Shelby led him out the far gate without looking back, the smile still on her face. Rollie got up and went out the other way, toward the sale office, to sign.
June went down the stairs and around the outside of the pavilion to the pens where they held the sold cattle before the trucks came. It was quieter there, just fans and the shifting of animals and a man with a clipboard. She found Shelby in an empty pen at the very end, sitting in the straw with her back to the boards and her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped around them. Domino stood in the next pen over, eating hay out of a rack, untroubled, with his number already glued to his hip.
June climbed the gate and came in and sat down in the straw next to her. Not too close. She didn't say anything. She didn't know anything to say, and she had learned at her grandmother's bedside that sometimes there isn't anything and you just have to be there anyway.
After a while Shelby started crying. Not like in the barn. Quiet, hopeless, the way you cry when it's already over.
"I told him," she said.
June went still.
"Last night. When I got back to the trailer. He was yelling about the sale, about how I'd ruined the steer, how I was going to cost him six hundred dollars, how I was soft like my mother. And I just—" She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. "I wanted him to look at me. Like I'd done something. Like I was good for something. So I said, Dad, I know how the Halvorsen girl does the floating. And he looked at me. He looked right at me." She laughed, horribly. "He said, That's my girl."
The fans roared. Domino pulled a mouthful of hay out of the rack and chewed it.
"He's going to the fair office in the morning," Shelby said. "Saturday. Him and Mrs. Pettit from concessions and some guy from the health department. He's been on the phone all night. He says between the fishing line and your grandma not being able to sign her own name, he'll have the corner by Sunday." She turned her head and looked at June with her ruined mascara. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I don't even know why I did it. You didn't even— you were nice to me. Nobody's nice to me. And I just—"
"You wanted somebody to give you something," June said slowly.
Shelby stared at her.
"It's okay," June said, and found out, saying it, that it almost was. "I mean, it's not okay. It's really bad. But it's okay."
"How is that okay?"