The Girl Who Rode the Sheep

More quiet. Then he let out a long breath, the kind you let out when you set down something heavy you have been carrying across a yard.

“She was worried,” he said. “Emmy’s little. Ashlyn’s real careful with the kids. She doesn’t want anything happening on our weekend.”

“I understand that,” I said, and I did. “But Emmy heard both things, Dane. That she was too scared, and that Bentley wasn’t. She’s six. She can add that up.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I hear you. I didn’t know she said it like that.”

“I’m not calling to fight. I’m calling so you’re not surprised on Sunday.”

“I appreciate that, Brit.” Then, after another minute of cattle noise: “She should ride. If she wants to ride, she ought to ride. I’ll be there.”

I went to church Sunday morning by myself, the way I do on Dane’s weekends.

The organist played “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” and I sang it louder than I usually do, and the lady in front of me turned around and smiled at me like she knew something I did not.

At noon I pulled into Dane’s driveway. Emmy came out the door before I could even get out of the car, with her bicycle helmet already on and buckled under her chin.

“She’s had that thing on since breakfast,” Dane said from the porch. He had on his good hat and clean jeans, and I knew right then he was coming to the fair.

Ashlyn came out behind him holding Bentley’s hand. Bentley had on a brand new black cowboy hat that was a size too big for him and a shirt with pearl snaps, and he was so excited he was hopping.

Ashlyn looked at Emmy’s helmet, and then she looked at me. She came down the porch steps by herself and stood by my car door where the kids could not hear.

“Dane told me,” she said. Her voice was tight. “I want to say I wasn’t trying to be mean to her. She’s so small, Brittni. I didn’t want her getting hurt on our watch. You’d have blamed me. Everybody would have.”

“I know you didn’t mean it mean,” I said. “But she heard it. And she’s not hurt. She’s riding.”

Ashlyn opened her mouth and closed it again. She looked like a woman who had practiced something all morning and then forgotten every word of it the minute she needed it.

“Okay,” she said. “Well. We’ll see you out there, I guess.”

I drove Emmy home and fed her half a peanut butter sandwich, because she said her stomach felt like it was full of bees.

Then I sat her on the bathroom counter and braided her hair in one tight braid so the helmet would sit down right.

Then I got out the shirt. It was a pink flowered western shirt, and it had been mine when I was her size.

My mother had kept it folded in her cedar chest for twenty-seven years, waiting on a granddaughter.

“Was this yours?” Emmy asked, looking at herself in the bathroom mirror and turning side to side.

“It was. I wore it to that same fair when I was six. In that same arena. To watch the barrel racers with your grandpa.”

“Did you ride a sheep in it?” she asked, and she sounded worried, like maybe the shirt already had a sheep on its record.