The Girl Who Rode the Sheep

“You’d be too scared, sweetie,” Ashlyn said. She said it kindly, the way you tell a child the stove is hot. “You cry when the vacuum runs. Sheep are a lot bigger than a vacuum.”

Emmy was standing in the middle of Dane’s kitchen with her backpack on both shoulders, ready to come home with me. She was six years old and weighed forty-one pounds, and every one of those pounds went still.

Bentley was at the table eating a bologna sandwich. He was six too, four months older than Emmy, and he had a sheet of paper beside his plate with his name printed on it in the fair office’s blue ink.

“I’m riding a sheep,” he told me, because he was six and it was the biggest news in the world. “At the fair. On Sunday. I get a number and everything.”

“That’s great, buddy,” I said, and I meant it. None of this was Bentley’s doing, and I was not going to let him feel like it was.

Emmy looked at the paper, then at Ashlyn, then at me. She did not cry. That was the part that got me. She just nodded, like a grown woman who has been told the job went to somebody else.

“Maybe next year,” Ashlyn said, and squeezed her shoulder. “When you’re bigger and braver. There’s no shame in waiting.”

There is no next year in mutton busting for a lot of kids. The fair board’s rule was ages four to seven and under fifty-five pounds, and kids grow.

Emmy was small, but she would not be small forever, and she had been talking about this since the Fourth of July.

I stood in that doorway with my car keys in my hand and the noon sun coming through the screen behind me.

I had about six things I wanted to say, and I did not say a single one of them.

“Come on, Em,” I said, and held out my hand. “Let’s go home.”

My name is Brittni Roe. I cut hair for a living at a two-chair shop on the main street of a small town in eastern Colorado, the kind of town where the grain elevator is the tallest thing for thirty miles and everybody knows whose pickup is parked outside the cafe.

Dane and I were married seven years. We had been divorced for three.

We did not hate each other, which I have learned is rarer than it ought to be. We just wanted different lives, and then he found somebody who wanted his.

Ashlyn came with Bentley, whose daddy was down in Texas and mostly stayed there.

She married Dane a year ago last spring, out at the little white church on the county road, and Emmy was the flower girl. I curled her hair for it myself.

So I want to be fair about Ashlyn. She was thirty, three years younger than me, and she was trying very hard.

Too hard, sometimes. She ran that house like a woman who was afraid somebody was walking behind her with a clipboard, grading her.

Dane had Emmy every other weekend, Friday at five until Sunday at noon.

That was the plan we signed, and we had kept it three years without a single phone call to a lawyer. I was prouder of that than of most things in my life.

On the drive home, Emmy was quiet for four miles. The wheat was long since cut and the stubble fields ran gold on both sides of the highway. Then she said, “Mama, am I a scaredy cat?”