The Stalls I Mucked So She Could Ride

Then at the end of August the plant cut the Saturday shifts, and the overtime went away. I didn’t know that part yet either.

All I knew was that my daughter was crying in her room, and her daddy had told her it was my fault.

That night after she fell asleep I called him. He answered on the fourth ring, and I could hear a ball game on the television behind him.

“You told her I wouldn’t help pay,” I said. “Corey, you never asked me. You never asked me about any of it.”

“Well, you could have offered,” he said, too fast, the way he talks when he knows he’s wrong. “It’s for her. You act like it’s my hobby.”

“I’m not acting like anything. I’m asking why our daughter thinks I’m the reason she lost her horse.”

“I’m not doing this tonight, Heidi.” And he hung up. I sat on the edge of the bathtub with the phone in my lap and stared at the towel rack for a long time.

I want to tell you what I thought about, sitting there, because people always ask why I didn’t just fight him on it.

The answer is simple. You can’t sue a man for lessons he never had to buy, and I was not going to fight him through our daughter.

Our child support order covers what it covers. Riding lessons were never in it.

Corey chose them, and Corey could stop them, and nothing in any courthouse in Moore County was going to make him start again. I knew that without asking anybody.

And the other thing I knew was worse. If I told Addison the truth, I would be doing the exact same thing he did.

I would be standing her in the middle and making her pick. She loves her daddy. A ten-year-old should get to love her daddy without a ledger.

So I didn’t tell her. I lay awake doing math instead. Rent, the light bill, the truck insurance, groceries, her school clothes, the dentist.

Four hundred dollars was not sitting anywhere in that math. Not even close.

On Monday I worked seven to seven. On Tuesday I was off, and after I put Addison on the school bus I drove out to Mae Holloway’s stable, nine miles north of town on a caliche road that turns to soup when it rains, which out here is almost never.

Mae’s place sits on a quarter section of flat ground with nothing between it and the Oklahoma line but wind.

There is a red barn with twenty-two stalls, an outdoor arena with wooden rail fencing, a round pen, a hay barn, and a little white house with a porch that leans.

Mae was in the barn aisle when I pulled up, filling water buckets with a hose.

She is sixty-six, gray-haired, wiry as a fence post, and she has run that place by herself since her husband died eleven years ago. She has taught half the girls in Moore County to ride.

“You’re Addison’s mother,” she said, before I could introduce myself. She shut off the hose and wiped her hands on her jeans. “I wondered if you’d come out.”

“I’m Heidi,” I said. “I’m guessing you know why I’m here.”

“I know Corey’s September check never came, and he quit answering my calls.” She said it flat, no meanness in it.

“I’m sorry about that, honey. I like that little girl. She sits a horse better than kids who’ve been riding twice as long.”