Page 68 of Sexting the Cowboy
“I’m all set, no worries. I’ll crack an electrolyte packet and be all good.”
“Okay.” She leans down and kisses the top of my head the way she did in college when I saved her from a bad haircut. Then she heads out into the light, her ponytail swinging, and the flap floats back into place behind her.
A baby. The word takes up the whole tent. It’s ridiculous. It’s also possible. My mind tries to find a way to climb out of it and can’t, so it starts tidying—the sign is crooked, the tape needs replacing, the bin of gloves should be one box fuller.
I suppose it’s fitting that the first thing I do is reach for a Sharpie. I make a new label for the drawer that holds the pregnancy tests we keep for teenagers who need a bathroom and a witness and a nonjudgmental place to cry. The letters wobble a little. I peel the old label off and stick the new one on, smoothing it with my thumb until it lies flat.
I am not crying.
I am breathing like a person who has practiced it for years in rooms with bad air.
The rational part of me lines up its bullet points with shaky hands. Pills aren’t perfect. People aren’t machines. Stressmesses with cycles. Travel does too. So does heat. So does forgetting. So does time.
I stand because sitting makes me feel like prey. I wash my hands and stare at my face in the little mirror above the sink. It’s the same face it was an hour ago. The same woman. The same problem solver. The same person who, ten minutes ago, thought the worst thing she’d have to do today was tell a teenage boy he wasn’t heat-proof. I turn the water off, and the tent gets loud again.
I need to take a test.The thought is clinical, a single plank in a river. I can stand on that. I need to take a test and I need to do it quickly, and I need to do it alone, and I need to figure out how to look at the result without the world tilting so hard I slide.
I grab my phone and pretend I’m checking the roster. My fingers open the pharmacy app instead. I could walk to the trailer. I could drive to the drugstore on the edge of town. I could steal one from my own drawer and pretend it’s for a patient who came in and asked for help.
No. Not from here. This tent is too bright. This tent belongs to other people’s emergencies. Mine can’t borrow its light.
I tuck the phone into my pocket. I put my stethoscope around my neck like armor. I straighten the heat-illness flyer one more time.
Jaden will be here in twenty minutes. The line at the lemonade stand will be long by then. The girls from the mutton busting will show up with glitter on their cheeks. The day will be loud and ridiculous and full of small disasters I can fix with tape and competence. I will do that, because that is what I do.
And then I will take a test. Quickly. Before my bravado runs out, before my brain starts writing a future and calling it the truth.
I’m a doctor. I know exactly what to do next.
I just have to do it.
20
BRICK
The gate clangs,hooves thunder, and the sound inside my skull turns bright white. I nod at the latch man and breathe through the leather, smell of hide and dust, and the old iron tang that lives in every arena like a ghost. The bull underneath me rolls his shoulders like he’s about to shake the world apart. I like him. He’s mean in a showy way. He wants me to look sloppy. I grin at the thought and set my hips.
Bang!
We’re out and going, hard left, nose buried, shoulders popping like a busted metronome, back feet kicking for Jesus. Crowd noise comes on like a storm behind glass—loud but far. I float my free hand and feel my body do what it’s done a thousand times. Loosen where I want to stick, stick where I want to loosen.
He fakes right on the second jump, and I don’t buy it. He’s got rhythm and I ride it, not ahead, not behind, just in it, the way you ride a song you know by heart.
I know this tune.
Four seconds. Five.
I hear my name get elongated into something syrupy and big in the announcer’s mouth. It’s funny and flattering, the kind of thing that slips through in moments like this.
Then the bull changes his mind midair.
I feel the cue a hair late.
He hitches. The rope slides a thumb’s breadth through my glove. My hips get a whisper too high. I course-correct, but physics cashes the check I just wrote.
The ground comes up fast and unkind. Tuck the chin. Round the back. Roll for meat not bone. Turn face away from hooves. Ignore the flaring pain.
It’s mechanical. But right now, I’m a slow robot. I land, bounce once, roll, plant my palms, and start to stand. I get to my knees, and the arena tips thirty degrees to starboard.
