The Girl Who Rode the Sheep

Dane is on one side with his hand on Emmy’s shoulder. I am on the other, and I look like a woman who has been crying for twenty minutes straight, because I had been.

And Ashlyn is kneeling in front, holding up the buckle with both hands so the camera can see it.

Ashlyn called me that next Tuesday. She asked if I would cut her hair.

I was so surprised I said yes before I even thought about it, and she came in on a slow afternoon and sat in my chair, and we did not talk about the fair at all for the first twenty minutes.

Then, while I was blow-drying, she said to the mirror, “I was so afraid of doing it wrong with Emmy that I went and did it wrong. Isn’t that something.”

“I know,” I said, and kept drying. “I’ve done that too. Every mother alive has done that.”

“Bentley’s daddy never came to anything,” she said. “Not one ball game. Not one birthday. I think I wanted Bentley to have one thing that was only his. And I told myself it was because she’s so little.”

“She is little,” I said. “But she’s not breakable. Those are two different things. It took me a while to learn that too.”

She nodded at me in the mirror. “I know that now,” she said. “I know it now.”

I did not fix everything for her that afternoon, and she did not ask me to.

But I gave her the family discount, and she tipped me more than the discount came to, and that is how two women in a small town say a thing without having to say it.

Emmy still goes to Dane’s every other weekend, the same as always. The buckle lives at my house most of the time.

But twice now she has packed it in her backpack to show Bentley, and once she let him wear it to the grocery store, which is the highest honor she has ever given anybody.

Rollin still works the fair. I saw him at the parade this summer, and he tipped his hat to me from the curb and said, “How’s my sheep rider?” I told him she was seven now, still under fifty-five pounds, and already practicing on my uncle’s ewe for one more year.

“Face in the wool,” he said, and winked.

“Face in the wool,” I said back, and he laughed that gravel laugh all the way down the block.

My mother came by the shop last week and stood in front of the picture on my mirror for a long time.

She is seventy-one and does not cry easy. She touched the corner of it where Emmy’s pink shirt shows, the shirt that sat in her cedar chest for twenty-seven years.

“That shirt finally got its ride,” she said.

I think a lot about Ashlyn kneeling in that dirt in front of the whole county. She could have walked to the truck.

Plenty of people would have. She walked across the arena instead, and she said it out loud, in front of everybody who had heard the other thing.

I did not make her do that. Emmy did. A six-year-old girl on a white sheep did it, with her face in the wool and her arms around its neck, all the way to the far fence.

And when that camera clicked, the woman who told my daughter she would be too scared was the one holding up her buckle for the whole county to see.