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But…just standing out there? For women to bid on me for a date? And then to be forced to show her an entertaining evening, lest I further tarnish my shoddy reputation in this tiny town?
I pace back and forth in the makeshift backstage area — cobbled together with partitions that look like they were once office cubicles — while I wait for the auction to start.
This is the kind of crap I was glad to leave behind when Barnette moved me to Texas at 17.
Why do they even want me here? If Hattie’s sour face is any indication, nobody’s forgiven me for what happened back in the day.
Suddenly it all comes crashing down mentally. I realize what this is. The entire town just wants to put me in my place. Take me down a peg. The small-town mentality never sat well with me. Anybody who strives for something bigger, or shows any ambition, is seen as “too big for their britches.”
And now I’m back, and they’re going to put me on display. Because it won’t do for them to only receive a big check for the emergency aid fund, will it?
And isn’t it perfect that it has to be a dating auction? Just the right setting to show me that I’m not the ladies’ man they think that I think I am.
But I wasn’t a ladies’ man then, and I still ain’t. I fuckin’ hate that reputation, despite my agent constantly encouraging me to play it up all these years. And now that I’m pushing 30, he wants me to give the appearance that I’m looking for a wife. I’m “not getting any younger, and the playboy image is not a good look anymore,” according to my agent.
This ain’t professional wrestling; I win on my skills alone; no need to make a caricature out of me outside the ring.
But Barnette doesn’t care about that as long as he keeps getting a cut of my winnings.
Five minutes of pacing backstage feel like hours.
I take a moment to think about what my mom would say right now if she were here.
I remember my very first rodeo. She’d burst out of the stands to find me just as I was about to enter the chute.
“Break a leg, honey!”
That memory still makes me laugh.
My heart aches that the sickness took her before she could see me succeed.
I wish I could talk to her right now. It was always Mom and me. Until it wasn’t.
And ever since then, it’s just been Uncle Barnette and me. Not that he ever likes it when I call him that.
“That’s your cue!”
I whip around to see the short woman with the giant earrings and a lanyard around her neck, waving me forward to the gap in the curtain between partitions.
Am I really doing this?
I have half a mind to walk away right now. But the hopeful look on this woman’s face is too much.
“I know it’s a good cause, Ms. Reed, but I don’t know. I don’t think you understand how much people hate me.”
Violetta Reed shoots me a conspiratorial smile. “It’s all going to be fine. Trust me. All you have to do is stand there, and when someone wins you, you step forward and wait for the winner to pin you.”
“Pin me?” What the hell kind of auction is this?
Violetta scoffs but talks super fast and urgently. “Sweetie, it’s a boutonniere. Like prom night. The winner pins a flower on your shirt, and you wear it until you go on your date. It’s a courtesy that says, ‘folks, I’m taken.’ I thought my assistant had been over this with you.”
If she means her assistant Laura, best friend of Hattie, and one of the chief shit-talkers about me at the height of all the past drama, then no. No, Laura did not go over any of this with me. Shocking.
Violetta pats my shoulder and adds, “And if she doesn’t bid on you, I might just do it myself.”
A wary feeling tugs at my stomach. “Who? If who doesn’t bid on me?”
She holds open the curtain just as the auctioneer introduces me with a flourish.
