The Stalls I Mucked So She Could Ride

Addison waited until we were past the grain elevator on the way out of Corey’s neighborhood before she said it.

She had her riding helmet in her lap, and she was turning it around and around by the strap.

“Daddy says I can’t ride Biscuit anymore,” she said, looking out the window at the wheat stubble and not at me. “He says it’s because you won’t help pay.”

I kept both hands on the wheel. Highway 87 runs flat and straight out of Dumas, and there was nothing to look at but road, so I looked at the road and tried to breathe slow.

“He said that?” I asked. I kept my voice even, the way I do at work when a resident’s family is upset and the worst thing I can do is match them.

“He said he paid and paid and you wouldn’t put in anything, and it’s four hundred dollars, and he can’t do it alone.” Her chin was shaking. “He said it’s not his fault, Mama.”

Nobody had ever asked me to put in anything. Not once.

Corey signed her up in June without a phone call, and I found out when Addison came home on a Sunday smelling like horse and grinning like Christmas.

I did not say that to her. I said, “I’m sorry, baby. I know how much you love that horse.”

Then I drove the rest of the way home with my jaw so tight it ached by the time we pulled into the carport.

She went to her room and shut the door. I stood in the kitchen with my keys still in my hand and listened to her cry into her pillow, the quiet kind of crying a ten-year-old does when she thinks you can’t hear.

I am thirty-four years old. I am a licensed vocational nurse at the county nursing home, which is what Texas calls the job most states call a practical nurse.

I work twelve-hour shifts, three and four a week, and I rent a two-bedroom house on the west side of Dumas.

Corey and I were married eight years and have been divorced for three. He works on the kill floor at the beef plant in Cactus, twenty minutes up the highway.

He has Addison the first, third and fifth weekends and Thursday evenings, the way the court set it up.

He is not a bad man. I want to say that early, because what I am about to tell could make him sound like one.

He is a proud man who never learned how to say “I can’t,” and those are two different things, even when they feel the same from the outside.

When the plant was running extra shifts last spring, Corey had money.

He bought a new truck, and in June he drove Addison out to Mae Holloway’s place and signed her up for weekly lessons.

Four hundred dollars a month. A private lesson every Saturday morning at nine, plus the time Mae let the kids spend brushing down and tacking up.

Addison was assigned a brown gelding named Biscuit, fifteen years old and as patient as a church pew.

He paid June. He paid July. He paid August. I know because Mae told me later, and because Addison talked about nothing else all summer.

Biscuit this, Biscuit that. Biscuit liked peppermints. Biscuit had a white star you could only see if you lifted his forelock.