Updated Mar 22, 2026 • ~5 min read
Chapter 14: The Rodeo
COLE
Ruby had been talking about the school rodeo since July.
It was a modest event — the county youth rodeo, held every August at the Dusty Creek fairgrounds, with junior divisions in barrel racing and calf roping and a series of activities for the under-tens that was called a rodeo in the same way that Ruby’s ponytail was called a hairstyle: technically accurate, generously applied. He competed in the adult roping demonstration every year because the school asked and Ruby wanted him to and those were sufficient reasons.
He had not thought about the fact that Wren would be there.
He should have thought about it.
She was in the stands with June when he brought Soot to the prep area, and June had clearly installed her there for maximum visibility, because June had opinions about the viewing angles at the Dusty Creek fairgrounds and she had put Wren in the correct seat with the directness of a woman who was managing something she didn’t call managing.
He didn’t look at the stands.
He got himself and Soot ready with the routine of fifteen years of doing this, the specific focus of the thing — the rope, the horse, the mechanics of the shot. He was good at roping. He had always been good at roping. It was one of those things that came to him the way certain work came, through some combination of instinct and the ten thousand hours of practice that became instinct.
He looked at the stands when he was positioned at the gate.
She was watching him.
The expression on her face was the one he had been cataloguing since week one — the observer’s face, the one that looked like it was writing. But underneath the observer’s expression, something else. She was watching him the way she watched the light: with the specific quality of someone who had found the thing they were going to try to capture and was already failing pleasantly.
He lost exactly one beat of focus.
He made the shot.
The time was clean. He heard Ruby’s voice from the junior area — she was still waiting for her event, she was entirely capable of shouting across a fairground — and then the applause from the small crowd and the particular quiet after.
He worked Soot back to the prep area and told himself he was not looking for Wren in the crowd.
He was not successful.
She found him after, when he was walking Soot out and Ruby had tracked him down and was in the middle of a very detailed account of her own run, which she was going to narrate three times before the evening was over and which got slightly more impressive with each telling.
“You were impressive,” Wren said.
He looked at her.
“The timing on the second—” She stopped. “I don’t know the specific vocabulary. The moment where the rope went out and the correction happened.”
“The header,” he said.
“The header,” she repeated, not writing it down for once, just filing it. “That was the impressive part.”
He said: “Don’t get used to compliments.”
She laughed.
He had been collecting these — her laughs, the different versions of them. This one was the surprised kind, the genuine one, the one that she didn’t control because it arrived faster than the management did. He was doing this collecting without quite meaning to.
“I won,” Ruby announced, returning to the conversation having temporarily departed to accept congratulations from a classmate.
“I know,” Cole said. “I saw.”
“Did you see?” Ruby asked Wren.
“The whole thing,” Wren said. “You were the fastest.”
Ruby looked extremely satisfied. She turned and ran back toward the junior area.
He and Wren were briefly alone in the small space of the fairground noise — the announcer still going, kids everywhere, the smell of fried things and summer evening.
“Thank you for letting me come,” she said.
“Ruby’s rodeo,” he said. “You’d have had to fight hard to stay away.”
“That’s fair.”
She was standing in the fairground light with the notebook in her back pocket for once, not reaching for it, just standing. The evening sun was doing the thing it did here — orange and relentless and making everything look like the inside of a painting.
He thought: I would like to tell her that.
He thought: don’t.
He said: “Ruby’s doing the barrel race in twenty minutes if you want to get back to the stands.”
“Yes,” she said.
They walked back.
He was aware, for the first time since his marriage ended, of walking somewhere with a person beside him and finding the specific quality of that presence — beside him, matching his pace, angled his direction — something he did not want to end.
He filed this poorly and went to find Ruby.
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