The Seat I Gave Miss Ada

“Carl’s folks are in two of them,” Megan said. “The backs of their heads.”

She was quiet a second on the line.

“I spent the whole fall trying to make this place look like something,” she said. “And the thing that makes it look like something is an old lady I almost left standing in the yard.”

“Yes,” I said. I did not say anything else. She did not need me to.

“You should see the one of you,” she said then. “You are not even looking at the camera. You have got your hand on the rail and you are looking up at her like she is the only thing in the field.”

I did not know what to say to that.

“That is the one I keep thinking about,” Megan said. “Not because it is pretty. Because I was back in the hay the whole ride and I never once thought to look at her the way you were looking at her.”

“You are looking now,” I said.

“I am looking now,” she agreed.

“I am going to print the one with the reins,” she said. “Big. For the stand.”

Then her voice dropped, the way it used to when we were girls sharing the upstairs room and she wanted to say a true thing in the dark.

“I am sorry,” she said. “I counted wrong.”

I told her she had counted the money right. She had just counted the wrong thing.

There is a difference between those two, and it took my sister thirty-nine years and one old woman to learn it.

And I am not going to stand here and pretend I have never once counted the wrong thing myself.

What The First Ride Is For

The next Saturday Ada rode the first ride again. She rode it in her good coat, up front.

This time nobody had to walk her up to the bench. Megan was already there at the iron step with her hand out before I even came around the barn.

Megan put her up herself. I watched her do it from the hay shed.

She steadied Ada all the way onto the bench, exactly the way I had the week before.

She had brought a lap robe down from the house on purpose. She tucked it over Ada’s knees and stepped back and let her ride.

The picture with the reins hangs by the cash box now. Printed two feet wide. People ask about it all day long.

Megan tells them. She tells the whole thing. The stump, the nickel stand, Walt, the black team.