Parking Lot Cowboy
Rebecca Crowley
Margot Dunn has spent months making up an elaborate fantasy about the tall, silent cowboy who serves as her fellow volunteer escort at a family planning clinic in Topeka. Then one morning he speaks, and the complicated reality of ranch-hand Tyler Olsen is better than any story she could make up.
1
Margot took her time finishing her coffee, in no hurry to trade the clinic’s warm lobby for the freezing February morning outside.
Plus the glass doors gave her a sweet view of her fellow volunteer’s tight cowboy ass.
Her gaze traced the Ws embroidered on his back pockets, followed the worn denim down to where the hems frayed over battered boots, then back up to the fluorescent pink vest labeled Clinic Escort that hugged his mustard-yellow barn coat. Today, to her utter delight, he’d traded his feedlot-branded ball cap for an honest-to-God black cowboy hat.
She made a slow-motion effort to crumple her cardboard cup and drop it in the recycling bin. Ever since she started volunteering at the family planning clinic three months earlier, the highlight of her Saturday was covertly ogling her tall, handsome, silent fellow escort as he crossed the parking lot to meet a patient. She’d never gotten the full view from the back, certainly not this close. She might not again. She wanted to enjoy it.
“How much longer are you going to stand there staring at that man’s butt? Should I get you another cup of coffee?”
Margot turned sheepishly to Ayana, the clinic receptionist, who raised her hands in innocence.
“I’m not judging. Boy’s got a fine behind. I just thought he might be getting lonely out there, is all.”
Margot doubted it. They’d stood next to each other for four hours every Saturday morning and other than the occasional nod of greeting he hadn’t said a single word.
“I hope you’re happy. That’s the most action I’ve had in months.” Margot shot Ayana a teasing dirty look as she zipped up her coat and tugged on her escort pinny. Ayana winced sympathetically, and then Margot stepped outside into the icy air.
Dean—that’s what she’d named him—offered his usual, inscrutable nod by way of hello. Calling it a nod was generous, actually—barely perceptible chin dip was more accurate. Then she took her position beside him at the front of the empty parking lot and waited for the first patient to arrive.
These shifts didn’t have to be so quiet and anonymous. He had been an established volunteer when she’d arrived, but she could’ve taken the lead. Asked his name. Struck up a conversation.
But she was worried about disrupting what appeared to be the order of things. Volunteering as a clinic escort was an Election Day resolution for her, whereas she got the impression Dean had been doing this for a long time. He didn’t speak to any of the other clinic staff any more than he spoke to her, and no one seemed to mind. He was largely silent with the patients he escorted from their cars to the door, too, and if anything, that quiet, almost reverent approach struck her as more effective than the upbeat, reassuring remarks she offered as she traversed the parking lot. Sometimes she could swear the protesters even piped down a notch when Dean got close to the chain-link fence keeping them on the sidewalk.
Then again, being six-foot-three and built like a Super Duty truck probably helped.
Over time she grew accustomed to his silence, even began to enjoy it. She’d spent the last three months letting her imagination fill in the gaps during those mute Saturday-morning hours, crafting an epic story starring the blond, blue-eyed man beside her.
Dean was a rancher, obviously. Rich. But also humble, as evidenced by the fifteen-year-old pickup he parked at the edge of the lot. Harvard grad, former human rights lawyer who followed his love of the outdoors to middle-of-nowhere Kansas. He didn’t raise cattle, either—or he used to, but then he had an environmental awakening and began introducing less invasive, local species of elk and deer, and made millions selling his highly sought-after venison to Michelin-starred restaurants. His enormous house was a shining example of clean, contemporary design, but as a lonely bachelor he longed–
“These guys are the worst.”
Margot’s head snapped sideways at Dean’s muttered words. Was she hearing things, or had he actually spoken?
His gaze slid toward her, then pulled back to the front as he nodded at the group of protestors gathering on the sidewalk.
She blinked, then blinked again, forcibly focusing on the protestors as she scraped her brain for a response. He was right. The clump of people from a local fundamentalist church were, in fact, the worst.
“Maybe they’ll be quieter today,” she offered, still incredulous that she and Dean were having a real, audible exchange.
“They brought the kids.”
She pressed her lips together. They sure had. A handful of children stood amongst the adults. Each was handed a child-sized version of the adults’ homemade protest signs bearing graphic photographs of bloody fetuses.
She and Dean watched the protestors hoist their signs and launch into a familiar series of anti-abortion chants. Then they turned to each other.
“I’m Margot. Margot Dunn.”
She stuck out her mitten-wrapped hand. He shook it, his grip big and tight and warm enough for her to feel through his leather work glove.
“Tyler Olsen.”
“Nice to meet you, Tyler.”
Goodbye, Dean.
Tyler ducked his chin in a way that seemed to signal a return to silence, so she hastily added, “Are you from Topeka originally?”
He shook his head. “Park.”
Her face must’ve shown her confusion because he expanded, “I’m from Park. About an hour west of Hays.”
That explained his thick accent and slow, deliberate way of speaking. She’d only been down that stretch of the interstate once, on a road trip to Aspen. Tiny towns with less than a hundred people scattered across miles and miles and miles of flat nothing. She couldn’t imagine anyone out there had much occasion to be in a hurry.
“Oh, neat. I’m an epidemiologist for the state. I look at health and healthcare access issues, so I’ve been out to a lot of the rural communities around Topeka, but I haven’t gotten too far west much. I’m going to a conference in Hutchinson in May, though, so hopefully I can do some exploring. I’ve only been in Kansas since August – I came down from Michigan for this job – so I still have a lot to see.” And she was babbling. “What do you do?”
“Ranch hand.”
His tone wasn’t unkind – on the contrary, he flashed her a hint of a friendly smile. But each word seemed to require great effort, like he had to drag them up from somewhere deep inside his big body. It made each short utterance seem especially valuable to her. Sparkling diamonds dredged up from the ancient center of the earth.
“Nearby?” she pressed.
“The Morse place. About forty minutes north of town. Seven thousand acres, five hundred head.”
“Super,” she remarked, with absolutely no idea whether he’d just described a huge ranch or a tiny one.
He nodded again, that same indication of imminent withdrawal. She was starting to feel bad about pulling him out of his comfortable silence, but she had one more question, and it had been burning her tongue since her first day at the clinic.
“Volunteering here was my Election Day resolution,” she offered, smiling brightly. “Instead of scrolling through social media feeling angry about a bunch of men on Capitol Hill telling women what to do with their reproductive systems, I decided to do what I could to make them feel safer about exercising their legal right to bodily autonomy, and show them they’ll never be alone. What made you decide to volunteer, if you don’t mind my asking?”
He lifted a shoulder, his gaze fixed on the minivan slowing to turn into the clinic’s parking lot. “Never gave it all that much thought. Just don’t like the idea of people getting shouted at when they go to the doctor.”
The minivan pulled into a parking space. Tyl
er turned to her and tipped his hat—actually tipped it, just like a cowboy in every Western she’d ever seen.
“Nice talking to you,” he said quietly, then started toward the car, long legs making quick work of the distance.
She watched his easy gait, the practiced way he turned his back to the protestors and guided the thirty-something female driver out of the car so she wouldn’t face them.
Margot wrapped her arms around herself as her heart ripped loose from whatever tethers kept it in place. She squeezed tightly in an effort to keep it from bobbing up into her throat.
Dean was gone, but that was okay. She already liked Tyler a whole lot more.
* * *
“Honestly, I’m sick of everyone pussyfooting around. It’s time for a wholesale repeal of the Second Amendment.”
Margot’s ex-boyfriend, Rob, sat back into the couch wearing the smug, authoritative expression she could swear he hadn’t possessed when they lived in Ann Arbor. His sense of self-righteousness had been expanding ever since he’d dropped out of the law school that brought them to Topeka in the first place. If he didn’t get it under control soon, he might not fit through the door of the house they still shared.
“Political suicide,” one of Rob’s friends declared. Margot narrowed her eyes at the beer bottle he used to punctuate the tirade he launched into. Someone had already dropped homemade beet dip on the beige carpet. She didn’t want to spend her Sunday scrubbing out dark ale stains.
“We missed you at the planning meeting this morning, Margot.” Kristina, another of Rob’s friends—she supposed technically they were her friends too—dropped into the vacant seat beside her on the couch.
Planning meeting? Oh, right—Kristina had been intermittently trying to organize some kind of a march for so long that Margot couldn’t remember exactly what she was protesting.
“Sorry. I’ve got my shift at the family planning clinic on Saturday mornings.”
Kristina held up a palm. “I forgot. Never mind. That is so much more important.”
“You’re doing such good work,” another acquaintance—Libby?—leaned around Kristina to add.
Margot shrugged. “I enjoy it. Everyone who works at the clinic is really nice. This other guy who volunteers with me, Tyler, he–”
“Hey, Margot,” Rob called from the opposite couch. “Remember that guy we met on the drive down from Michigan who had a trunk full of guns?”
Rob continued telling the anecdote without waiting for her response. She gritted her teeth. She was finding it harder and harder to maintain the initial civility she and Rob had when they broke up but agreed to see out the rest of their lease as roommates. Between the revolving door of acquaintances coming in and out of the house, his growing unwillingness to pay bills as his savings dwindled, and the general annoyance of his constant, unproductive, unemployed presence, she wasn’t sure how she would survive the six months left before they could get the deposit back.
Rob finished the story and most of their guests stared at him, eager to be outraged about the tale but not sure exactly why.
“It’s a clear example of how legislation fails when you can cross state lines to buy guns,” Rob explained, parroting the point Margot made at the time it happened.
The penny dropped. Margot flopped back against the couch as everyone bemoaned the NRA, state legislators, and the defense industry.
“I wonder if all the rehashing online creates a cycle of rage that exhausts people so much that they end up not mobilizing offline,” Margot mused aloud. “Imagine if all that energy put into sharing political memes or arguing in Facebook comments was invested into real-life organizing, or calling government representatives, or volunteering.”
She looked up, surprised, into the silence her comment garnered. An awkward hush fell over the room. Too late she realized she’d completely misjudged her audience.
Rob didn’t have to say a word. He simply arched a censorious brow, giving the rest of the room permission to weigh in.
“All discourse is valuable, including the comments on Facebook,” Kristina chided.
“And not everyone has the privilege of time to make phone calls,” Libby added.
Margot held up a palm. “I’m not saying no one should express their views online, just that change would happen a lot more quickly if more of that virtual dissent was backed up by–”
“Social media is an important tool of revolution,” Dark Ale Guy told her pointedly.
Margot did her best to teleport off the couch and away from her disapproving dinner-party guests, but after about ten minutes she opted for a more reliable, terrestrial route.
“I’m going to start the dishes,” she announced to no one in particular, and beat a blissfully unimpeded path to the kitchen.
She truly loathed washing dishes, but tonight the pile of sauce-ringed plates in the sink greeted her like an old friend.
Margot genuinely believed there were good-hearted, motivated people in Topeka trying hard to make this country a better place for everyone.
They just weren’t the people in her living room.
She shut the door on the world-saving dialogue, pulled on a pair of yellow gloves, and got to work.
She started on the pot Rob used to make a sauce which required expensive ingredients she’d lent him money to buy, only to be barred from the kitchen for most of the day as he monitored its precarious marinating process. Had he always been this pretentious, and she simply hadn’t noticed? Or had he really substantially changed in the last six months?
They’d both changed, she decided, and not only since the move. They’d known each other since their freshman year in college a decade earlier, but they’d only gotten together eighteen months ago. Becoming a couple seemed perfect at the time. They were the only two single people left in their social circle. Rob was funny, smart, reasonably attractive, and not the worst she’d had in bed. The most steadfast couples she knew—including her parents—seemed to be more friends than epically romantic lovers, so it didn’t occur to her to expect anything different.
In retrospect they should’ve stayed friends.
There’d always been a certain level of friction in their relationship, and when they moved, the sudden absence of their extensive social community intensified their daily grating on each other. Rob resented how much she loved her new job when he hated his new school. She struggled to be empathetic about his career crisis and wished he would shut up and get on with it. He let his bad experience in law school color his whole perception of their new home, which he decided was a conservative, ignorant backwater. She liked the more diverse, less college-town feel, and didn’t care that her personal politics didn’t align with most of her neighbors’. The friends she made at work tended to be older and more settled, while the friends Rob met in class were usually several years younger, and after a while she felt more like a beleaguered single mother to a basement-dwelling teenage dropout than one half of a couple.
The end came one crisp, clear Saturday morning in October. She hadn’t planned to say anything, hadn’t even consciously come to a decision, but when he offered her a sample of a carob brownie at the farmer’s market, her response was, “When you leave Topeka in August I’m going to stay.”
He wasn’t surprised, and he didn’t argue. That Saturday turned into the best day since their move—maybe one of the best in their whole relationship. They had a long, chatty lunch, made cocktails and watched a movie, and laughed late into the night like they used to when they were just friends. They congratulated each other on their maturity, their ability to calmly transition from lovers to roommates, and Rob happily moved his belongings into the second bedroom.
Only when Margot was alone in their bed that night—just her bed, now—did panic slice through her, leeching air from her lungs and tightening a cold fist in her stomach. As she lay there, gin buzz receding, twenty-ninth birthday looming, the man she’d assumed would be her husband suddenly several walls away, she wondered on a lift
of terror whether she’d be single forever. Whether she’d ever truly love anyone. And whether anyone would ever truly love her back.
Rob’s laugh cut through the kitchen door, yanking her from her reverie to realize she’d been washing the same pot for ten minutes. She stowed it in the drying rack and picked up the next one. As she waited for it to fill with water, she looked at the window above the sink, the darkness outside and the bright lights inside combining to show her a harsh reflection.
Four months since that night in October. Four months since she promised herself she would turn a corner, do only what fulfilled her, become someone authentic and content and capable of loving and being loved.
Four months’ more silver threads in her brown hair. Four months’ more lines on her forehead. And what did she have to show for it? A sink full of dirty dishes and a headache.
“But it’s fine,” she said aloud. She was fine. Everything was totally fucking fine.
2
“Until gun control becomes a white suburban mom issue, we can’t–”
The picture stalled, the commentator’s face frozen in a half-grimace as the ring of buffering dots appeared on top of it. Tyler leaned over his bowl of cereal to tap the laptop keyboard. Internet was out again.
Rogue Nights Page 11