The Girl Who Rode the Sheep

But I thought about my girl standing in that kitchen, nodding like she had lost a job, and I figured that was answer enough for one Monday.

On Tuesday after the shop closed, I drove her out to my uncle’s place south of town.

He runs a few hundred head of ewes on grass and wheat stubble, and he keeps a patient old ewe in the pen by the barn for the grandkids to practice on.

“You want to try sitting on her?” I asked Emmy. “Just sitting. Nobody’s going to make her run today. You can get off whenever you say.”

“Is she going to run?” Emmy asked. She had both hands on the gate and she was not letting go of it yet.

“Not today. Today she’s just going to stand there and think about lunch,” my uncle said. “She’s been ridden by every grandkid I’ve got.”

He lifted her on. Emmy grabbed two fists of wool and laid down flat along the ewe’s back, the way she had seen in the videos on my phone, and she started to giggle, and she giggled so hard she slid off on her own into the straw.

“Again,” she said, before she was even up. “Again, again, again.”

She got on nine times. On the ninth, my uncle let the ewe walk a little way along the fence, and Emmy stayed on with her face buried in the wool and her knees tucked in, and when she slid off she came up with straw in her hair and the biggest smile I had seen on her since spring.

“Mama,” she said, out of breath. “Mama, I’m not scared. I’m not even a little bit scared. Well. Maybe in my stomach.”

That was when I took the receipt out of my pocket and showed it to her. She could not read all of it, but she could read the number, because she is very good at numbers.

“One. Nine. Nineteen,” she read out loud. Then she ran around that pen twice with her arms out like an airplane while my uncle leaned on the gate and laughed until he had to take his hat off and wipe his eyes.

I called Dane on Wednesday. I want to be honest that I almost did not.

I almost let him find out at the arena, and that would have been a small, mean thing to do to a man who had never done one to me.

Dane drives a feed truck out of a big feedlot east of town, six days a week in the summer, and he does not answer the phone while he is hauling.

He was working that Saturday, which is why he was not in the kitchen when Ashlyn said it.

“Brit. What’s wrong? Is Emmy okay?” That is always the first thing he asks.

“Emmy’s fine. I wanted you to know I entered her in the mutton busting on Sunday. On my afternoon. I paid for it. You don’t have to do a thing.”

There was a long quiet on the line. Dane was never a big talker. He was the kind of man who would fix your fence before he would tell you he was sorry he backed into it.

“I thought she didn’t want to,” he said finally. “Ashlyn told me she was scared of it. Said she cried about it.”

“Ashlyn told her she’d be too scared,” I said. “That’s different. I was standing in the door, Dane. She said it to Emmy’s face, in front of Bentley, and then she only signed Bentley up.”