By Bodie Fox
Linda works her cellphone camera, filming her boyfriend Ricky as he climbs on the back of an old nag that’s about half-wild because no one has touched her in so long. It was Ricky’s idea, not hers—ideas aren’t something Linda gets into too often.
She shields her eyes from the sun, from the glare off the white-gray dirt. As soon as he slides up behind the horse’s withers, it shies and jumps sideways. Ricky don’t have much of a seat, so, of course, he falls. Linda don’t like watching him flail through the air, don’t like hearing him hit the baked ground with a crunch. But, he said it would make him happy, so she plays along and points the camera in his direction, which is all he wants out of life.
The mare wanders to the far part of the arena, to the corner that’s nearest collapse. Ricky writhes in the dust, kicks off a boot borrowed from a friend. Linda stops recording and goes to him. Gray dust and spit smear the side of his face. It’s worked into his mustache. He rolls over away from her.
“You okay,” she asks.
He peeks at her: “You ain’t getting this? It’s good stuff.”
She resumes recording, zooms in on Ricky’s face, which blurs in and out of focus as he rolls on the ground.
The idea is to get rich, easy and quick. Ricky’s ex Ana is this season’s star of Get Back On, If You Fall, a reality dating show where a cowgirl or cowboy dates a group of farmers and ex-rodeo stars, narrowing down to one, final person to get married to. He showed Linda a photo—where had he got the photo, had he been holding onto it?—of his brief, unfinished stint in farrier school, where he met Ana, a strapping blond with a flat nose and cleft chin that stood in the middle of the class of guys with her arm around Ricky’s shoulders.
“Drama,” he had said to Linda. “Looking for it, they always are. I’ll drive her about plumb insane, and the producers’ll be eating right outta my hand.”
She smiled and nodded and tried to agree with him, to believe him. It was a good idea, so she told herself.
As Ricky gets to his feet, Linda gets the mare from the single spot of shade under the sweetgum tree at the far end of the arena. The horse is a flea-bit gray with long eyelashes and a white snip on the end of her nose.
Ricky leans against the arena panels, which are falling in on themselves and only held together by hay string. The land is their buddy Trev’s, but he doesn’t work the horse enough to justify fixing the place up.
“Since that went so southways, here’s what I’m thinking,” Ricky says.
Linda is from a low-end, working-class family. The kind that piled tires in the yard and sold whatever scrap metal they could get their hands on to pay the bills. Means that she’s fine where she’s at in life. She’s alright to toil. She’s okay to work. Where she is now is where she’ll be then, even if she don’t know that in front of her head.
“I think,” Ricky says, holding up his hands, picturing shots. “We just get a bunch of shots like that. Maybe a half-dozen, yeah? Then have me talk about getting back on?”
“Whatever you think, babe,” she says.
*
The video is rough, not really what the show looks for in this kind of thing, but Linda is certain Ricky’ll be selected.
Using iMovie on his lunch breaks from digging swimming pools, he spliced together footage of himself and YouTube videos of bronc riders at big rodeos: The screaming roar of crowds—the quiet, rundown arena—the soft-watered, pillowy dirt—the hard, sun-dried clay—the cowboys in their vests and hats, settling onto the horses’ back in the chutes—Ricky jumping onto the horse’s shoulders from the crooked arena panels—the cowboys’ big moves into and out of the well with a stiff-straight arm—Ricky clutching the mane, unable to keep up with the horse’s movement—the cowboys leaping from the horses’ back, landing gracefully with a wave of their hats—Ricky flailing, scared to fall, sliding his teeth through the dirt.
Then, there is a shot of him standing against the panels. “Falling,” he says.
His lip is busted. He holds his ribs. “It’s the falling,” he says. “And it’s the getting back on.” He explains how he and Ana met so long ago at farrier school. There’s this twinkle in his eye. The glare of the sun. The prologue of gladness. What comes ahead of a cowboy nod. How long had it been since she’d seen him make that face?
Fallen for Ana once he already had, he tells the camera, and he was ready to fall again, if she’d have him.
*
In the evenings, after a perfunctory, “How was your day?” Ricky sits at the dining table, glued to his phone, watching and rewatching the video of himself, making notes on changes to make, places to more cleanly splice. Linda sits on the loveseat by herself. She shakes her head because he pauses and rewinds a lot, especially the part of himself talking.
Did she think maybe he should write something down? Did she think they should reshoot it? Did it sound real? Did she think it had enough feeling?
Linda don’t say, but she wishes he wouldn’t go. Wishes it was anybody but his ex. Wishes they could watch TV or a movie together, even if only while they eat dinner, even if they don’t talk. Wishes he’d put his hand on her knee.
One day, Linda comes home from work—and this is after she spent the whole day as the one-person team at her Dollar General running reg, receiving trucks, slinging boats of product, fronting and facing as she went—and Ricky tells her that he’s going out to the bar with his buddies, did she want to come? Typically, yeah, a bar-cold beer’s hard to beat, but tonight, her feet ache, her back aches, and that ganglian cyst cropped up again in her hand, so no, she reckons not tonight. Instead, she drinks down a glass of water mixed with BC Powder, chases it with a Coors Light, and eats a ham sandwich.
During the third different evening news show, Ricky calls her.
Over the Amvet bar chatter and the noise of karaoke, he says: “Babe, I forgot.”
“You forgot what?”
“The video.”
“What about it?”
“Submissions, due today. I ain’t sent it yet.”
Linda mutes the TV and takes her plate to the sink. There’s so much noise on his end. Laughing, yelling, and he couldn’t even step outside?
She says: “You haven’t sent it yet.”
“No, and it’s come due,” he says.
“It’s come due, and he ain’t sent it. Did you change it any?”
“Send it for me, please, Lin. You and me both need you to.”
“I don’t know how to or where.”
Ricky explains that it’s all set to go. The page is bookmarked on the laptop. Everything is filled out. All she has to do is open it up and click send.
“You didn’t send it when you filled it out?” she says.
“Please, Lin.”
They hang up the phone, and Linda opens their laptop. The application is just where he said it would be, bookmarked on the browser and filled out.
This, it’s a good idea. The money, they would have more of it, according to the numbers that the banks would send them. Ricky would be on TV, where folks might could know him. Neither of those things seemed like bad things. People wanted these things.
She scrolls through the questions:
Describe yourself.
Why are you applying to be on the show?
How long have you been single?
What is the most interesting thing about you?
Who do you look up to when it comes to relationships?
Where do you see yourself in five years?
Each answer is some variation of something Ricky’s said to her before. Or caught him practicing shirtless to himself in the bathroom mirror with both hands flat on the counter. Or had otherwise written down on a yellow legal pad that he passed to her and asked her that same question—Did she think it had enough feeling?
But three questions catch her eye, stop her scroll down the page.
What is your greatest fear?
Waylon’s got a song that nails it. Dreaming without a thing to do.
How important is falling in love to you?
Of the upmost.
Have you ever been in love?
I’ve fallen once, ain’t I?
The answers were things that they hadn’t ever talked about. It’s just for the show, she knew. She knows. But, still. Somewhere inside a little piece of her cracks and falls right down to the bottom of her, though Linda don’t know exact where these things happen inside, don’t know how to say that they do.
Linda closes the laptop. The TV is on commercial break. She stands and goes out into the yard, where it’s dark, and she walks to the road and back, then to the road and back again. Inside, she paces in front of the TV. She washes the dishes in the sink, dries them with a towel, and forgets herself and washes them again despite the aching cyst in her hand. She brushes her teeth, or had she already done that? Returning to the couch, she sinks into the well-worn shape, adjusts until she’s comfortable, and focuses on taking several shaky breaths. The evening news turns into a game show, which turns to another game show, which turns to a singing show, and that turns into a late-night show. Ricky is still not home, and Linda’s head spins. The corners of her eyes seem to shake just a slight bit, like the noise a wasp might make. As the clock nears midnight, she opens the laptop.
Again, she reads the application:
Of the upmost.
I’ve fallen, once, ain’t I?
What’s your greatest fear?
Ain’t I?
Ain’t I the upmost?
Ain’t I? Ain’t I?
Linda ain’t never been proactive, never done or even said what she wants. Just takes what is given to her, plays the hand she’s dealt without ever drawing for something better. She knows what she has, and she likes knowing what she has. In her mind, what she has is a nice enough life with Ricky. She likes their small, ranch-style house. She likes their dead-end jobs, which they can quit for new dead-enders when they get bored. She likes the Amvet bar they go to. She likes that the bartender there knows her face and her preference for Coors over Bud but doesn’t know her name. She likes when Ricky cooks hot ham and cheese sandwiches and she does the dishes. She likes watching TV movies on Sunday mornings. She likes when Ricky gets pissy about the Chock-full-o-Nuts can running out. She likes when Ricky falls asleep on the couch at night.
The guilt would eat her up if she didn’t send the video, mostly because he’s bound to make the show. Again, it’s a good idea. Still, she waits, and now it is one minute to midnight, until it is the day after the submissions are due. A late submission is the dream.
In the window above the submit button, there are attached pictures. She clicks one, and the downloaded file is of Ricky at work, standing in a dirt hole, shirtless and skinny, with a shovel laid across his shoulders behind his neck. She smiles at it, at him. At his laugh, at the way he snorts, at whatever goofy thing he said before or after this picture that he probably swore up and down was true and serious.
She had fell once, too, hadn’t she?
Had Ana?
It’s another one of them things that Linda don’t quite know about herself—why she does it, or what meaning is wrapped up in that button. Her life with Ricky, his life, the chance of a life with Ana. How much of everything was show, how much that said about what wasn’t.
Linda envisions Ricky taking her out to steak dinner and walking-hand-in-hand to the door, and a man calling out his name: Ricky! He’s a stranger, but he saw Ricky on that show and ain’t that something? She can imagine a small newspaper clipping in a shadow box: Town Looks on as Local Looks for Love. She sees new Sunday mornings: they still watch their TV movies, but instead of Jimmy Dean microwave biscuits, Ricky sets down a pair of plates with omelets; she can hear him say, We’re omelet folks now, L, double-yolk egg folks. And, too, she could hear him explaining during a commercial break—and explaining it again to his buddies at the Amvet—Water! A whole person’s whole job just to get water and bring you water, whenever you want it and when you don’t. Can you believe it?
She clicks SUBMIT.
*
Linda finally gets what she wished for, though she regrets it. Each night now, her and Ricky settle into the loveseat where they turn on Netflix and watch each of the three previous seasons of Get Back On, If You Fall. Ricky really studies it, and Linda loses track of how many times through they have seen it. Her least hated season is the one with Brady Cowert, who falls in love with the first female rodeo clown from Mississippi.
“Babe,” Ricky tells her, “they pay good each week you’re on the show. If I’m there long enough, we might could use some of that cash as kindling, probably.”
Ricky wants the money to buy a farm of his own, talks about maybe buying some of Trev’s land so he knows it’s well looked after. Second to being a TV star, Ricky wants to be a cowboy.
When they first met, Ricky worked at a Movie Gallery, and Linda came in for a copy of The Cowboy Way.
Behind the counter, Ricky looked her up and down and shook his head.
“What,” Linda asked.
“You believe this crap?”
“Is it no good?”
“Real cowboys,” he said, tapping his knuckle on the counter and sucking his lips. “They ain’t from Texas for one, nor New Mexico.”
“Where then?”
“Right here. Right here from Georgia.”
Linda laughed at him, but he swore that he meant it, that he wasn’t being funny, which only made her laugh harder at him.
She brought the movie back the next week, and he said: “See? Not real cowboys.”
“Did they have movies about cowboys from Georgia?”
“Not yet, they do not, but that’ll real soon change.”
They started dating not long after that, which was over ten years ago now. Sometimes back then, he walked around bowlegged like he’d been on the back of a horse his whole life. He talked a lot about Joshua trees. He dreamed about what he’d do if he had his own herd of cattle. She figured dreams like that was why he went to farrier school in the first place, though he dropped out a week before he finished the certificate—he had bigger fish to fry than that tiny tin shack, he had explained to her.
It was less often now, but he still sometimes talked to Linda like that. Usually, it was when they were out somewhere, driving through dense woods of state-protected land, and he’d go on and on about owning it, about just having a piece of land that held your name, a piece of paper that showed it, that you could walk as far as you could see in any direction and bend down and pick up a fistful of dirt and say: This is mine. How you could put up a fence, and everyone who drove through there, just like the two of them, would have to say: That’s theirs. And after that, they could clear the land and set up shop, maybe his own, their own ranch, with their names, and everyone who drove through would see their sign and know their names.
That was one of the things she loves about him, knows that she loves about him. The way he talks. Ricky will talk until he’s blue in the face and sounds about insane, but he means every word. Even when the dreams never happen, he still has dreamt, and always he dreamt again.
She knew him a bit better now, though. He dreamed even in his stories of growing up, which he always spun one cowboy way or another, riding horses, working a piggin’ string, falling out of a hayloft and losing a boot. Over the years, she put some of the actual pieces together—he grew up similar to her on the other side of town, scrap metal and tires and bills and baloney, but his parents watched a bit more TV than her family; they’d seen the picket fences for themselves, and they wanted that for Ricky, though he always made a big show of wanting something less or something more.
But, still. Linda plays along with him when he talks like that because he’s sweet. He folds the laundry and rubs her feet at the end of the day, sometimes without her even asking. Because he usually leaves a space for her in his dreams. Because it makes him happy, which usually makes her happy. Once, she bought him a rope and a plastic steer head, and he stayed in the yard until it was too dark to see, trying and trying to flip back the honda and open the loop in one smooth motion.
*
The TV people call the landline. Ricky’s an alternate, but someone backed out. He has forty-eight hours to get to the ranch in Arizona. Linda watches from the doorframe as he throws jeans, button-downs, and his borrowed boots into a bag.
“Is it really about the money,” she asks.
“The money? Course it’s about the money.”
Where it came from inside her, Linda’s not sure, but, for the first time, she says what she wants: “I don’t want you going.”
Ricky crams boxers, briefs, and socks around the zipper. He doesn’t even look up at her, “You wanna live like this for always?”
“I dunno.”
Linda cuts the light on. They both blink hard a few times, even though one of the lightbulbs are out and the room is still dim. She sits on the edge of the bed.
“Why do we always gotta talk always,” she says.
“You ain’t talking like you.”
“Why’s it gotta be this show? Why Ana? Why not something else, why not some other time?”
“This could really be something. Otherwise we’d just never know, huh?”
He zips the bag. He stands up and leaves the room, Linda following. They stand in the driveway by the truck, where Ricky tosses his bag into the back.
“It’s asking for trouble. What about your job? What if they don’t hire you back?”
“The zeros on them checks they cut, they’ll make your eyes pop out of your head. If you thank me when you go to pick em up and put em back in, I might even help you.”
And with that, he shuts the door and turns over the engine. They linger for a moment. Bye, bye, and they kiss, and what if it will be their last one? And Linda decides, shielding her eyes from the taillights, that it couldn’t be. Steels herself, her worries.
It won’t.
*
Ricky calls that first week he’s gone. It is late at night after she’s laid down. He says, “Don’t know when I’ll call again, I’m so busy.”
The producers don’t know he’s in a relationship. If they find out about her, that could mean getting sent home early. Linda doesn’t understand, though she tries, why that’d be the worst thing in the world.
In the meantime, Linda works extra shifts to cover the bills while Ricky is away. She is at Dollar General six, seven days each week. For twelve hours at a time. She slings out product, she stacks empty pallets, she checks the balance on the till. When her shifts end, she spends an extra hour at the store, sometimes two, straightening up the dog food section and the Coke coolers and lifestyle section, making it all look so put together.
She goes to the Food Lion, where she wanders the aisles, fronting up the soda section and the Pop-Tarts and the cereal as it needs. She goes to the Amvet bar, where she sits with a beer and traces a finger along the grooves cut into the wood, runs a finger behind the dollar bills that are tacked to the wall. The bartender, who has a horseshoe mustache, brings her a fresh Coors and asks where Ricky’s at, and she tells him that he’s off shooting a TV show.
“That Ricky’s a damn card,” he says with both hands on the bar.
She explains the show and why Ricky’s there, and the bartender’s face drops and he leans back. There’s this look in his eyes like he’s looking at Linda so close that he knows her better than she does. She stops mid-explanation; the words catch on her teeth, and her tongue ties itself in a knot, her face grows warm and it all feels so, so dumb. Afterwards, at home, where it’s so quiet, she sits on the porch in the dark, and she waves at cars who can’t see her.
Ricky eventually calls again, but Linda is in the shower. He leaves a message, and she listens to it on the corner of the bed, wrapped in a towel.
“The cactus,” he says, “you remember it? You said you wanted one, one of them with a red fruit on it. We was at the Home Depot, I do believe, and I do believe we were looking for a potted Joshua tree. Sawdust was scattered all over the place. Then, outta nowhere, you started talking about the scrap jug we got, when it fills up, how ugly it is, how bad it stinks. The damned thing was rancid. Rancid, that’s what you said. I never heard you use a word like that. You said you thought that cactus with the little red fruit on top would make it pretty. Why the red fruit? Hell if I know, but you said it. I gotta go, but forget it I never did.”
The next morning, a rare off-day, she goes fishing at the pond on Trev’s land, where she knows no game warden will pop up. It’s hot, and it’s windy, and the fish aren’t much moving, but it don’t matter. She only goes to think, to not think if she don’t want to.
Despite her trying, she thinks about the voicemail. They did use to go to Home Depot some for hammers or wrenches or screws or PVC pipe during phases that Ricky wanted to fix stuff around the house. There was even a little while when Linda would intentionally break things—the kitchen faucet, the toilet handle, the batteries in the TV remote—just to watch him struggle and strain and puzzle over how to do it right, eventually getting embarrassed and giving up. She hated, hates, the scrap jug, sure, and she makes Ricky take it out when it fills with scraps scrapped from dinner, but she can’t remember ever wanting a cactus. It feels like something Ricky might want but not her. There’s prettier flowers out there. Some needier, but prettier still.
Before she leaves, she goes to the barn to see the mare. Linda’s never been a horse person, but her family kept a mini in the front yard for a year when she was a kid. She never rode the horse—her brothers tired it out plenty—rather, she brushed its hair each day, combed out its mane, picked mud and rocks from its tiny hooves, sat in a lawn chair and rubbed its belly down to its flank while it chewed up the yard.
The mare almost smiles at her when she steps into the breezeway and lets herself into the dusty stall. The horse puts her snout in Linda’s hand and whinnies in a tiny way. Linda rubs down her neck and strokes her mane, presses the side of her face into its jaw.
“I can’t believe it,” Linda says to the horse.
She runs her hand down its leg and pinches the fetlock, holds the hoof between her knees and picks rocks out from around the frog.
“I don’t like him being there,” she says.
Linda drops the foot and switches sides. She untangles burs from the mane. “But what a shame it’d be for them to find out.” She brushes out the mane with her fingers, straightening it out.
Linda sits at the dining table, a round and wooden thing from a relative that they got when they moved in. The laptop is open in front of her. She found the email address contact@getbackonifyoufall.com. She types without thinking too long or too hard about it:
To who it concerns,
My name is Linda Baker. Ricky Annear is one of the contests right now for your TV program. I just thought you lot might should know that Ricky and me are in a relationship. A good and happy one, too, for ten years and coming up on eleven. We aren’t married, but we live together and have for about eight years. I know that he said he was single, but he’s a liar. Is that the kind of person you want on your show? Maybe it is, and maybe it ain’t. Here are some pictures.
In the body of the email, Linda pastes three pictures. One is of them at a local rodeo last fall, standing in front of the arena during the bulldogging event. A picture of the two of them working in the yard together, raking up leaves. And a picture of them as something barely more than kids at Six Flags in their early-twenties, badly sunburnt, sweaty but smiling.
She misses him that much more. Does Ricky feel the same? Does he ever lay down at night, regretting?
It will be worth it in the end. It had to be. Ricky would come home. They would watch a morning movie together. They’d drink a pot of coffee. They’d drink orange juice, and they’d eat omelets.
She clicks SEND.
*
When Ricky does come back home, Linda is laying on the bed with the lights off. It’s only been six weeks, but it feels so much longer. He drops his bag on the floor and lays down next to her, and neither of them speak. The hum of the cars on the road. The whir of the A/C, of the ceiling fan. The thump of her heart. This man beside her. A big bubble of feeling. The slow wobble of a swaybacked horse.
Linda stands and smooths out the comforter. She cuts the lights on. Recently, she changed the bulb, and the room is bright.
“Leave it off, please,” Ricky says with eyes closed.
She does as he asks. “You hungry?”
“I dunno.”
“I could make you a sandwich.”
Ricky shrugs.
“How was it?”
“Good.”
“And?”
“And now I’m back here.”
“It was good, and now he’s back here.”
“Please, Lin. I don’t really feel like talking.”
Linda goes to the kitchen and stands at the sink, turns her nose up at the smell of the scrap jug.
It was good. And now, he’s stuck right back here.
She’s glad he’s home, and also she ain’t so glad, too. Her shoulders, her chest, they feel like they caved in, and there was that wasp buzz around the corners of her eyes. Again, feelings for her, they just—
The kindness got the better of her. She slathered white bread with mayo, stacked it with turkey cold cuts, and set it out on the counter. Linda had eaten a few hours ago, but she found herself wanting a cheeseburger from Wendy’s, fries covered in that crunchy salt, a tall Cherry Coke.
She turns on the TV, and nothing is on, but it is noise, and the noise is nice in how it fills her ears, fills her thoughts, and then there is a commercial for Wendy’s—a bacon cheeseburger, perfect fries, ice to the top of the cup—and she feels her stomach growl.
Ricky comes out of the bedroom to the kitchen. He explains that the show was good, but he doesn’t really feel like talking, and Linda doesn’t really feel like being in the same room, so she returns to the bedroom. She wants to be mad, to be spiteful, but the best she does is to kick his unpacked bag, which rattles when she hits it. She picks it up, and it rattles again, rattles when she tosses it on the bed. Unzips, unpacks, and there’s a box tucked amongst the clothes.
It’s white. The cardboard is thick. There is heft to it. On the lid, in golden script, it says:
Get Back On, If You Fall
Season Four
Ricky Annear
Inside is what rattles. Eight silver-plated belt buckles with golden trim braided around the edge like rope, intricate paisleys swirl and spiral and sing out around each other from the center, which is an image of a woman helping a man swing onto the back of a bucking horse below the show title.
She doesn’t know what to say. There ain’t nothing. Only to concentrate on her eyes, to stop this buzzing feeling. Why can’t she breathe? She sits on the bed, feet on the floor. The wasp just won’t go away, won’t just quit.
She wants to be mad, to have this feeling turn hot inside her, to set the water to a boil and walk away from the stove. The feeling rises, and she imagines herself throwing the box of buckles at Ricky, cussing him, saying: You’re an asshole, a selfish asshole, an embarrassing asshole. To her, to himself. Why Ana, and why not her? Don’t he love her? She imagines that she would remind him that he didn’t even grow up with horses, that Joshua trees don’t grow in Georgia.
And just as quickly, that feeling cooled—she thought of the bartender at the Amvet. The face he made. How dumb she felt. How she couldn’t speak, how she couldn’t look him in the face even though he wore that stupid mustache. How she got up and left without even laying a tip down. And, God, why did she got to be so goddamn dumb?
*
A few months later, the show finally airs, and the checks are finally cut, though Linda eyes don’t pop out.
Ricky invites all his buddies to the house to watch the first episode. They crowd around the TV in the living room, and there is nowhere for Linda to sit. She stands beyond the dining table, far from the TV, and sees as well as she cares to. She hates it, she hates it that he’s on TV, but it is a bit exciting, and she hates that her heart flutters for him when he appears on screen. Her Ricky, his goofy dreams. She hates that it makes her feel the slightest, slightest nod towards happiness for him, whatever comes before happiness.
On the show, Ricky rides up to the ranch on a short, swaybacked donkey, and Ricky’s feet nearly drag the ground. Ana stands at the door in boots and a button-down, a cowboy hat, looking like she just went sixteen-seconds around the barrels, aside from the heavy makeup. And Linda hates it, but Ana is a little bit pretty in a leathery, calloused way.
When they greet each other, Ana is speechless. Ricky takes off his hat awkwardly—it’s a gesture he practices in the mirror sometimes but has never gotten right. He hugs Ana, kisses her on the cheek, and then heads inside the house beyond.
In dueling confessional videos, Ricky explains that they dated when they were just kids, thirteen or fourteen years ago, when they were in farrier school together; Ana says that they broke up because she can shoe horses better than he can.
That’s about all the talking Ricky gets the first episode, but his buddies enjoy watching him, and Ricky enjoys watching them watch him—Linda notices his glances at the room when he’s on the screen. They back the episode up and watch it all again, rewinding Ricky riding up to the ranch over and over.
The next week, the contestants have their first challenge; they have to try to break a wild horse. Linda figures it won’t go well, considering the submission video, and it don’t. Ricky falls, of course he falls as soon as the horse is turned out. He lands hard and gets up, clutching his arm and demanding a re-ride, that he wasn’t ready. He’s told, No, but he sneaks back over to the chutes and hops onto another horse. He refuses to move, so, to get him out of the way, they turn out the horse. And again, he falls.
This becomes Ricky’s thing. To try and try again. It annoys Ana. It annoys the other men on the show. It embarrasses Linda. But it seems like the producers start presenting Ricky with more and more chances to do this. As long as Ricky keeps getting back on, they look the other way. Ricky does it so often and with so much gusto that she can’t even watch his turns in contests anymore.
At the end of each show, for whatever reason, Ana keeps handing him one of those stupid belt buckles. And each time he steps forward to accept it, his face holds part of that goofy charm, but it’s turned down a little, like it has aged some. And there’s something new now, something closer to admiration, and it is a look that Linda doesn’t know how to name.
The final episode, that’s what does her in.
It’s just Ricky and two other men—a cigarette ad cowboy and a retired rodeoer-turned-Hollywood-stuntman. Ana has to choose between the three of them for the final buckle ceremony. But, before she does, from behind his back, Ricky takes out a plastic, dollar-store cactus with a small, plastic red fruit on it.
Ana cries. That was so long ago, how did he remember? TV Ricky says, “Forget it I never did.”
Linda gets up and goes to the bedroom. A half hour later, Ricky comes in and flips on the light. He lays down beside her, tries to put his arm around her, but she don’t allow it, wriggles out from under his hand. She stands and leans against the dresser.
“I love you, right?” Ricky says. “You know, I mean.”
“You got the final buckle?”
“Yeah, I did.”
“What happens now?”
“They found out about you,” Ricky says.
“How awful.”
“I still get paid. They’ll have a special, and she’ll pick one of the other two.”
Linda crosses her arms. She turns and digs the box of buckles out from the dresser where he keeps it now. In trying to lift the lid, she tears the box. She pulls one out and rubs her thumb across it.
“You’re an asshole,” she says.
“I’m an asshole?”
“I thought it was strange that voicemail. I never wanted a cactus.”
“You’ve never mixed something up before?”
“I just feel so stupid. This whole thing. You’re such an ass. You called me, you said it was me with the cactus.”
“I remembered later, but too late it was.”
“He remembered later,” Linda says. “I have to go out like this. I have to have people know me by this now.”
“I’m an embarrassment then.”
“I grew up with more horses than you did,” Linda says, “which was exactly one. You run around talking about Joshua trees! In Georgia!”
“Have you never wanted for nothing?” He says. “You sit around, you don’t do nothing, you don’t want nothing. To be nothing with nothing, and I embarrass you?”
There’s a flicker of something inside her. A cigarette lighter, a struck match. She hates him. She loves him, but, God, does she hate him.
Whatever it was he wanted—money, love, Ana, a final zoomed-in shot of his face at the end of a show—she took it away from him. Ain’t she the reason? Ain’t she? He was at home, in their house, with her, and she had put him there. Kept him there. She had wanted it, and now it was hers.
Almost, she tells him this.
Almost, but no. This was now hers and hers alone. Her own buckle to hold and wear and cherish. Each time he would turn away from her at night to look at his phone; each long, long look out the window in the kitchen, dreaming, wishing so far away from her, and she would smile, stifle a laugh, and run a hand down his arm and play with the hair on his wrist.
She could see it clear as creek water.
One day out of the blue—maybe it would be weeks, maybe it would be years, maybe it would be when they were old and fat and just having said goodbye to one ugly grandkid who Ricky rarely spoke to—he would mute the TV and look at the floor—not at Linda, but at the floor near her wrinkled feet—and ask was it her who all them years ago had let slip his secret to the show producers?
In her mind, her voice wouldn’t have aged at all: I’ve loved you, ain’t I, Ricky? Of the upmost, I fell for you. I don’t know who would’ve done an ugly thing like that.
And after saying that, all that time would finally collapse together, each wall of the barn finally fall in on itself, and she wouldn’t be able to contain no smile no longer.
The face he would make. How unbelievable it would be.
No, no, not her. Not his Linda. He knew Linda, and this ain’t Linda. He loved her, didn’t he? He knew her, hadn’t he? He trusted her, and, this, she wouldn’t have never done that.
And she would ask after him all that time: Did it have enough feeling, Rick, when I said?
HA.
HA.
HA.
The words are on her teeth, they fill her mouth, and they taste of blood, of an ulcer inside her lip, and she likes it like nothing else. But no. She grips that belt buckle in her hand and puts it in her pocket, and she dumps the rest of the box out on the floor.
“You’re an asshole,” he says.
“Yeah,” she says, accepting it, which is the stupid, stupid thing that she does so well.
*
On another rare off-day, Linda digs a belt out of her closet, and she slides the buckle onto it, tucks her shirt in behind it, so everyone can see it gleam. She makes a day of solo errands: at the bank, the teller points at the buckle and asks if she’s planning on making a deposit; at Food Lion, the cashier eyes it as she rests her hands on it while looking at the tabloids. At the Amvet bar, the bartender with the horseshoe mustache says to her, “That’s a pretty plate for a steak dinner.”
And everywhere she goes, she tells everyone, everyone she can that she got the buckle from her Ricky, who got it from the dating show he went on. Just when each person gives her that look, she grins. She tucks her thumbs behind the buckle and tells them that they better tune into the special episode to see what he wins.
When the special airs, Ricky don’t watch. He goes to the bedroom. Linda pours herself a drink and sprawls on the couch, balancing the cup on her belt buckle. The camera is tight on Ana. The moment finally comes for Ana to choose between the two men. Who will she give the very final, final belt buckle to?
Ana begins to sob, tears well around her the parallel lines of her flat nose. It’s not fair. She’s already chosen, and she’s not gonna choose again. Instead, all she wants is some time alone with her horse somewhere on a mountain where she can sort it all out for herself.
And in hearing that, Linda feels for her. She falls in love with her just a little bit, wishes that she was more like that.
Linda goes to the bedroom. She stands in the doorway. “You wanna know?”
“I don’t reckon I care all too much about it now,” Ricky says.
“It was just money. Ain’t that all?”
“I hoped things were gonna be different.”
“Sure,” Linda says.
“And they’re not.”
She lays beside him. Their knees touch, which is okay, and neither of them move for a long while. Together, they are confined to this house, to this twelve by fourteen room, to this full-sized mattress. There is the buzz of the house, the buzz of a car on the road, the buzz of anonymity between them. She does not know this Ricky. And he certainly don’t know her, except in name alone.
There is a creak in the floor, some sound she does not know creeping up from the crawl space below. She can’t imagine the sheer space under their house, just how incredibly dark.
Just how many belt buckles could she fit down there? Mountains of them. Mountains and mountains until the silver rusted and they spilled and rattled clear through the access door.
“It’s just a long ways,” he says. “An awful long ways and not a thing to show for it.”
*
During the middle of a shift at Dollar General, Linda gets a call from an unknown number. It is a producer from Get Back On. It was coming time to shoot a reunion episode. There had been a little email that got sent that they wanted to ask her about. Would Linda be open to coming out for the shoot, maybe answer a particular thing or two on camera?
The woman on the phone said that she just can’t believe it herself. What was it like? It must have been hard, right? All that time together, building a life—something some folks never achieve—and then he goes on a dating show.
“And to date his ex at that,” Linda reminds her.
“What’s your side of the story?” the producer asked her. Everyone wants to know. It’s all over socials. Is she on socials? She’s seen the speculation, right, how they talk about her?
Linda adjusts the phone, holds it between her ear and shoulder while she pushes a heavy boat of product out onto the floor.
People already knew that it had been her?
Did Ricky know?
If not, then when?
She stops and runs a thumb over the belt buckle, feels its raised print, presses the indentations into her thumb. Not sad for Ricky. Sad for herself, which makes her feel bad about herself, but she can’t help it. This one thing that was hers. She bites her teeth together, steadies herself on the cart.
But, too, she smiles.
Already, they know her already.
“Hello? You still there,” the woman on phone says to Linda.
“Yeah, I’m still here.”
“Come on,” the woman says. “Everyone wants to know.”
“I just don’t reckon it’s all that interesting.”
“You built a life with this man, you love him—loved—and he goes on a dating show. People talk. People wanna know.”
“Maybe.”
“He throws away this whole life with you, and for what? Some other woman? He’s a villain, isn’t he? Or is Ana? That’s the kind of thing you can tell me, tell the world. Did he lie, did you know, are y’all still together? Why, why?”
Linda parks the cart and walks up and down the canned foods aisle, lined with boxes that need to be unpacked and broke down and thrown in the baler. After that, when the baler is full at the end of the day, she’d empty it, wheel the wet and stinking, smelling mound of cardboard out back for recycling. Maybe she’d linger out there, hesitate, some afraid, to open the door and come back into the Dollar General—more product, more boxes, more carts, more receiving, more register.
She puts the phone on speaker and opens Google. She searches Ricky’s name, and there are headlines, there are stories bearing his name. Clicking on one, there’s a picture of him. And below that, the picture of Ricky and Linda at Six-Flags. Then, there is also her name, too: Linda Baker.
She imagines herself on the show, a big microphone hanging down from the ceiling, the lights brighter white than anything, the camera pointed right in her direction. She would hear her voice on tape; she would see herself on a screen. Other people would see her and know her face, but now, too, they would know her name. They would say it out loud: Linda Baker.
What if then she went on a reality show of her own? What if she went on a full season of Get Back On separately herself? And what if she went as the newly-single star? What if she met someone new?
But what if, what if she met Ricky there? People would talk. What if she gave him a belt buckle, then another, and then another? People would want to know. She imagines people would ask. What was she thinking? She sees herself sitting across from a b-list celebrity on a red, plush couch. There, she’s holding Ricky’s hand—his other hand on her thigh—and they wear a fuchsia dress and a blue suit with hair and with make-up and a big audience of people laughing and smiling and applauding for them. She imagines her and Ricky, the two of them, talking humbly. Something about finding each other over and over again. Something about the little ways of showing it. Something about falling back in love and back in love and back in love again.