The Hat She Wore For Horsemanship

“Honey, don’t bother,” Renee said, and she said it kindly, which was the worst part. She leaned over my daughter’s shoulder and tapped the entry form with one painted fingernail, right on the line where it asked for the name of the horse.

“Not in a borrowed saddle and a $40 hat,” she went on. “I love you, Kaycee, so I’m going to tell you what nobody told Gussie. The girls who win that contest ride $3,000 saddles. Some of them ride more than that.”

We were on my front porch after church, a Sunday in June, with the sun high and the wind doing what it does in eastern Wyoming, pushing at the screen door and lifting the corners of the paper plates.

I had a ham on the table and a pan of potato salad going warm.

Kaycee was sixteen that spring. She had the form flat in front of her, and she had already filled in her name and her birthday and her 4-H club in her careful printing.

She had been carrying that form in her Bible since the first Sunday in May.

She looked at the form for a long second. Then she folded it in half, and in half again, and put it in her shirt pocket.

She didn’t say a word. She just picked up her fork and ate her potato salad like nothing had happened.

I wish I could tell you I said something smart. I didn’t. I sat there with my glass of iced tea sweating in my hand and felt my face go hot, and I did the thing ranch wives learn to do, which is wait.

It was my husband who spoke. Marlin doesn’t talk much at a table. He is a big quiet man who would rather fix a water gap than give a toast, and he set his fork down so carefully that we all looked at him.

“That’s enough, Renee,” he said.

That was all. He didn’t raise his voice. He never has, not at his sister, not at a cow, not at me.

But Renee went a little pale, and she picked up her empty pie plate and her purse, and she said she ought to get going before the wind got worse.

She drove off down our lane with dust rolling up behind her car, and we sat there and listened to it go. Kaycee finished her plate.

Then she excused herself and went out to the barn, and I let her go.

I should tell you who we are, so you understand why a few words on a porch cut the way they did.

My name is Jodi Briggs. I am forty-three years old, and I have been a ranch wife for twenty-one of those years.

We run about a hundred and forty mother cows on a place that Marlin’s grandfather homesteaded, out where the grass is short and the sky is the biggest thing you own.