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We loaded up near five o’clock, while the sun was still high and hot over the hills. Colt drove the pickup from the fairgrounds to the highway, which he is not supposed to do yet, and my husband let him, cast propped up on the dash.
I rode in the middle. Pepper and the sorrel stood in the trailer behind us, and every so often I could feel the trailer sway as one of them shifted.
“I couldn’t have done that,” my husband said to me, out of nowhere. “What you did. Getting back up after fifteen years. I don’t know that I could have.”
“You’d have done it in a heartbeat,” I said. “You just couldn’t get your leg over.”
He laughed. Colt laughed too, both hands on the wheel at ten and two the way his father taught him.
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When we got home I turned Pepper out with the two old saddle horses. She walked off a few steps, then stopped and rolled in the dust by the windbreak, groaning the way old horses do, legs in the air. Then she got up and shook and went to grazing like nothing had happened.
I stood at the gate and watched her a long time. Fifteen years. I had thought the rope was done. I had thought she was done. It turned out neither of us was. It turned out we were just waiting for somebody to need us.
The next morning was Sunday. We went to church in the good clothes and sat in our usual pew, my husband with his leg stuck out in the aisle. The hymn was one my mother used to sing at the kitchen sink. I sang it all the way through.
Monday
Lance’s pickup pulled in Monday afternoon at a quarter to two, hauling his bay. The heat was coming off the arena in waves.
My husband was in his lawn chair by the gate. I was carrying a bucket from the barn. Colt was already horseback, sitting his sorrel in the arena with his rope coiled.
Lance unloaded his horse and saddled him and led him over to the fence. He stopped at the gate and stood there a second, the way a man stands at a door when he is not sure he is welcome.
My husband looked up at his brother. His brother looked down at him. Something passed between them that I was not part of and did not need to be. Then my husband nodded, and that was the end of it.
Lance turned to the arena. He did not say anything about the money, or the rodeo, or the pay window. He looked at Colt sitting his horse in the August sun.
“Kid,” he said, “I’m here every day like I said. Will you rope with me at the next one?”
Colt grinned and rode over to open the gate for him, and Pepper whinnied from the pasture like she wanted in on it too.