The Girl Who Rode the Sheep

“No, ma’am,” I said. “Where did that come from?”

“Ashlyn says I cry at the vacuum,” she said, in that flat little voice she uses when she is trying hard not to have feelings about something.

“You did cry at the vacuum,” I said. “When you were three. You also cried at the Easter Bunny at the bank, and you cried the first time you saw the ocean on television. That was a long time ago, baby.”

She thought about that for another mile. Then she said, very quietly, looking out the window, “I want to ride a sheep. I want to so bad, Mama.”

“I know you do, baby.” I reached over and held her knee. “I know you do.”

“Bentley gets a number,” she said, and that was all, and she did not say another word until we were in our driveway.

It was his weekend and his house, and his wife had made a call about his weekend.

I did not get to make those calls, any more than he got to tell me what Emmy ate for supper on a Tuesday. That is how a plan like ours works, or it does not work at all.

But the mutton busting was Sunday at two o’clock in the afternoon. And Dane’s weekend ended Sunday at noon. Sunday afternoon was mine, and so was anything I chose to sign my daughter up for in it.

On Monday I took my lunch break early and drove out to the fair office by the livestock barns. The woman behind the counter had worked the fair office since before I was born.

Her name was Philene, and she had given me my first perm in eighth grade, back before she quit doing hair and took the fair board job. She looked at me over her glasses.

“Brittni Roe,” she said. “You don’t look like a woman here to enter a pie.”

“No, ma’am,” I said. “I wanted to know if there’s any room left in the mutton busting. For Sunday.”

She pulled a clipboard out from under the counter and ran her finger down it. “Sunday go is twenty-four kids. I’ve got three spots left. How old and how much does she weigh?”

“Six. Forty-one pounds with her boots on.”

“Helmet?” Philene asked, still writing.

“She’s got a bicycle helmet. Is that all right?”

“Bicycle helmet’s fine. Riding helmet’s fine. No helmet, no ride, and I don’t care whose grandbaby it is.” She wrote Emmy’s name in that same blue ink. “Twenty dollars. You sign the waiver. You know Bentley’s already on here?”

“I know,” I said. That was all I said about it, and she did not ask me for any more than that.

She looked at me for a long second anyway. Philene had known me thirty-three years. She knew Dane’s mother from the quilting circle. She probably knew what Ashlyn put in her potato salad.

“Well,” she said, and stamped the receipt. “Emmy’s number nineteen. You tell her to hug that sheep like it owes her money.”

I want to tell you I was not doing it out of spite. I am not sure I knew, sitting there. So I prayed about it in that parking lot, which is something I do not do nearly often enough.

I asked the Lord to tell me whether this was for Emmy or for me. I did not hear anything back.