Page 193

I grinned before I could stop myself.

She took an exaggerated bite of cornbread and chewed like she was demonstrating correct procedure to a slow learner.

That woman.

I turned back to the gate. “Try it.”

Earl swung it. The latch dropped clean into the slot.

Ty put his boot against the bottom rail and shoved. It held.

“Good,” he said. “Next bull.”

That was also Ty’s version of congratulations.

The day moved.

It didn’t move smoothly. Nothing with livestock, weather, four hundred people, and Petey near a microphone moved smoothly. But it moved forward, and forward was the only direction that mattered.

A barrel racer lost a rein coming out of the alley and recovered before the first turn. The generator behind the flatbed coughed twice at eleven-thirty and Boone got it running with one look and a screwdriver. The lemonade vendor ran out of ice at noon, which would’ve become a crisis if Josie hadn’t known that Doc had six bags in the clinic truck for medication transport and Doc hadn’t declared the medication could survive twenty minutes without all six.

The south parking line backed up to the county road.

Wyatt stood at the entrance in his clean hat and directed pickups with the expression of a man renegotiating a land lease. Nobody argued with him. Nobody ever argued with Wyatt when he used the flat hand.

Ty ran the stock.

Boone ran the arena crew.

I ran everything that fell between the two, which was most of it.

For once, nobody called me kid.

They called me Cash. Or Calloway. Or, from Ty, “You,” delivered like a job title.

I kept waiting to feel the old thing—the hot need under the ribs, the need to turn and check whether Wyatt had seen me handle the gate, whether Boone had noticed I’d moved the riders’ meeting fifteen minutes to clear the horse exhibition before the afternoon wind, whether the ranch hands understood I knew what I was doing.

It never came.

I knew they’d seen me.

More than that, I didn’t need them to.

The first bull went out. The second went out. The third refused the gate, backed into the chute, and tried to climb steel. Ty and I got him settled without rushing him. The rider nodded. I held the rail. Boone pulled the gate, and the bull came out straight enough to earn the only full eight-second ride of the first round.

The buzzer sounded.

The grandstand shook.

And through the dust, the banner on the north rail held.

CARROW CREEK RANCH.

Underneath, smaller: INAUGURAL RODEO—IN MEMORY OF BIG JOHN CALLOWAY.

Dad’s name took the dirt and the noise and the afternoon sun without needing anything from me. It didn’t turn me into a different man. It didn’t settle the mortgage or put the gooseneck back beside the barn or explain why he’d strung lights down the drive every December and never told us what it meant.

It was just his name.