I close my eyes.
This is a fear that lives in a different place in my body.
The fear a woman is warned about when we’re turning into tiny women—almost to adulthood.
I let myself sit with it for ten seconds.
That's all I'll give it. Ten seconds, the way Pops taught me and his daddy taught him before that.
Ten seconds of feeling the thing, and then you put it down, and you do the next thing.
I count to ten with my eyes closed.
At seven my hands stop shaking.
At ten I open my eyes.
The paper is still in my hand. The halter is still on my boot.
I bend down. Pick the halter up and hang it back on the pegboard.
I think about my mother.
I don't want to. The thought rises anyway, the way she rises lately, in the cracks between the things I'm controlling.
Mom would have known what to do.
Mom would’ve walked into that round pen with a paring knife, a Solo cup of Crown and Coke, and asked Spur which man on this compound she was about to teach a lesson to.
Mom would’ve made it funny. She would’ve made it scary in a way that didn't show. Mom raised me to be a Lyle and a Lyle doesn’t sit in a tack room with shaking hands.
I stand up.
The fear doesn't leave. It just gets walked over.
That's what anger does, I figure out, sitting in a tack room with a note from a stranger in my hand.
Anger isn't the opposite of fear. Anger is what you put on top of fear so you can pick your boots up off the floor.
I have Earl's knife in my boot. Work knife in my back pocket.
Pops's club. Spur. A horse in the trailer who'd kick a man's head off at one word from me.
I have what I need. I fold the note and pocket it.
Lock the tack room behind me with the spare key on my belt, and head to the round pen.
And the whole way across the dirt, I am thinking about how he watched me, and I never knew.
* * *
Spur is on his bucket.
I don't know when he got back from Kerrville. I didn't hear his truck.
The mustang is grazing in the center of the pen—the mustang who didn't graze in the round pen at all until last week, who now eats his hay off the ground at noon like he was raised tame.
Spur's been working him for weeks now and the horse isn't broken yet. But he's listening.
