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Being scolded meant somebody cared enough to be angry. This was inventory. I was an item on a list, and the list was longer than I was, and she was going to get to the bottom of it with or without me.

She capped the pen. Reached into the car through the open window — she’d left it unlocked, windows down, Denver plates gleaming, and pulled out a travel mug. Coffee, from the smell. She took one sip, set the mug on the rim of the stock tank, and walked away from it.

Toward the south end. Back to the gate. The clipboard was up again.

She left the coffee on the tank.

Not carried it. Not tucked it into the crook of her arm. Set it down and walked off without it.

I stood beside the tank. The mug sat on the rim, lid closed, a small cylinder of something she’d made for herself and then forgotten.

She’d found the gate. The seep. The ambulance access. The sun in the chutes. The stock crossing the crowd line. The creek dropping. The certificate missing. Seven things, maybe eight, in under an hour, each one named and written down and moved past with the efficiency of a woman who treated problems as items on a conveyor belt.

And she’d left her coffee on a tank in a field.

And her sunglasses had been on her head.

I picked up the mug. It was warm. Good weight. The kind of travel mug somebody who forgot to eat owned, the kind that was supposed to remind you that you’d made coffee, except it couldn’t follow you across a hayfield.

I smirked.

Not at her. At the shape of it. The woman who found every fault in my operation and couldn’t find her own coffee two feet behind her.

I set the mug back on the tank rim, where she’d left it, because taking it to her would have been a decision I wasn’t ready to make yet. A decision about what kind of man I was going to be around this woman, and whether I was going to start taking things out of her hands before she asked, and what that would mean.

Instead I walked back to my flags and started measuring again.

The tape came up different. I wrote it down anyway.

***

She came back from the south end with the clipboard full and her boots wet to the ankle. The dew had soaked through the wrong leather. She didn’t seem to notice.

“What’s the event called?” she asked.

“The Carrow Creek Rodeo.”

She looked at me. The sunglasses sat on her face now, and I couldn’t see her eyes, which made the looking worse.

“Is that the name?”

“That’s the name.”

She wrote it down. Then she crossed it out.

“Nobody drives ninety miles for a place,” she said. “They drive for a reason. A name. A story. Something that makes the drive shorter than the alternative, which is staying home.”

“Carrow Creek’s a good name.”

“Carrow Creek is a ranch. People who know ranches know it. People who don’t, don’t. You’re trying to fill a grandstand, not a sale barn.”

She was right. I knew she was right because the argument I had against it died before it reached my mouth.

“What do you suggest?”

She looked across the field. The mountains. The creek. The sale barn roof showing red above the corrals. The main house with its kitchen light still on, Wyatt’s shadow moving behind the window.

“The Big John Calloway Memorial Rodeo,” she said. Plain. Direct.