over to the handle, leaving Blake behind, turned back to him and said, “Goodnight, Blake.”
He smiled and watched her enter. He stared into an upstairs window with the curtains pulled open, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dark so he could see into the space or catch some motion lurking back in the darkened room. He was sure it was staring back at him.
Blake got into his truck and drove off down the lane and only the porch light was left, barely bright enough to illuminate a pair of long hands reaching towards a set of drapes upstairs and closing them.
CHAPTER NINE
A smile stretched across Linda’s face with her eyes still closed as she was overrun with the knowledge that the night before had not been a dream. The whole world around her was new that morning. How could it be the same?
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At the breakfast table, Linda’s sisters could barely contain their frustration, knowing what had happened. They wouldn’t have contained it if they could think of any real excuse to take it out on Linda. They could not, but they tried anyway, complaining about the pancakes she made and even then struggling to come up with a reason for that.
"These are too soft," Caroline said.
Linda kept smiling. “I know,” she replied, “and too round.”
A fist holding a fork slammed into the table, but what good did it do?
Linda began to weigh the options in her head for what time she should message Blake, studying the benefits and cost of each carefully, not wanting to make a mistake. Blake, apparently unconcerned with optimizing his text message time, sent her one first.
It contained a picture of a flyer for a rodeo in the city of Helena. The rodeo was two weeks away and Helena was only 20 miles away. Linda drew a fast breath.
You’re coming to this, right? He texted.
Immediately Linda was yanked in two. Seeing Blake ride in person was a thought that made her eyes close and her heart sink she wanted it so badly. She had always wanted to attend the local rodeos when he was competing but it had really never been possible, and a part of her feared that this time would be no different.
But it would be different. If for no other reason than this time, she would try.
This was her chance to relive the excitement she remembered from when she was a girl, to bring back the memories she had of her father, to see Blake perform in person as a seasoned professional, but her stepmother would not allow it without putting up a fight.
Linda was not brave enough to face the woman right away about taking the time off, but she wrote off her procrastination as needing to prepare and plan for the confrontation, which was partially true.
Riding with her sisters to work, she went about her regular workday, only this day was better than usual because now and then she would set down her pitchfork, wipe her brow, remove her glove and check the phone in her pocket and there would be a message from Blake.
Standing in the dusty stable, a bashful smile would always crack on her face and she would reply to his messages by sharing some mundane part of her day with him by sending a picture. She thought maybe he would tire of the silly pictures, but he asked for more, commenting on them. He was learning about her and she wondered why he wanted to, but she continued to feed him information in the form of pictures, as he did to her.
Low air in the tire on his trailer.
A thrown horseshoe she held up next to the bare hoof.
A waffle he dropped on the floor.
A bottle of fly spray that she captioned, “This smells so good.”
Things he was buying at the store.
A large traffic cone outside a horse stall.
Blake asked through text messages why there was a traffic cone in the stable and Linda explained that legitimate horse toys are quite expensive, but she had stolen two tall traffic cones from a parking lot (she was pretty sure they had been abandoned) and they worked just fine. Horses always tired of their toys anyway, but she rotated the cones among the animals so they wouldn’t, all except for two of them.
One horse did not receive the cones because he was a scaredy-cat and was terrified of them and had kicked a board out of the wall of his stall in the madness that the horrifying cone once instilled in him. And also Carl did not receive a cone because he was too short to pick them up with his teeth (which was how the horses played with the cones).
Carl would have liked to play with a horse ball, but neither Carl nor anyone he knew could afford one, so instead he made do with three round plastic Halloween candy buckets that worked just fine, and Carl might have even argued that they worked a little better because on lucky days he could get his snout stuck inside one of them and shake it around, and also because they had edges to chew and balls didn’t.
Sometimes in his carelessness, he would crush one of the buckets and fall into despair, but every November 1st a new supply of colorful buckets somehow appeared in his stall, only slightly smelling like trash cans, which he was willing to overlook anyhow.
The buckets were mostly round, orange Jack-o-lanterns but sometimes one of them was a white ghost that Linda would hang from the roof of the stall so it would dangle near him, haunting and terrorizing him. He played along, biting at it and knocking it around, eventually bringing it to the ground and stomping on it, and then missing it until the following autumn.
All of this was explained to Blake in a much more efficient manner that people use when sending messages and that Blake was still young enough to understand. He also sent short explanations with his pictures and both he and Linda would laugh and feel endearing thoughts about how unique and quirky their lives must be, and how ridiculous, even though everyone on Earth feels exactly the same way about their own.
But Blake was not interested in everyone else on Earth, he was interested in a girl who could not purchase a horse ball for her mule so she used Halloween buckets from the trash, and found the action respectable and it earned his admiration, just as most of the things that Linda did without thinking about them ended up doing.
It was a classic case of liking all the little things about her. And maybe the same would have been true for how Linda felt about Blake, but she couldn’t really know because she was also drawn to one big, fascinating, outstanding thing which was that he was an amazing, famous bull rider and she was obsessed with bull riding. Or was she just obsessed with him?
It didn’t matter, not to her, and not to him. If there weren’t obstacles in their way, they would probably be together at that very moment. But Linda thought that maybe that was best, at least for now. Two people kept apart always grow fonder.
Blake, as usual, did not seem as contemplative about the matter and asked when he could come see her during the day. When she responded by explaining that he could never see her during the day because she worked every day, he replied back with a cryptic, We’ll see about that.
Then he speculated that maybe he could never see her in the daylight because she was a vampire, ignoring the fact that he already had, and it was great fodder for enough back and forth joking to last until the end of the workday.
Her sisters wanted to leave and Linda didn’t want to walk home so she got in the car. She felt the tug of reluctance to ask about going to the rodeo but knew that it was only the fear of coming face to face with her stepmother and that working later to avoid it or walking all the way home would only be putting it off.
Through her workday, she had not come up with any real game plan, and she knew that an emotional appeal would not work, no matter how accurately she explained to her stepmother the strength of her desire to watch Blake ride from a flat stadium bench in the open air of a rodeo, or how she had waited half her life to do it again.
The car was too quiet on the way home and Linda became paranoid that her sisters could hear her thoughts. Even if they couldn’t, they must have suspected something because they refrained from their usual gossiping and bickering and complaining and just sat there on the ride, trying not to be seen looking back at Linda’s reflection in all the little mirrors that hung around the car.
The tension was relieved when they pulled into home and fresh oxygen was pulled at last into the vacuum of the car as Linda opened her door, careful not to speed into the house and alert her two sisters that she had an agenda.
Linda had to think for a moment about what she usually did when she first got home from work so as not to seem suspicious, and couldn’t really remember, so she simply threw some things down the stairs and began preparing dinner, which seemed about right.
Her stepmother lurched about the house, appearing here and there, and Linda observed her without looking, determining if her mood was right.
She hoped to talk to her without her sisters present and, just like any time someone tries to get someone else alone, the others simply would not leave, always hoverin
g around like moths, suspicious of something, drawn to her.
But Linda accepted this frustrating fact of life, knowing they would never go away if she wanted them to, and decided to play ignorant and completely ignore the obvious idea that her sisters were going to try to stop her from getting what she was about to ask, and asked right in front of them.
“Stepmother,” she said, which was always an uncomfortable way to address someone, which was why the woman preferred it, “I need to ask you about a rodeo.”
Her stepmother, who was passing through, slowed to a stop before Linda and grew taller as she stood up straight. “What about a rodeo?” she asked in a way that was intentionally not harsh or threatening enough to prevent Linda from revealing her true intention.
Her stepsisters were there, in the kitchen, and didn’t bother to pretend not to listen. Three faces awaited Linda’s response.
Linda wiped her hands on an apron she was wearing. “There’s a rodeo in Helena in a couple of weeks, and I would like to attend.”
“How would that be possible?”
Linda’s heart rate rose slightly as the real issue floated towards the surface. “I’m sure I could find a way to get to Helena, and the ticket wouldn’t cost much.”
“Is the rodeo at night?”
“No... I would need a day off.”
There was movement from her stepsisters. After hearing such a bold request, they turned to watch their mother’s reaction, nervous that somehow their mother had become compassionate and reasonable overnight.
“You would ask your two sisters to do the work of three?”
Caroline began to say under her breath, “I’m not cleaning those horse stalls-“
“QUIET,” her mother shouted with an intensity that scared both of her own daughters.
Linda, careful not to seem too eager or she knew the answer would be “no” automatically, gently persisted. “It would only be for one day, and I could prepare everything so that the horses would be fine without me.”
Linda’s stepmother remained as still as a corpse, calculating. Her sisters shared glances with each other and grew worried when the answer was not an immediate “no,” but refrained from interjecting.