Chapter 23
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Cecelia had survived charity galas, hostile boardrooms, and one memorable product launch with indoor fireworks. The rodeo scared her more than all of them put together.
The parking field was full when they arrived, trucks nosed into rows. Music rolled out of the arena speakers and broke against the grandstand. Behind the chutes a horse called out, high and bright, and Cecelia’s nerves called back.
She had one moment of pure cowardice at the gate. Then Rylee took her left arm while Wendy took her right, and Faith walked ahead of them, with Lydia and Wren sweeping behind. Cecelia and her posse walked into the Rocky Ridge rodeo grounds together.
The town noticed. There was no version of this where the town didn’t notice.
A few of the looks slid away fast. Others held on longer than manners allowed.
The girl from the boutique stared, then lifted her chin in a gesture that wasn’t quite a greeting and wasn’t quite a cut.
An older rancher tipped his hat to Rylee and let his eyes go through Cecelia as through window glass.
Wendy kept up a running commentary on everybody they passed, pitched exactly loud enough to leave no silence for anyone else to fill.
They found their seats as the first event opened. Brent rode in it, to a wall of noise from their whole row, and stayed on longer than Faith’s composure did. Cecelia was on her feet yelling with the rest of them before she remembered she was supposed to be invisible.
It got easier after that. Not easy. Easier.
Jason had been gone since they arrived, off among the pens and chutes where the competitors’ horses came and went. Every so often she’d find his hat among all the other hats, as you find one particular star, and the knot behind her ribs would loosen a turn.
The trouble started between events.
A gate clanged behind the chutes, and then a horse was screaming. Not calling. Screaming. The crowd noise sagged and turned as a young sorrel gelding fought its way around the holding pen, a torn banner off the fence tangled at his hindquarters and snapping with every stride, alive.
Handlers scattered back from the panels. Somebody’s rope missed. The animal went up, came down crooked, and went up again, and the pen boomed every time he struck it. Along the rail, men shouted advice at each other, which as far as Cecelia could tell is what men do when nobody knows what to do.
“He’s going to break a leg,” Wendy breathed. “Or somebody’s skull.”
The announcer asked folks to please stay clear of the pens. The horse screamed again. And then a hat was moving through the crowd the wrong way, against the grain, unhurried.
“Jason,” she whispered.
He didn’t climb the panel. He came around by the gate, spoke to the man frozen beside it, and let himself in. He latched it behind him, which sent a murmur down the rail.
Then he stopped. And did nothing.
The gelding tore around the pen with the banner snapping behind him. Jason stood a little off center with his hands at his sides and his shoulders turned just so, and he was, as far as Cecelia could tell, the only thing on the grounds not looking at the horse.
The circles shortened.
The grandstand quiet spread section by section, until the banner popping and the animal’s blowing breath carried.
“Tell me he’s not,” said the man standing next to the rail.
“Hush up,” said another man near the ring.
She never heard what Jason said. His mouth moved, low and steady, and the near ear swiveled toward him and stayed. The horse stopped. He stood with his sides heaving, and Jason turned his shoulder and looked away down the pen. The gelding took one step toward him. Then another.
When the horse dropped his head against Jason’s chest, the sound the grandstand made wasn’t a cheer. It was an exhale.
He worked the banner loose without hurry, ran a hand down the shivering neck, and led the horse the length of the pen to his handler on a palm and two fingers, no rope at all. The applause came then, and it came from everywhere.
“That,” said someone behind Cecelia, to nobody in particular, “is the other Dennison.”
“The quiet one.”
“Whose is he?”
“His own, looks like. Heard he’s taking clients.”
“He is,” Wendy said, turning full around and beaming, not quiet about it at all. “He takes referrals, too.”
For the rest of the evening there was a knot of men wherever Jason stood.
From the grandstand it formed and re-formed.
Ranchers with their hats tipped back, the arena manager, a father with a horse-crazy daughter tugging his sleeve.
Jason listened, and nodded, and said almost nothing, and every one of them walked away as if they’d been paid.
Mrs. Bailey found him near the rail with Danny in tow. Cecelia was close enough to hear that the trainer in Ennis had retired before they’d ever hauled to him, that Danny had not stopped complaining since, and that the mare, in Mrs. Bailey’s opinion, had likely forgotten everything she’d learned.
“She won’t have forgotten, ma’am,” Jason said. “She’s smarter than both of us.”
“Bring her by whenever suits,” Mrs. Bailey said, which was not an apology. Then she looked over and found Cecelia looking on, and something went back and forth behind her eyes. “Miss Williams,” she said at last, with a nod, and moved off with her boy.
A name, spoken out loud, in public. It wasn’t warmth. It was more than she’d had.
Near the concessions, the woman from the council appeared at her side. “Miss Williams. The re-notice is moving. The flyers are going up, like you asked.” A pause with a dry note underneath it. “There are a great many windows in this town. Your check is going to feel it.”
“Best money I ever spent,” Cecelia said.
The councilwoman smiled and moved on.
Cecelia found Jason at the rail while the crew dragged the arena ground for the last event, the arena lit now, everyone’s breath showing. He turned before she said a word, as if he’d known exactly where she was the whole evening. She suspected he had.
“Well?” he said.
“You didn’t tell me it would be like this.”
“Like what?”
She looked at the arena, the crowd, the whole cold bright noisy world of it that had spent the evening deciding, and hadn’t decided everything, and had decided enough. “Like a town,” she said.
Jason took her hand where every soul in the grandstand could see it, and kissed her knuckles, a promise being signed, and their row of family whooped loud enough to spook the pens all over again.
The town hadn’t forgiven her. He hadn’t asked it to, and neither had she. But between the anthem and the last event, Rocky Ridge had watched Jason Dennison become inevitable, and it had let her stand close enough to be caught in it.
It wasn’t forgiveness, but it was a start.