The Ring

She had the ring picked out before the man, too bad. She imagined it from the start, the first start. If she couldn’t be a cowboy then she would marry one and she twirled where cowboys gathered. At the time it seemed a reasonable plan.

The ring would be a simple 10mm band, 18k rose gold with his their brand embossed equidistant in five places. Husband, wife, two children and one more after they were married, just to seal the deal. Five equals, no more, no less, forever.

It couldn’t be a complicated brand or the sentiment might be lost in the heat of it. Nothing that would form a hot spot to scar when they punched it to the shoulder of a 3-month old calf. Something with a mill iron would be fine.

It should have been a Running W, but she was slack in his rodeo now. Still damn good fun at a ropin, or in the empty calving shed way up in the bluffs with no one but the eagle as witness. Fun is not for marrying, too bad. A fence crawler with two small children is worse than a breachy second calf heifer. No matter they were his calves she weaned, or what good hooks and pins she had. But the way she swung her rope…he would remember and calls her still, when he’s drinking.

Her brand would tuck inside the band, engraved, marked, scratched, branded, scarred, forever, this time.

She found him, a Lazy J mill iron. No hot spots there, none. Finding a herd sire isn’t difficult when all you’re looking for is a simple brand, and it only took the honeymoon for her to understand she had a two-hundred pound pizzle rot Lazy J mill iron bull-ringed through her Achilles tendon. The brand made it hard to swing her rope, so she quit tryin.