flower child weddings (1968—75)—–Rebellion fad made popular by people who didn’t want to totally rebel against tradition and not get married at all. Performed in a meadow or on a mountaintop, the ceremony featured, “Feelings,” played on a sitar and vows written by the participants with assistance from Kahlil Gibran. The bride generally wore flowers in her hair and no shoes. The groom wore a peace symbol and sideburns. Supplanted in the seventies by living together and lack of commitment.

Billy Ray brought the bellwether down himself. “I put it down in the paddock,” he said when he came into the stats lab. “The gal down there said to just put it in with the rest of the flock.”

He must mean Alicia. She’d spent all afternoon huddled with Ben, discussing the Niebnitz profile, which was why I’d come up to the stats lab to feed in twenties data. I wondered why Ben wasn’t there.

“Pretty?” I said. “Corporate type? Wears a lot of pink?”

“The bellwether?” he said.

“No, the person you talked to. Dark hair? Clipboard?”

“Nope,” he said. “Tattoo on her forehead.”

“Brand,” I said absently. “Maybe we’d better go check on the bellwether.”

“She’ll be fine,” he said. “I brought her down myself so I could take you to that dinner we missed out on last week.”

“Oh, good,” I said. This would give me a chance to get some ideas of low-threshold skills we could teach the sheep. “I’ll get my coat.”

“Great,” he said, beaming. “There’s this great new place I want to take you to.”

“Prairie?” I said.

“No, it’s a Siberian restaurant. Siberian is supposed to be the hot new cuisine.”

I hoped he meant hot in the sense of warm. It was freezing outside in the parking lot, and there was a bitter wind. I was glad Shirl didn’t have to stand out there to have a cigarette.

Billy Ray led me to his truck and helped me in. As he started to pull out of the parking lot, I put my hand on his arm. “Wait,” I said, remembering what Flip had done to my clippings. “Maybe we should check to make sure the bellwether’s all right before we leave. What did she say exactly? The girl who was down there in the lab. She wasn’t out in the paddock, was she?”

“Nope,” he said. “I was looking for somebody to give the bellwether to, and she came in with some letters and said they were in Dr. Turnbull’s lab and to just leave the bellwether in the paddock, so I did. She’s fine. Got right off the truck and started grazing.”

Which must mean she was really a bellwether. Things were looking up.

“She wasn’t still there when you left, was she?” I said. “The girl, not the bellwether.”

“Nope. She asked me whether I thought she had a good sense of humor, and when I said I didn’t know, I hadn’t heard her say anything funny, she kind of sighed and rolled her eyes and left.”

“Good,” I said. It was five-thirty already. Flip wouldn’t have stayed a minute past five, and she usually left early, so the chances she would have come back to the lab to work mischief were practically nonexistent. And Ben was still there; he’d come back from Alicia’s lab to check on things before he went home. If he wasn’t too enamored of Alicia and the Niebnitz Grant to remember he had a flock of sheep.

“This place is great,” Billy Ray said. “We’ll have to stand in line an hour to get in.”

“Sounds great,” I said. “Let’s go.”

It was actually an hour and twenty minutes, and during the last half hour the wind picked up and it started to snow. Billy Ray gave me his sheepskin-lined jacket to put over my shoulders. He was wearing a band-collared shirt and cavalry pants. He’d let his hair grow out, and he had on yellow leather riding gloves. The Brad Pitt look. When I kept shivering, he let me wear the gloves, too.

“You’ll love this place,” he said. “Siberian food is supposed to be great. I’m really glad we were able to get together. There’s something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about.”

“I wanted to talk to you, too,” I said through stiff lips. “What kinds of tricks can you teach sheep?”

“Tricks?” he said blankly. “Like what?”

“You know, like learning to associate a color with a treat or running a maze. Preferably something with a low ability threshold and a number of skill levels.”

“Teach sheep?” he repeated. There was a long pause while the wind howled around us. “They’re pretty good at getting out of fences they’re supposed to stay inside of.”

That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I’ll get on the Internet and see if anybody on there’s ever taught a sheep a trick.” He took off his hat, in spite of the snow, and turned it between his hands. “I told you I had something I wanted to talk to you about. I’ve had a lot of time to think lately, driving to Durango and everything, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the ranching life. It’s a lonely life, out there on the range all the time, never seeing anybody, never going anywhere.”

Except to Lodge Grass and Lander and Durango, I thought.

“And lately I’ve been wondering if it’s all worth it and what am I doing it for. And I’ve been thinking about you.”

“Barbara Rose,” the Siberian waiter said.

“That’s us,” I said. I gave Billy Ray his coat and gloves back, and he put his hat on, and we followed the waiter to our table. It had a samovar in the middle of it, and I warmed my hands over it.

“I think I told you the other day I was feeling at loose ends and kind of dissatisfied,” he said after we had our menus.

“Itch,” I said.

“That’s a good word for it. I’ve been itchy, all right, and while I was driving back from Lodgepole I finally figured out what I was itching for.” He took my hand.

“What?” I said.

“You.”

I yanked my hand back involuntarily, and he said, “Now, I know this is kind of a surprise to you. It was a surprise to me. I was driving through the Rockies, feeling out of sorts and like nothing mattered, and I thought, I’ll call Sandy, and after I got done talking to you, I got to thinking, Maybe we should get married.”

“Married?” I squeaked.

“Now I want to say right up front that whatever your answer is, you can have the sheep for as long as you want. No strings attached. And I know you’ve got a career that you don’t want to give up. I’ve got that figured out. We wouldn’t have to get married till after you’ve got this hair-bobbing thing done, and then we could set you up on the ranch with faxes and a modem and e-mail. You’d never even know you weren’t right there at HiTek.”

Except Flip wouldn’t be there, I thought irrelevantly, or Alicia. And I wouldn’t have to go to meetings and do sensitivity exercises. But married!

“Now, you don’t have to give me your answer right away,” Billy Ray went on. “Take all the time you want. I’ve had a couple of thousand miles to think about it. You can let me know after we have dessert. Till then, I’ll leave you alone.”

He picked up a red menu with a large Russian bear on it and began reading through it, and I sat and stared at him, trying to take this in. Married. He wanted me to marry him.

And, well, why not? He was a nice guy who was willing to drive hundreds of miles to see me, and I was, as I had told Alicia, thirty-one, and where was I going to meet anybody else? In the personals, with their athletic, caring NSs who weren’t even willing to walk across the street to date somebody?

Billy Ray had been willing to drive all the way down from someplace on the off chance of taking me to dinner. And he’d loaned me a flock of sheep and a bellwether. And his gloves. Where was I going to meet anybody that nice? Nobody at HiTek was going to propose to me, that was for sure.

“What do you want?” Billy Ray asked me. “I think I’m going to have the potato dumplings.”

I had borscht flavored with basil (which I hadn’t remembered as being big in Siberian cuisine) and potato dumplings and tried to think. What did I want?

To find out where hair-bobbing came from, I thought, and knew that was about as likely as winning the Niebnitz Grant. In spite of Feynman’s theory that working in a totally different field sparked scientific discovery, I was no closer to finding the source of fads than before. Maybe what I needed was to get away from HiTek altogether, out in the fresh air, on an isolated Wyoming ranch.

“Far from the madding crowd,” I murmured.

“What?” Billy Ray said.

“Nothing,” I said, and he went back to his dinner.

I watched him eat his dumplings. He really did look a little like Brad Pitt. He was awfully trendy, but maybe that would be an advantage for my project, and we wouldn’t have to get married right away. He’d said I could wait until after I finished the project. And, unlike Flip’s dentist, he wouldn’t mind my being geographically incompatible while I worked on it.

Flip and her dentist, I thought, wondering uneasily if this was just another fad. That article had said marriage was in, and all the little girls were crazy for Romantic Bride Barbie. Lindsay’s mother was thinking of getting married again in spite of that jerk Matt, Sarah was trying to talk Ted into proposing, and Bennett was letting Alicia pick out his ties. What if they were all part of a commitment fad?

I was being unfair to Billy Ray. He was in love with what was trendy, he might even stand in Une in a blizzard for an hour and a half, but he wouldn’t marry someone because marriage was in. And what if it was a trend? Fads aren’t all bad. Look at recycling and the civil rights movement. And the waltz. And, anyway, what was wrong with going along with a trend once in a while?

“Time for dessert,” Billy Ray said, looking at me from under the brim of his hat.

He motioned the waitress over, and she rattled off the usual suspects: crème brûlée, tiramisu, bread pudding.

“No chocolate cheesecake?” I said.

She rolled her eyes.

“What do you want?” Billy Ray said.

“Give me a minute,” I said, breathing hard. “You go ahead.”

Billy Ray smiled at the waitress. “I’ll have the bread pudding,” he said.

“Bread pudding?” I said.

The waitress said helpfully, “It’s our most popular dessert.”

“I thought you didn’t like bread pudding,” I said.

He looked up blankly. “When did I say that?”

“At that prairie cuisine place you took me to. The Kansas Rose. You had the tiramisu.”

“Nobody eats tiramisu anymore,” he said. “I love bread pudding.”