The Hat She Wore For Horsemanship

I didn’t go to her. I wasn’t sure she’d want me to.

So when Renee told my daughter not to bother, I knew exactly where it came from. She thought she was sparing Kaycee what Gussie went through.

She thought she was being the honest aunt, the one who tells you the truth before the world does.

But knowing why somebody does a thing doesn’t make the thing right. You don’t take the wind out of a sixteen-year-old girl on her mother’s porch with a ham on the table.

You don’t tell a child her grandpa’s ranch isn’t good enough before she has even ridden into the arena.

I found Kaycee in the barn about an hour later. She was brushing Dot, our old sorrel mare, which is what she does when she is upset, the way some girls cry and some girls clean their rooms.

Dot is eighteen years old. Amos bought her as a two-year-old at a production sale two counties over because, he said, she had a kind eye.

Kaycee has been riding her since she was four years old and her boots didn’t reach the bottom of the fender.

Dot has a white snip on her nose and a habit of resting her chin on your shoulder when you’re cinching her up.

She has moved cattle, packed salt, carried Kaycee in every 4-H horse show since she was nine, and once walked home on her own when Kaycee fell off in the creek.

“You okay?” I asked.

“I’m fine, Mom.” She kept brushing. Dot’s coat was already shining like a new penny. “Aunt Renee’s right, probably. I looked it up. The girl who won last year, her saddle was a custom one. It had more silver on it than the church has.”

“Is that what you want? A silver saddle?”

She thought about it. She is like her daddy that way. She doesn’t answer a question until she has turned it over a couple of times.

“No,” she said. “I want to ride Dot. I want to give my speech about the ranch. I was going to buy a new straw hat at the feed store with my babysitting money. They’re forty dollars. That’s what she meant about the forty-dollar hat.”

I hadn’t known that. I hadn’t known she’d told Renee about the hat. It made it worse somehow, that Renee had taken the thing my girl was saving up for and turned it into the joke.

“You can still enter,” I said. “The form isn’t due till the first of July.”

“I know.” She set the brush down. “I just have to think about it.”

I left her alone. That was Sunday afternoon. Monday morning I got up at five like always and went out to start chores, and the tack room light was already on, with the morning sun already up and gold over the hayfield behind it.

Kaycee was standing in the doorway in her pajama pants and her muck boots. She was holding her grandpa’s hat in both hands, the way you’d hold a bird you were afraid of crushing.