by Margo Rabb
Chance mentioned liquid nitrogen vapors and proprietary fluids, and then he and Annie launched into a debate about heat indexes, dissipation, and several other things I barely understood. Chance had a kind, serious face, and nodded as he spoke.
“Annie’s a science genius. She studies animal behavior,” I explained to Trent, lest he think my friend had an unnaturally perky interest in their horses’ manly urges.
“You’re welcome to join them today,” he told me. “Or you can come with me.”
“I’ll feed the cows,” I said.
Power
I hopped into the cab of Trent’s pickup. The truck bed was filled with bales of hay. We drove to a fenced-in area a few miles down the property.
“Usually we only feed hay in the winter, but the drought’s parched the pasture,” he said. When we reached the cows, he stopped the car. “We’ll just go slow and I’ll toss the hay off the back. You drive.” He left the keys in the ignition.
“I don’t—I can’t—” I tried to tell him, but he was already out of the truck and standing in the back, leaning over the bales.
“Drive,” he yelled.
I took a deep breath. I looked out the window. The cattle were staring at me. I put my hands on the steering wheel. Maybe I should just give it a whirl—how hard could it be? Maybe I could go pick up Annie and we could drive this thing straight to LA and not turn back. I looked down at the pedals.
Trent opened the passenger door. “What’s the problem?”
“Which one makes it go?”
He looked at me like I was insane.
“We don’t drive in New York. I mean, some people drive.” Will. “You can’t drive if you’re under sixteen at all, and when you turn sixteen you can only learn on a car with double brakes, at a driving school. It’s the law.” Annie and I planned to take driving lessons, but we hadn’t gotten around to it yet.
“All right. I’ll drive. You get in back,” he said.
I climbed into the back of the truck bed. Cows were everywhere—black and white, gigantic, and smelly. They mooed and gazed at us. They almost seemed to be smiling. Trent gave me a pair of thick gloves. He showed me how to toss the hay at them—not too much, since hay was expensive and scarce, he said.
The gloves were so big that they kept flying off when I tossed the hay. Trent climbed out of the truck and got them back for me.
“Dang, you’re slow,” Trent said.
“People really say dang?”
He shook his head, got back into the cab, and slowly drove along to more cows, and I kept tossing the hay in the ninety-degree heat. I finally managed to keep the gloves on by bunching my fingers inside. Sweat ran down my forehead, but after a while I got into the rhythm of it. I pictured Destry, Ewing, and their eight cousins, Bowen, Sykes, Maverick, Hawk, Tuf, Audie, Bryce, and Tumbleweed, riding toward me in the pasture. I thought: I’m a Texas hay-tossing cowgirl. I’m Mary Sue Lincoln and Sage Cody and Cora McMullen and all those heroines combined. As I worked, I tried to let go of all my worries about Will and whether I’d see him in LA, and I tried not to think about my dad and the wreckage, and whatever was happening in the news while we were so disconnected.
After I’d tossed the last mound of hay to the current group of cows, it was time to move forward, but Trent had stopped driving. I bent toward the back window of the cab, ready to knock on it and find out what the delay was.
He was reading. My backpack was open beside him and he held a book in his hands.
“Hey.” I knocked on the window.
He held up Cowboys on Fire.
I hopped down from the truck bed and opened the door to the cab.
“Why are you reading my book?” I’d thrown my love-worn copy into my bag that morning, thinking I might get a chance to read it in honor of the occasion, but not in front of him. “Give that back,” I said.
He pointed to a page.
Destry’s thoughts dwelled on her ripe love-mounds and the furry nest at the apex of her femininity.
“Your bag fell over and this book came out right there on the floor. Honest.” He paused and held up the cover. “I kind of look like him.”
I shook my head. “No. You don’t.”
I felt the familiar shame heat my cheeks, my shoulders slumping, my mom’s and Janet’s comments about my books embedded in my brain—dishonest and misleading—and then I decided, then and there, watching an actual cowboy mock my cowboy romance, that I was going to stop being embarrassed by my books. I loved the fantasy and escape because I needed to believe that love didn’t always end in heartache, that the world wasn’t only filled with tragedies and accidents and newspapers with horrible news. The romances kept me from going into the corners of my mind that I didn’t want to enter. They were bright against the darkness, and I needed bright.
“It’s a good book,” I said. “Actually, that one, book one, is a great book.”
He got to his feet. “Hey. I’m going to show you something,” he said.
“What?”
The almost-smile. “What real cowboys do for fun. Come on.” We stepped outside, and he rummaged around in a large box in the truck bed, and then he walked toward me, holding a gigantic shotgun.
A chill spread across my shoulders. Was he going to shoot me?
“Everyone’s got to learn how to protect themselves. Especially you—living in New York City.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sure. Because you never know when you might need to murder someone on the subway. With a giant shotgun.”
He held it out toward me. I’d never touched a gun before. He placed it in my hands.
“It’s a 12-gauge,” he said.
“It’s huge. Heavy.” What were you supposed to say about a gun?
He went back to the truck and took out some empty beer cans. My mom would love this. If she could see me right now, she’d call the sheriff’s office and try to have Trent arrested for beer-in-car possession, gun possession, driving with broken seat belts, and a hundred other things she’d think of.
“So—is it legal?” I asked. “To just go shoot stuff?”
He laughed. “Of course. We’re just firing in the brush—we’re not killing anybody.” He paused. “At least you seem trustworthy.” He smiled, went over to a small hill, found a flat rock, and set the beer cans on top of it.
A tiny lizard ran across the rock. “I’ll watch you do it first,” I said.
He stood in front of me, aimed at the cans, and shot them. They scattered everywhere. He fired again at a prickly pear cactus and blew off some of its leaves.
“Ready? I don’t have any more cans, so you can shoot at the cactus. Easy target,” he said.
He handed the shotgun to me. It felt awkward in my hands.
“So what you do is stand like this. A good stance is important. Balance your weight on both feet.” His voice was calm. “Don’t lean away from the gun. Lean forward instead. No need to be shy about it. Shooting isn’t passive or weak.”
I leaned forward.
“Hold it like this, so the kick doesn’t hurt like hell.”
He placed his hands over mine, showing me. My skin froze. Was this okay? What would Will say?
He positioned the shotgun by my shoulder. “And breathe. Most folks hold their breath when they shoot for the first time, but breathing will help you relax.”
I hadn’t realized I’d been holding my breath, but I was.
“Okay,” I said. “Here goes.”
I paused. I tried to relax. It was impossible. My arms stiffened. I clenched my shoulders, aimed, exhaled, and pulled the trigger.
I flinched from the noise and the pain in my shoulder. “Ow,” I said. “Did I do it?”
He nodded. “Fantastic. Great for a first-timer.”
“Did I hit the cactus?”
“Not exactly. You hit the ground. Try again.”
I thought of my mom again. If she was here, she wouldn’t just get Trent arrested—she’d take the gun and shoot him herself.
I loved doing things that she knew nothing about.
I positioned the gun and shot again. Finally, a leaf exploded off the cactus.
I was Annie Oakley! I was a natural!
“You did good.”
“I guess so. Who knew?” I asked. “But I feel kind of bad for the cactus.” I rubbed my shoulder. “And that hurt.”
He patted my arm. “We’ll have to take you hunting feral hogs next,” he said.
“Sure. I’ll be a pro. Those hogs won’t know what hit them.” I handed the gun back to him. My hands felt strangely light without it. Weak. Spent. Trembly. I’d never before felt that type of strength. To take away a life. Because that’s what guns did—wasn’t that the whole purpose? To kill, or instill fear of killing. Maybe men felt that strength without guns, men like Trent, who were tall and broad-shouldered and probably could murder someone with their fists. A part of me was still shaking, not used to it, and not liking it—and a part of me did like it, to even momentarily have that kind of power.
“You okay?” he asked.
I nodded. “It just feels weird. I’m so used to being this sort of . . .” I shrugged. “I’m always the weak one. Last one picked for volleyball. Probably because I run away from the ball. Apparently you’re not supposed to do that. I even almost failed my self-defense class. I could never find the dummy’s jugular notch.”
“Not so weak now,” he said, and we walked back to his truck in the afternoon light.
Let’s rodeo!
Hey, Miss New York,” Trent shouted from downstairs. “Hurry up.”
I changed clothes—my jeans were dusty, my shirt damp with sweat—I put on a denim skirt and a black T-shirt (what were you supposed to wear to a rodeo?), and quickly fixed my hair. I checked my phone to see if service miraculously worked (it didn’t), and met Trent in his truck. Chance had taken Annie on one of his chores to town earlier, so they were meeting us at the rodeo.
Trent looked me over. “Black again,” he said. “You going to nun school?”
“I don’t think they let Jewish people into nun school.”
He glanced at me. “I’ve never met a Jewish person before.”
“Irma’s Jewish.”
“Irma’s got six crosses in her bathroom.”
“Well, she was Jewish, before husband two. Or maybe it was husband three. There’s no temple in a nearby town? Or a JCC?”
He looked at me like I was speaking Martian. I watched the scrubby trees float by out the window. I was as foreign a species to him as he was to me.
We reached the fairgrounds. A banner said FORT WELLS RODEO: PRESERVING WESTERN TRADITIONS. And beneath that, LET’S RODEO! Cowboys were everywhere, wearing white hats and black hats and crisp button-down shirts tucked into their jeans. We walked past rows of orange, blue, yellow, and pink food stands—“Texas Taters Sliced Oooh Sooo Thin,” “Shrimp on a Stick,” “Ice Cold Sweet Tea,” “Cherry Limeade,” “Turkey Legs,” “Calf Fries.”
“What are calf fries?”
Trent said I didn’t want to know.
At the gate of the arena, a man stamped our hands with a little blue armadillo. Chance and Annie met us in our reserved seats; Farley, Janet, and Irma sat beside them. Farley gnawed on a giant smoked turkey leg.
I slid in next to Annie. “You guys had fun?” I asked.
“Not as much fun as Janet. She got on a horse today.” Annie’s eyebrows lifted.
Janet’s yellow shirt was slightly untucked, and her jeans had smudges of dirt on the knees. She placed a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “It was a small horse.”
The poor animal. Janet probably threatened it with photos of hoof-and-mouth disease if it bucked.
“I had phone service in town today,” Janet said. “I spoke to your mother. She specifically told me that she doesn’t want you getting on a horse.”
“There goes my rodeo career up in smoke,” I said.
“A loss for horsewomen everywhere,” Annie said.
Irma laughed heartily at this, and then excused herself to see a friend who worked in one of the stalls. “Be back in a few,” she said.
The air smelled like oiled leather. When I’d read about rodeos in my books, I’d thought that people didn’t really rope calves, wrestle steers, and ride broncos and bulls for fun.
But they did: the gate swung open; a horse bucked and thrashed while its rider held on for dear life. I gripped the railing in front of us.
Holy holy holy holy cow.
Literally.
We watched team roping, steer wrestling, and barrel racing; Janet soon had her fill of the smelly arena and went outside with Farley for fresh air. Trent saw someone he knew, and they walked off toward the beer stall. Then Annie and Chance left to get food. Annie invited me to come with them, but it seemed like they might want to be alone.
I sat by myself in the empty row. I took out my phone. Still no service. I put it back in my bag.
When I was around other people, keeping busy, I felt so optimistic, but when I was alone, dark thoughts poked their tendrils in. You’ll never hear from him. This whole trip was for nothing.
My stomach rumbled. I got up to get something to eat.
I wandered past the turkey leg, popcorn, and calf fries stalls, and booths that sold jewelry and scarves, souvenirs, and cowboy hats, and I stopped at a corn dog cart. I bought one.
It was the first corn dog I’d ever eaten. The outside was soft, sweet, crumbly; the inside salty, juicy, and rich. I loved it. I ate the whole foot-long thing. Everything was big here, larger-than-life. I passed a stand that sold huge bottles of bluebonnet perfume in fluted glass decanters like a genie’s house. I picked one out for my mom and put it in my backpack.
I thought of a game we used to play when I was really little, one of the rare times she was as openly affectionate as my dad. She’d say, How much do I love you? I’d say, A teeny tiny bit. She’d laugh: No! My love for you is bigger than the house, the whole city, all the people in the world, the entire universe.
In our texts, I’d told her bits about the trip but nothing real, nothing about the things that were going on inside me. Now, I wished that when I’d texted her yesterday I’d told her I missed her. I felt this lump in my chest and I realized that it was this primal missing, this inexplicable longing for the clink of her perfumes, the steam rising out of her coffee cup, her padding around the apartment in the mornings. I missed her and wanted to run away from her at the same time.
As I left the perfume stall, someone touched my shoulder.
It was Irma. “I’ve been looking all over for you! I need to show you something.” She led me to a booth filled with racks of western-style shirts, dresses, and pantsuits.
“Sheri Jo, this is my granddaughter-to-be,” Irma said to the woman behind the cash register, who had dyed red hair and sparkly green eye shadow.
Sheri Jo grinned. “Heard all about you.” Her nails were painted a red so dark it was nearly black.
“She spent the day with Trent today. Cute one, isn’t he?” Irma asked.
Sheri Jo nodded. “Cuuute.”
“I have a boyfriend,” I said. For some reason, it felt important to point that out, whether or not it was exactly true.
“Oh, who cares about that,” said Irma. “You’re too young to have just one. Trent has a whole bunch of girlfriends.”
“A whole bunch?” How many was that? Four? Five? Sixteen? Did he keep them like livestock, in different stalls in the barn? It wasn’t jealousy that I felt. (Was it?) No. It was envy that he probably had simple and easy relationships, with no drama, no chasing anyone across the country. Love always seemed so simple for some people.
Irma laughed, and Sheri Jo eyed me up and down. “When we’re done fitting her, she’s going to look so dang good. Excuse my French.”
“Fitting me?” I asked.
“For your maid of honor dress!” Irma squeezed my arms. “I’m surprising your mom. Whatever you do, don’t tell her. It’s our secret. Sheri Jo is the
best seamstress in all of Texas. She’s already finished my dress. Same material, so we’ll coordinate for the pictures. When she’s done, I’ll send it to you in the mail. Or I can bring it in person.” Irma beamed; light bounced off her bathroom-tile teeth.
Panic rose in me. “They haven’t even set a wedding date.”
“Oh, they did! December fourteenth. Larry checked December fourteenth to make sure I was free.” She took out her date book and flipped to that day: “Wedding of Claire Roth and Larry Greenbeck,” Irma had written, encircled in a pink heart. “Didn’t they tell— Oh.” She paused, her eyes grew wide, and she put her hand to her mouth. “I wasn’t supposed to say anything. Larry’s going to kill me!” She laughed.
Why didn’t they tell me? I checked my phone—still nothing. I wanted to call my mom right now. How could she not tell me?
“I’m sure they just wanted it to be a surprise,” Irma said, her teeth gleaming.
Sheri Jo wound a measuring tape around my waist.
Irma picked up a bright teal dress. “Now this is a similar style to the one Sheri Jo’s going to make. We’ll see how it looks on you.” Sheri Jo finished her measurements, and Irma drew the curtain to the dressing area. She handed the dress to me and gave me a pair of silver heels to try on with it.
I felt sick, but I didn’t know what to do besides put the dress on. It was hideous: puffed sleeves, satiny and shiny but rough against my skin. Why wouldn’t they tell me if they’d set a date? I shoved my feet into the heels.
I opened the curtain and tried to calm down. My mom had never asked me to be her maid of honor. I couldn’t imagine actually walking down the aisle behind her, faking joy. What else could I do, though? When the rabbi said Speak now or forever hold your peace, I could flail my arms and yell Don’t do it, Mommy! (Why did they even say that line at weddings if they didn’t want you to speak up?) All this time, I’d been sure the wedding would never happen. But Janet was wrong—my mom planned to go through with it. I stared at myself with the teal mushrooms on my shoulders, and for the first time, the wedding seemed real. Or at least Irma’s version of real—marriage for a few years. Maybe Larry would try on my mom and me like Buddhism or Catholicism or Texan, and then be done with us.