The Filly Across the Road

I told Wade we’d moved. I told him at the barn, more than once. But I never wrote it on the contract.

The post office forwarded our mail for a year, and then it stopped. Wade’s certified letter went to Ash Street, sat a while, and went back to him unclaimed.

He told me later he figured we were ignoring it. Maybe he believed that.

I called a lawyer in Muskogee the week we got home. He was a decent man, older, with a box of tissues on his desk that I suppose he needed more often than he’d like.

He read the statement and the contract and was quiet for a while.

“The sale is going to stand,” he said finally. “The buyer paid a fair price in good faith. Getting the horse back is off the table. I’m sorry. That’s the hard part, and I want you to hear it from me first.”

“And the rest of it?” I asked. “The twelve thousand?”

“You could sue him for the surplus,” he said. “You’d have to prove every one of those charges was padded. He’d fight it. My retainer is thirty-five hundred, and a contested case like this could run a year and cost you more than the horse.”

I thanked him and paid him for the hour, sixty dollars, and drove home with that number in my head.

Thirty-five hundred to maybe get back money that might not exist, while my daughter learned to walk again.

That is why we never sued. People have asked me since, and that is the plain answer.

I had a girl to get well, a mortgage, a husband in North Dakota, and nineteen hundred dollars I really had owed.

Jeff came home on his week off at the end of July.

He walked in the door, set down his duffel bag, hugged Kenzie for a long time, and then looked at me over her head. I knew what he was thinking.

“I’m going over there,” he said that night on the porch.

“Jeff,” I said.

“I’m not going to do anything stupid, Shel. I just want to look him in the eye. Man to man. I want him to tell me to my face why he did it.”

He was gone an hour and a half. When his pickup came back up the drive, he sat in it a minute with the engine off before he got out.

He came and sat beside me on the step and didn’t say anything at first.

“Well?” I said.

“He’s in trouble, Shel,” Jeff said. “Bad trouble. He lost half his boarders when hay went to a hundred and forty a round bale after the drought. The bank’s been out twice. He’s behind on the note on that barn.”

“So he took our horse to pay his note.”

“That’s about the size of it,” Jeff said. He rubbed the back of his neck the way he does. “He didn’t deny it. He just stood there. He said one more thing I keep thinking about.”

“What?”

“He said he figured Kenzie wouldn’t ride again anyway. After a knee like that. He said he’d seen it before, girls who get hurt and lose their nerve and the horse just stands. He said he told himself he was doing everybody a favor.”

I didn’t say anything for a long time. A whip-poor-will started up down by the creek. Jeff reached over and put his hand on my knee and left it there.