The Mare I Bought Cleaning Stalls

Cody Comes Home

Cody’s truck came up the drive the second week of June, and the oil smoke off it was worse than Daddy had ever let on. You could smell it before you saw it.

He had not made his card. That is the plain fact underneath the whole thing. He had run the spring hard on borrowed nerve and my horse money.

He had come up short at the pay window more times than he had hit it. And he had come home the way a man comes home when the thing he went chasing did not love him back.

I was not ready to be kind to him. I want to be honest about that part. I looked at that truck and I thought about nine thousand dollars and a bay mare in Texas.

I had to set my teeth just to say hey. He knew it. He did not push.

He found me in the round pen that evening with Junebug. He leaned on the rail a long time without talking, just watching her come around the barrel in the low light.

“She’s handy,” he said finally.

“She’s green.”

“She’s handier than she is green.” He pushed his cap back off his forehead. “Jo. I did not know he was going to do it like that. I swear it.”

“You’d have taken the money, though.”

He went quiet. That was the honest answer and he was man enough not to dress it up for me.

“Yeah,” he said. “Probably I would have. And I am sorry for it. That’s the truth.”

I could have left it right there, cold as the aisle in January. Ruth from church would say forgive him. I am not that good a woman yet. Maybe someday.