The Rodeo Back Lots

I pull my pickup into the gravel lot behind the grandstands and kill the engine. The rodeo ended two days ago, but the back lots are still full of trailers and pens and guys in canvas jackets yelling at each other about loading orders. Move-out day. Everything has to be gone by dark.

I'm sixty-three years old and I still get nervous parking at places like this, like somebody's going to tell me I don't belong. A florist at a rodeo. Well, here I am anyway.

I spot Marci right away. She's over by a rental truck, a big white one, loading a dented metal toolbox into the bed. She's fifty-eight and she still moves as a woman half that age would, all business, no wasted steps. Twenty years in land acquisition will do that to you. Or maybe it's the other way around and the job found her because of it.

I get out and walk over. My boots crunch on the gravel and she doesn't hear me, so I just stand there a second and watch her work. She slides the toolbox up against the truck wall, scoots it, scoots it again, like it has to be exactly right.

"Nobody's grading you on the packing, you know," I say.

She straightens up and turns, and that face does what it always does. First surprise, then the smile. "Liz. You found me."

"Wasn't hard. You're the only one out here fussing with a toolbox."

"This toolbox deserves fussing." She pats the top of it. It's red, or it was red once. Now it's mostly rust and scratches. There are initials punched into the lid, worn down but still there. G.V.

"Your dad's?" I ask. I know the answer. I've heard the stories.

"Yeah. Geoff Vaughn." She says the name the way some people say a prayer. "He bought this in nineteen seventy-one, the year I was born. Man kept the same toolbox for forty years and never once let me borrow a wrench off him without a lecture."

"What kind of lecture?"

"Oh, the usual. Tools are a promise, Marci. You break a promise to a tool and it breaks on you when you need it most." She shakes her head and laughs a little. "I thought he was full of it. Now I catch myself saying it to people half my age."

"So it's going to Alberta with you."

"It's going to Alberta with me." She looks at the truck, then back at me. The smile fades some. "Everything's going to Alberta with me."

I don't say anything to that. There's nothing to say. We've been over it for weeks, ever since she took the job. Two years we've had, since we met at that ranch supply auction over in Riverton, when she outbid me on a set of fence posts and then had the nerve to help me load them. Two years, and tomorrow morning she drives north and I go home to my shop and my flowers and a town that suddenly feels a lot smaller.

"Come here," she says, and takes my hand. "You want to hear the thing about the toolbox? The real thing?"

"Always."

"Pop died in oh-nine. You know that. Mom wanted to sell everything, and she did, mostly. But this box, nobody wanted it. Too beat up, too heavy, latches shot. So I took it. And when I got it home and opened it up, there was a coffee can in the bottom. Full of screws and bolts and, I swear to God, seventeen pennies."

"Seventeen?"

"Seventeen. I counted. And a note in his handwriting that said, for the good ones." She snorts. "No idea what that means. Never figured it out. But I keep the can in there and I keep the note in there, and every time I move, the box moves."

"For the good ones," I repeat. It sits funny in my chest. I look away, out at the pens. Most of the stock is gone already, but a few horses are still in the far pen, shifting around, restless the way everything is today.

"Hey," she says, soft. "Don't start on me out here. I'll cry and then the crew guys will see me cry, and then I'll have to fire somebody, and I don't even have the authority to fire anybody anymore."

"You quit two weeks ago, Marci."

"I know. Old habits."

I laugh, and it breaks the thing that was building in my throat, which I think is what she meant to do. That's her all over. She handles hard moments like she handles contracts. Read it fast, find the soft spot, use it.

"All right," she says, and claps her hands once. "Work. If you're here, you're helping. Grab that end of the toolbox and we'll get it squared."

I take the other end. It's heavier than it looks, all that rust and all those promises. We walk it up into the truck bed and set it against the front wall.

"There," she says. "Dad would've approved. Maybe. He'd have said I didn't strap it right."

"Would he have liked me, you think?"

She stops and looks at me. That question came out of me sideways. I didn't plan it. But it's been sitting in me since I turned off the highway.

"Elizabeth. He would have loved you. A woman who runs her own business, shows up when she says she will, and puts up with me? He'd have made you coffee every Sunday for the rest of your life." She squeezes my arm. "He'd have said you're one of the good ones."

"And the note would've covered me."

"Seventeen pennies' worth, easy."

We stand there a second longer than we need to, hands on the toolbox, both of us pretending the box needs more adjusting. The wind comes through the lots and picks up some dust and a paper cup and rolls them along together.

Then she steps back and gets practical again, because that's how she copes. "Okay. The trailer's half loaded. I need you to tell me if the trunk of stuff in the corner looks like it'll shift. You've got a better eye than me for that kind of thing."

"I run a flower shop, Marci. I know exactly how things shift in transit."

"That's what I'm counting on." She jerks her head toward the trailer. "Come on. It's going to take us till dark, and I want the dark hours for something better than packing."

"And what would that be?"

"You'll see." She grins at me over her shoulder. "Well. You know what I mean."

I follow her toward the trailer, past the empty pens, past a crew guy wrestling a gate hinge, past the chutes all stripped down to their frames. The sky out here in the fall is so wide it makes you feel as a coin dropped in a bathtub would. Somewhere behind me the horses shift in their pen and one of them blows out air, loud.

Inside the trailer it's tight and dim and smells like cardboard and old coffee. Boxes everywhere, labeled in her square handwriting. TOOLS. KITCHEN. BOOKS. And one box with no label at all that I've learned not to ask about.

"Start with the corner," she says, pointing. "Tell me if it looks stupid."

I look. It looks stupid. "It looks stupid. Nothing's braced."

"I knew it." She climbs in past me, which in this space means her whole body presses along mine for a second, and neither of us hurries out of it. She braces the corner with a folded moving blanket, then another. Her hands are quick and sure and I watch them and think about all the hours left and how few they are.

"Six hours," she says, like she's reading my mind. "Truck leaves at six a.m. I'll be on the road by six thirty."

"I know the schedule."

"Then stop looking at me like that and hand me that blanket."

I hand her the blanket. We work.

We work through the afternoon. The trailer fills up slow. I hand, she stacks. She climbs in and out of the truck maybe forty times and doesn't complain once, which is not normal for her, so I know she's running on something other than patience.

Around four the light starts going long and gold. The crew guys are down to the last two trailers besides hers. The horses are gone now. Somebody took the far pen down while we weren't looking, and now there's just fence rail lying in the dirt where the pen used to be.

"Break," I say. I don't ask. I say it and sit down on the tailgate of the rental truck.

She looks at her watch, argues with herself about it, then sits down next to me. "Fine. Ten minutes."

We sit. Her shoulder against mine. The wind has died down and the lots are quiet in a way they haven't been all day. A dog barks somewhere off toward the fairgrounds and then quits.

"Do you remember the auction?" she asks.

"Two years ago, October. Fence posts."

"You wanted those posts so bad."

"I needed those posts."

"You glared at me across half that sale barn, Liz. I thought you were going to come over and fight me. And then when you didn't win, I felt so bad I helped you load the ones I bought, and you still glared at me the whole time."

"You outbid a florist on fence posts, Marci. That's not a crime with a statute of limitations."

"And then you let me buy you a beer in the parking lot, and I thought, well, this is either the start of something or the end of a very short friendship."

"It was both, kind of."

She laughs. "Yeah. It was."

Two years. It went fast. I keep trying to find the shape of it, where it started and where it ends, and it doesn't have a shape I can hold. It has a parking lot with two lawn chairs. It has her trailer and bad coffee and a hundred small evenings. Now it has a tailgate and an hour of light left.

"I left the shop with Tia this morning," I say. "Told her I'd be back Monday."

"You'll like having her run it. She's good."

"She's good. She'll also change my whole cooler layout and I'll pretend I don't mind."

"You'll mind."

"I'll mind."

She takes my hand. Her fingers are rough from the packing, a little cold. I hold on.

"Come here," she says, and turns toward me on the tailgate.

"I'm already here."

"Closer than that."

I turn too. Our knees touch. She looks at me and the look is the whole question, and I nod before she can get a word out, and she kisses me. Slow. Her hand comes up to my jaw and stays there. Out here in the open where anybody could walk by, and I don't care one bit.

When she pulls back she keeps her hand on my face. "I've been wanting to do that since about nine this morning."

"Took you long enough."

"I had a toolbox to fuss with."

I laugh and lean my forehead against hers. The light is going orange on the white side of the truck. Down the row, the last crew guy kills his generator and the lots go quieter still.

"Marci."

"Yeah."

"What were you going to do with the dark hours?"

She pulls back and gives me that grin, the one that got me into this whole thing at the auction, the one I've never once learned to say no to. "Well," she says. "I had a plan. It involved the trailer, the door locked, and you."

"Did it now?"

"It involved a lot less clothes and a lot more of me telling you things I should've said weeks ago."

"Then say them."

"After the packing. Come on, we're losing the light."

We climb back into the trailer to finish up. It's already half dark in there, the little window over the bed doing most of the work. Boxes everywhere. TOOLS, KITCHEN, BOOKS. And the one with no label, which I don't ask about, because she told me two weeks ago what's in it and I'm not ready to look at it again.

She hands me a stack of kitchen stuff and I put it where she points, and then I remember what's out in my truck.

"Wait. Stay here a second."

"Where are you going?"

"Stay."

I go out to the pickup and dig under the passenger seat until I find it. I wrapped it this morning before I left the shop, out behind the cooler where Tia couldn't see me doing something sentimental with a rubber band. I carry it back up the steps.

"Okay. Here."

"What is it?"

"Just take it."

She takes it. She holds it up to the window light and unwinds the rubber band and the paper falls open, and there it is. Dried wildflowers. I picked them off the ditch bank behind my shop back in August and hung them upside down from the ceiling rack for six weeks and forgot to tell anybody why.

"That's sage," she says. "And what's the yellow stuff?"

"Goldenrod. There's some yarrow in there too. And the little purple ones, don't ask me, I picked them because they were pretty."

"Liz."

"It's not a big deal."

"You hung flowers from your ceiling for six weeks."

"I hang things from that ceiling all the time. You've seen it."

"Not dried wildflowers in August with a rubber band waiting on them." She holds the bundle up and smells it. It doesn't smell like much anymore, just dust and a little of whatever sage keeps when it dries. "When did you decide?"

I sit down on the edge of the bed box. "The day you told me about Alberta. You called and I hung up and walked out to the ditch and picked flowers like an idiot. What was I going to do, buy you roses? For a move to a job you already took?"

"You could've bought roses."