The Reunion Rodeo

Josie Mae gets to the grounds first. She has every year since she was nine, and not because anybody made a rule about it.

The Reunion Rodeo is the first one of the season at Cloverdale, and it is the one where everybody comes back. Seven months of school and winter and being somebody else, and then the rigs come through the gate and the ramps come down and there they are.

Codie, who lives ninety miles away and somehow hears Cloverdale news first, and who does not ask before she puts her hands in your hair. Quinn, who notices everything and says about a third of it. Tawny, who shows up with an animal in her coat and does not explain, and whose rocks on the windowsill are the good ones, which everybody knows and nobody has ever said out loud.

And up over the cattle pens at the east end, on four legs, the old announcer's stand that nobody announces out of anymore. Two folding chairs for four girls, which has been an ongoing situation for three years. A gray lockbox with a notebook in it that everybody writes in and nobody reads out loud.

Josie Mae has a list for opening day and she has had it since February. Sweep it out. Wipe the window. Good blanket back on its nail. Check the lockbox.

What is not on the list is everything else. A season that is about to start whether anybody is ready or not. A father who is the best pickup man on those grounds and is also a man who says Saturday. A thing that goes wrong at the east end that four girls are going to have to decide what to do about, with no proof and no grown-up and not much time.

There are two chairs and there are four of them. There have always been four of them. That turns out to be the part that matters.

First of twelve books in the Crows Nest Cowgirls series. One rodeo season, start to finish. Four girls, and four voices telling it.