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I took the receipt. Folded it into my clipboard.

“Thank you, Petey.”

“Sure thing. Tell Wyatt I’ve got the mineral back-ordered for next week — the twelve percent, not the eight. And tell Cash I said hi. Tell him I read the article and I told Donna M. she’s got no business having opinions about other people’s — well. I told her. I said, Donna, you’ve never run anything bigger than a church potluck, so maybe let the woman do her job.”

He was still talking when I carried the mineral tubs to the truck, his voice echoing around the valley.

***

I had the clipboard open on the bunkhouse table by nine-fifteen. The vendor list ran to forty-two entries — stock contractors, food vendors, a blacksmith doing demonstrations, a leatherworker, a woman who made goat-milk soap and had booked a table in July. Three names were already crossed off. I’d crossed them off before I left for Ennis, sitting at the table with the phone between my shoulder and my ear, writing the cancellations in my left hand while the right hand held the pen and the wrist complained and I kept writing.

The first had come in from a food vendor from Twin Bridges — pulled out, no reason given, the email three lines long and signed with a first name. The second at eight. A family from Virginia City who’d booked a craft table, citing “scheduling concerns.” The third at eight-forty, a farrier from Dillon who’d been booked for the blacksmithing demonstration, and his voicemail had said “given the circumstances” and nothing else, and the “circumstances” sat in the voicemail like a stone in a shoe.

I’d called each of them back. None of them answered. I’d left messages — professional, warm, the voice I used for vendors, the voice that said I understood and hoped they’d reconsider and the door was open. I’d left three messages and received zero callbacks.

The phone sat on the table face up. The screen was bright. The email app showed fourteen unread, and I’d opened seven and closed five and was working through the rest when the fourth withdrawal came in at eleven.

Bud Halvorsen. I knew the name — he was on the stock contractor list, a rancher from Norris who’d promised two horses for the open riding exhibition. I’d spoken to him twice, once in June and once in July, and both times he’d been enthusiastic and specific about the horses’ ages and temperaments and the kind of arena surface they needed.

“Priya, it’s Bud. Listen, I can’t make the fifteenth. Family thing came up — my daughter’s in from Spokane and we’re doing a reunion that weekend. I hate to do this to you, but — yeah. Family thing.”

I picked up the pen. Crossed off Bud Halvorsen. Wrote “family thing” in the margin beside his name, in my left hand, the letters slanted, the quotation marks small and precise.

Four withdrawals. Two horses gone. One demonstration gone. One food vendor gone. The structure I’d built was losing pieces, and each piece that fell away left a gap that had to be filled or the structure failed, and the filling was my job, and the job was the thing I could do, so I did it.

I opened the laptop. The budget spreadsheet loaded and the numbers sat on the screen in the grid I’d built in June, and the grid had holes now — vendor fees gone, stock contractor fees gone, the revenue side shrinking while the cost side held. I started adjusting. The food vendor loss was two hundred in revenue. The farrier’s demonstration had been free — no cost, no revenue, a gap in the program that could be filled with something or left as dead air. Bud’s horses were the bigger problem. Two horses for the open riding exhibition meant the exhibition needed two horses or the exhibition didn’t happen, and the exhibition was on the poster and the poster was printed and the poster said “Open Riding Exhibition — All Ages” and the “All Ages” was the part that made families come.

I was on the phone with a horse rental outfit in Bozeman when I heard the voices outside.

The bunkhouse window was open six inches at the bottom — the August heat, the creek air, the cross-ventilation I’d set up in the first week. The voices came through the gap, not loud enough to be words at first, then louder, then words.

Boone’s voice. I knew it the way I knew the creek — low, deliberate, the voice that moved through a room without raising itself. And Cash’s voice beside it, faster, higher, the voice that filled spaces Boone left empty.

“What the hell do they think they’re doing?” Cash said. “A local paper going after a local business — going after the rodeo — we’re two weeks out, Boone. Two weeks. And they’re running a hit piece on the person running it?”

“It’s not a hit piece. It’s—”

“It’s a hit piece. It names her. It names Denver. It brings up Tuck. It’s designed to make people pull out, and people are pulling out, so don’t stand there and tell me it’s not a hit piece.”

A pause. I heard Boone breathe.

“I’m not saying it’s not a hit piece,” Boone said. “I’m saying getting angry about it in the yard doesn’t change what’s in the paper.”

“Then what changes it?”

“Doing the rodeo. Doing it right. Showing people she knows what she’s doing by doing it.”

“She does know what she’s doing.”

“Then that’s the answer.”

“Then why are four vendors gone?”

Silence. The kind that meant Boone didn’t have an answer, or had one and wasn’t giving it.

I set the phone down. The horse rental outfit was on hold — hold music, thin and tinny, coming through the speaker. I sat at the table with the clipboard and the laptop and the crossed-off names and the margin notes and listened to two men talk about me through an open window as though I were a weather system they were trying to assess.

“The paper doesn’t care about the rodeo,” Boone said. “The paper cares about the story. The story sells papers. The rodeo sells tickets. Those are different things.”