The Front Pew and the Choir

The Trailer

That Thursday night Dan and I sat at our own kitchen table with the checkbook, the savings book, and a yellow legal pad. Dan ran the numbers twice in his slow, square handwriting.

We had a little over nineteen hundred dollars in savings. We had just paid the shop in Marshfield for the transmission in his truck, and that had taken most of what we’d put away since spring.

“We can’t pull forty-six hundred out of this,” Dan said. He did not say it unkindly. He said it the way he tells a farmer the price of protein went up. “Not without a loan.”

I did not want a loan. We had paid off our last one two years ago. I could not stand the idea of starting over for something that should have already been paid.

Then Dan set the pen down and looked out the window, toward the yard light and the machine shed. I knew what he was looking at before he said anything.

Behind the shed sat my horse trailer. A two-horse bumper pull, steel, with a tack room in the nose and new floor mats I had put in only three summers ago.

It had been empty since April, when I lost Penny. She was a sorrel quarter horse mare, twenty-six years old, and I had owned her since she was a two-year-old.

I had not sold the trailer because selling it would mean admitting there would not be another horse. I was fifty. I worked full time. There was not going to be another horse, and I knew it.

“What’s a used two-horse going for around here?” I said.

Dan rubbed his jaw. “That one, with the mats and the new tires? About five thousand. Maybe a little more if somebody’s in a hurry for fair season.”

“That’s enough,” I said. My voice came out smaller than I meant it to.

He reached across the table and put his hand on top of mine. He has big hands, rough from fifty-pound bags, and they have always been warm.

“It’s a trailer, Teresa,” he said. “He’s your dad.”

I cried a little then. Not about the trailer. About Penny, and about Mom, and about Denise saying old age like it was a reason to stop trying.