6. Lo
— ? —
Lo
The text comes in while I’m driving.
I shouldn’t look at it. I’m behind the wheel, Jesse’s in the passenger seat scrolling through something on his phone, and the responsible thing to do is keep my eyes on the road and check my messages later.
But I see the name on the lock screen: Tammy from Lazy Star.
Tammy doesn’t text me. We’re friendly enough. She pours drinks, I occasionally sit at her bar when I need to feel like a person instead of a rancher, but we’re not text-each-other friends. We’re nod-hello-at-the-grocery-store friends.
The preview shows a link and three words: is this real??
My stomach tightens.
“Everything okay?” Jesse asks without looking up from his phone.
“Fine.”
“You tensed up.”
“Pothole.”
There wasn’t a pothole. He doesn’t notice.
I leave the text unopened. Whatever it is, I can’t deal with it right now.
The charity roping starts in forty minutes, and I need to smile and wave and be Jesse Cooper’s wife in public, which is apparently a performance I’m still expected to give even though my husband told his manager that nobody should find out I exist.
The rodeo grounds come into view. Same dirt parking lot, same weathered grandstands, same stock pens where I sold hay off Granny’s flatbed nine years ago. The place where everything started. It looks smaller now, or maybe I’m just tired enough that everything looks smaller.
“Big crowd,” Jesse says.
“It’s for charity. People show up for charity.”
“They’re showing up for you too, you know. The hometown hero thing.”
“I’m not the hometown hero. I’m the hometown hero’s wife.”
“Lo-”
“I’m stating a fact, not fishing for reassurance.”
He sighs. I park the truck in the reserved area near the contestant entrance, and we sit there for a moment in silence.
His hand moves toward mine on the seat between us, and I think he might actually reach for me, might actually touch me like he used to, casual and constant, but then his phone buzzes and his hand redirects to his pocket.
“Sloane,” he says, checking the screen. “I need to take this real quick.”
“Of course you do.”
“Five minutes.”
“Sure.”
He gets out of the truck, phone already at his ear, and I watch him walk away in the side mirror.
Cowboy boots, jeans that fit him the way jeans are supposed to fit, shoulders broad enough to block out the sun.
He looks like every fantasy I ever had about what my life would be, and the distance between that fantasy and this reality is far enough to make me carsick.
I check my phone.
Tammy’s text is still there. Still unopened. Still waiting with whatever bomb it contains.
I put the phone in my pocket.
Not now, not here. I need to be composed. I need to sit in those stands and smile while my husband ropes calves like everything’s fine, and then I need to drive home and figure out what to do about the two pink lines in my nightstand and the husband who’s leaving in two days.
One crisis at a time.
The contestant area is chaos: horses being unloaded, ropers warming up, kids running between the trailers chasing each other with stick horses. Cal’s already here, his bay gelding saddled and ready, and he tips his hat when he sees me.
“Boss.”
“Don’t call me boss.”
“Mrs. Cooper.”
“Don’t call me that either.”
“Lo, then.”
“Better.” I lean against the fence next to him. “You ready?”
“Born ready. Your husband, on the other hand…” He nods toward Jesse, who’s still on the phone, pacing in tight circles near the truck. “He gonna remember how to rope, or has Nashville softened him up?”
“He grew up roping. It’s in his blood.”
“Blood can thin.”
“I guess we’ll find out.”
Jesse finishes his call and jogs over, tucking his phone into his back pocket. He’s smiling, that performer’s smile, the one he puts on like armor.
“Cal. Good to see you, man.”
“Jesse.” Cal shakes his hand. “You remember which end of the horse to sit on?”
“I think I can manage.”
“What about the rope? You remember that too, or you need me to draw you a picture?”
“Funny.”
“I thought so.”
They grin at each other, and for a second it almost feels normal. Two men who used to work together, who used to spend long days in the saddle moving cattle, who used to be something like friends before the music took one of them away.
“Header and heeler?” Jesse asks.
“You heading or heeling?”
“Heading. My heeling’s rusty.”
“Your everything’s rusty.” Cal swings up onto his horse. “Let’s see what you’ve got, superstar.”
I leave them to their warm-up and make my way to the stands.
The wives’ section is three rows up, dead center, same spot it’s always been, populated by the same women who’ve been sitting here for twenty years.
Donna’s there, and Martha, and Rosa, and a handful of others I recognize from church and the feed store and the endless cycle of small-town encounters that make up a life.
“Lo!” Donna waves me over. “Saved you a seat!”
I climb the bleachers and settle in between Donna and Rosa. The metal is warm from the sun, the smell of dust and livestock thick in the air. Familiar. Grounding, almost.
“How’s he doing?” Rosa asks. “Jesse. He look nervous?”
“He looks like Jesse.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I’ve got.”
Down in the arena, the first team is setting up.
Local boys, father and son, warming up the crowd before the main event.
The announcer’s voice crackles over the speakers, and I let myself sink into the rhythm of it, the calls, the cheers, the collective held breath as the steer breaks from the chute.
Then it’s Jesse’s turn.
He rides in on Cal’s spare horse, a buckskin mare he’s ridden before, and the crowd loses it.
Not rodeo applause, celebrity applause. Phones come out.
People stand up. The announcer says something about “hometown boy done good” and “Nashville’s newest star” and I stop listening because I’m watching my husband on a horse for the first time in a year.
He looks right.
That’s the worst part. He looks exactly the way he’s supposed to look, settled in the saddle, rope coiled easy in his hand, hat pulled low against the sun.
His forearms are tan and muscled, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up to the elbow, and I can see from here the way his body remembers this. The muscle memory. The instinct.
He was a roper before he was a singer. Before he was famous. Before any of it.
He was mine.
The steer breaks. Jesse’s loop goes out smooth and catches clean around the horns, and then he’s dallying and turning and Cal’s coming in behind him to heel, and the whole thing takes maybe eight seconds but it feels longer. It feels like watching a home movie of a life I used to have.
The crowd goes wild. Jesse tips his hat. Cal shakes his hand. The announcer says something about “still got it” and “ain’t lost his Texas roots” and I sit very still in my seat and try not to feel anything at all.
“God, he’s something,” Donna says beside me. “Isn’t he something?”
“He’s something.”
“You’re a lucky woman, Lo.”
“So I’ve been told.”
The jumbotron flickers.
I don’t notice at first. I’m watching Jesse ride out of the arena, watching the way he moves with the horse, watching the man I married exist in a world that used to include me. Then Rosa makes a small sound next to me, and Donna goes quiet, and I look up.
It’s an interview. Nashville backdrop, slick lighting, Jesse in a designer shirt I’ve never seen. The interviewer is a blonde woman with perfect teeth and that particular brand of warmth that reads as flirtation.
The event coordinator’s voice crackles over the PA between clips: “Folks, we want to thank Sloane Marsh and the Cooper team for providing this exclusive promotional package for today’s event-”
I feel the blood drain from my face. Sloane sent this. Sloane chose this clip, packaged it up, and shipped it to my hometown rodeo like a care package from hell.
“So, Jesse,” she’s saying, “the fans want to know. They’re dying to know, actually. We get this question more than any other - especially with all those marriage rumors floating around online.”
Jesse on the screen laughs. That easy, charming laugh I used to think was just for me.
“Hit me.”
“You single? Because management keeps saying the wedding-ring sightings are just gossip, but the fans are convinced-”
“As they come,” Jesse says, cutting her off. “Single as they come.”
My heart stops.
The management line. I’ve seen it in comment sections, on fan forums, “his team says he’s not married, the ring pics are photoshopped”, and I always assumed it was fans making excuses. But it’s official. It’s coordinated. They’ve been dismissing the truth as rumor for months.
The crowd in the stands laughs. A few whistles. Some cheers from the younger section, the ones with the homemade signs and the Jesse Cooper t-shirts.
The wives don’t laugh.
One by one, they turn to look at me. Donna, Martha, Rosa. All of them, turning in their seats, their faces doing that particular thing faces do when they’re witnessing something terrible and don’t know how to react.
I don’t move.
I think about my grandmother. I think about the way she used to sit in church with her back straight and her chin up, no matter what the town was whispering about her.
She used to say that dignity was the one thing nobody could take from you unless you let them.
You could lose your money, your land, your health, your husband, but dignity was yours to keep or give away.
But I keep mine.
I sit very still on the metal bleacher with my hands folded in my lap, and I watch the interview play out on the screen, and I don’t flinch. I don’t cry. I don’t give them anything.
“As they come,” Jesse says again, grinning at the interviewer. “Free as a bird. Just me and my music.”
The interview cuts to commercial. The jumbotron switches to a sponsor ad. The moment passes.
The silence doesn’t.
“Lo,” Rosa says softly. “That was probably just-”
“I need some air.”
I stand up. My legs work, which is surprising. My feet find the bleacher stairs, which is more surprising. I walk down, one step at a time, and I don’t run. Running would be giving them something. Running would be admitting that what just happened mattered.
It mattered.
God, it mattered.
The concourse is crowded with people buying hot dogs and sodas and those big foam fingers that never made sense to me.
I push through them, not sure where I’m going, just knowing I need to not be in those stands anymore, out of sight, done being the wife everyone just watched get erased on a twenty-foot screen.
“Lo!”
Jesse’s voice. Behind me, getting closer.
I keep walking.
“Lo, wait.”
His hand catches mine. His fingers wrap around my wrist and he pulls me to a stop, and I turn to face him because I don’t have a choice.
He’s out of breath. Still in his roping clothes, hat askew, dust on his boots. He looks worried. He should be worried.
“Let me explain,” he says.
“Let you explain what?”
“The interview. It wasn’t - I didn’t mean it like-”
“Like what, Jesse? Like you told the whole country you’re single? Like you erased our marriage on national television? Like I just sat in the stands with every woman I know and watched my husband pretend I don’t exist?”
“It’s not like that.”
“Then what is it like?”
“It’s complicated. The label - there are things you don’t understand-”
“Then help me understand.”
His mouth opens. Closes. His hand is still on my wrist, warm and familiar, and for a second I think he might actually tell me. Might actually explain whatever it is he’s been hiding.
“Jess!”
Sloane’s voice cuts through the crowd like a blade. She’s moving toward us, phone in hand, heels somehow navigating the dirt concourse.
“Jess, the label’s on the line. It’s the Friday single. They need you now.”
Jesse looks at me. Looks at Sloane. Looks back at me.
“Lo-”
“They need you now, Jesse. It’s urgent. Something about the streaming numbers.”
His hand loosens on my wrist.
“I’ll be right back,” he says.
“Jesse-”
“Two minutes. I swear. Just let me-”
Sloane is already pulling at his arm, phone extended toward him, and I watch the decision happen in real time. The war on his face. The moment of hesitation.
He lets go of my hand.
He walks toward Sloane.
I stand in the concourse with my empty hand still raised, still feeling the ghost of his grip, and I watch my husband choose his career over me. Again. Like he’s been choosing it for a year. Like he’ll keep choosing it until there’s nothing left of us to abandon.
People walk past. Families with children, teenagers in groups, old men in worn boots. Ridley, Texas, going about its business while I stand frozen in the middle of it.
Someone recognizes me. I see it happen, the double-take, the elbow to the friend, the glance toward where Jesse disappeared with Sloane. They’re putting it together. The interview. The wife. The very public humiliation.
I lower my hand.
I walk.
Where I’m going, I don’t know. The truck, maybe. Somewhere quiet. Somewhere I can fall apart without an audience.
I end up in the parking lot, leaning against the hood of our truck, staring at the dust on my boots. My phone is heavy in my pocket. Tammy’s text is still there, still waiting.
The phone comes out.
I open it.
The link takes me to a video. Jesse’s interview, clipped and captioned and spreading across the internet like a virus. Forty thousand shares. Three thousand comments. Climbing by the second.
I scroll to the comments.
he’s so hot omg
marry me jesse
that smile I can’t
wait, he has a WIFE?