The Stalls I Mucked So She Could Ride

She thought about it. “I told him I wasn’t ever ashamed of him. Just sad.”

In March, Mae’s old sorrel mare, Dolly, foaled in the middle of the night during a sleet storm. Mae called me at four in the morning because she knew I was a nurse and she was worried about the mare.

By the time Addison and I got out there, the foal was already up on its wobbly legs, a little brown colt with a white star.

Addison stood at the stall door in her pajama pants and her coat and her muck boots, and she didn’t make a sound.

She just held onto the door with both hands and watched that colt find his mama.

Mae came and stood next to her. She put one hand on Addison’s shoulder, the way she does with a nervous horse.

“He needs a name,” Mae said. “I’ve named every horse on this place for forty years, and I’m tired. You do this one.”

Addison looked up at her like Mae had handed her the moon. Then she looked back at the colt, and she was quiet a long time, and then she said, “Saturday.”

“Saturday,” Mae said, trying it out.

“Because that’s when everybody comes,” Addison said. “Mama and Daddy and me. Saturday is when we’re all here.”

Mae didn’t say anything for a minute. She looked at the floor of the barn aisle, and then she took a handkerchief out of her coat pocket and blew her nose hard, and she said, “Well, that’s his name, then,” in a voice that didn’t sound like hers at all.

I had to go stand in the feed room for a while after that. Nobody asked me why. People who keep horses understand about needing a minute in the feed room.

It’s spring now. The wheat is green out along Highway 87, and the wind has gone back to blowing the way it was made to.

Addison is riding Biscuit at a canter, which she couldn’t do in the fall, and Mae says by summer she’ll be ready to try the little jumps in the arena.

My hands have healed. Corey’s truck got caught up. He’s back on some overtime now that the plant is running a little heavier, and in April he paid Mae the last of what they had settled on, with a card that Addison made him sign in front of her.

He still comes out on Saturdays. He says it’s to keep his word to Mae.

I think it’s because he likes it, though he would never say so. He has gotten faster. He is still not as fast as me.

Saturday is two months old now and follows Addison around the paddock like a puppy. She brings him a carrot every single week, rain or shine, and she has never missed one.

Last Saturday I got there early, before anybody else, the way I like to.

The sky was just going gray over all that flat ground, and the barn was quiet except for the horses shifting and blowing in their stalls, waiting on their breakfast.

I took my pitchfork off the wall. And I stood for a second in the doorway, in my muck boots with my coffee going cold on the tack room shelf, and looked down the long aisle at what was waiting for me there.

Two wheelbarrows in the barn aisle.