Rope and Rodeo

I want to start by saying I'm thirty-five years old and I own four hundred acres of good cattle land outside Billings, and until last Friday I had never once been inside a building with a naked stranger on a leash. My ex-husband Bernard, who I married at twenty-two and divorced at thirty-four, would have laughed himself sick if he'd seen me at the airport gate with a rolling duffel bag full of leather samples and a lanyard around my neck that said EXHIBITOR on it. Twelve years of marriage and the wildest thing we ever did in bed was once with the lights on, so you can imagine what a freight train the Desires and Devices Expo was for a woman like me. I still don't know why I said yes when Chelsea asked, except that the house got so quiet after the divorce that I could hear the clock in the hallway from the barn, and a person can only stand so much quiet.

Chelsea, who is twenty-nine and runs her company like she was born to it, met me at the trade show in Denver two years ago and talked me into selling her hides and stitching patterns for a line of leather cuffs and collars she was building. I thought it was a joke at first, a well-dressed woman with a catalog asking a rancher about grain leather for a dog collar, and then she showed me the page and I saw what the collars were actually for and I went home and sat in the truck for a long time. She pays good, better than the feed store, and I helped her design the Bridger line, named after a mountain range I can see from my porch, so when she said come to Portland for the expo and stand at the booth, I couldn't think of an excuse that wasn't just loneliness with a different hat on.

* * *

The convention center used to be something else, a sports arena maybe, and it was huge and echoey and full of music thumping off the rafters at nine in the morning. Chelsea met me at the loading dock in a burgundy blazer and boots that cost more than my saddle, and she hugged me before I could decide whether to offer a handshake, and that was the tone for the whole weekend, decisions made for me before I could freeze up.

"Poppy, you look great," she said, holding me by the shoulders. "Tell me you brought the oxblood cuffs."

"I brought everything, and I ironed the display cloths, which I regret, because I don't think anybody in this building owns an iron."

She laughed and steered me through the hall doors, and the floor just swallowed us. There was latex everywhere, shine on every surface, and a man in nothing but a leather apron demonstrating a flogger on a volunteer who looked delighted about it, and a booth selling rope in forty colors, and somewhere ahead a stage where a woman with a microphone was talking about safety shears in a voice meant for a rodeo announcer. I held my sample bag with both hands like a life vest. Chelsea kept touching my elbow and pointing out booths, this is the distributor from Berlin, this is the couple who does the podcast, and I nodded at all of them and heard maybe half of it over the music.

"You're doing that thing," she said, leaning close so I could hear her. "The thing where you go polite and flat. What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong, it's just loud, and there's a lot of, I don't know, everything."

"Okay, new plan. You tell me if it gets to be too much. I mean that. You say the word and we go somewhere quiet. Deal?"

"Deal," I said, and I meant it, and I still lasted about forty minutes.

It wasn't any one thing. It was the crowd and the heat and a demonstration across the aisle where a man was doing something with wax that made a woman make a sound I could hear over the music, and I felt like a fencepost standing in a river. I told Chelsea I was going to find the restroom and she pointed the way and I walked in the opposite direction, which I'm not proud of, but my legs were making the decisions by then.

* * *

The supply closet was off a corridor behind the rope booth, a plain gray door with no sign, and it wasn't locked, so I went in and shut it and stood in the dark listening to my own pulse slow down. It wasn't really a closet, more of a staging room, metal shelves on one wall and stacks of cardboard and a big wooden crate in the middle with EXPEDITED FREIGHT stenciled on the side. I sat down on the crate to catch my breath, and when I did the lid was loose and it shifted, and I looked down and the crate was full, packed in white tissue paper, of silicone toys. Dozens of them, in colors I didn't know silicone came in, teal and plum and one that was swirled like a marble rye, all of them packed nose to tail and jiggling slightly when the door rattled somewhere down the hall.

I should have stood up. Instead I sat there on a crate of the product I technically helped invent, mortified and, I'll admit it, curious, and I picked one up, a slim one that fit my hand like a tool I already owned, and I was still holding it when the door opened.

Chelsea came in fast, already talking, and then she saw me and stopped with her hand on the light switch.

"Oh my god," she said. "You're sitting on the inventory."

"I got overwhelmed," I said, which was as close to the truth as I could get while holding a toy in a supply closet. "I know this looks, I was just sitting."

"No, don't explain, this is actually perfect. Can I close this?"

She turned the little lock on the knob and it clicked, and the noise from the hall got small, and then it was just the two of us and a thousand dollars of product in tissue paper. She came over and sat beside me on the crate, which was not built for two people, so her shoulder rested against mine, and she looked at