The Stalls I Mucked So She Could Ride

“She told me her daddy said I was the reason she had to quit.” I hadn’t meant to say it.

It just came out of me, standing in the cool of that barn with the smell of hay and horse all around.

Mae was quiet for a minute. A horse down the aisle stamped and blew. Then she said, “Well. Is that true?”

“No, ma’am. Nobody ever asked me. But I can’t pay four hundred a month either. I came out here to ask if there’s another way. I’ll do anything you need doing.”

She looked at me the way I imagine she looks at a horse she is thinking of buying. Up and down, slow, from my work shoes to my face.

“You ever cleaned a stall?” she asked.

“I grew up on my granddad’s place outside Stratford,” I said. “He ran about forty cows and a couple of saddle horses. I know which end of a pitchfork goes down.”

That made her laugh, one short bark. “The Pruitt boy who did my Saturday stalls quit two weeks ago to work at the feedlot,” she said.

“I was paying him fifteen dollars an hour,” she went on. “Twenty-two stalls, strip the wet spots, haul it all out to the pile, rebed with fresh straw, scrub water buckets, rake the arena. Six hours if you don’t dawdle.”

I did the math in my head before she did. Six hours, fifteen dollars, four and a third Saturdays in a month. Just under four hundred dollars.

“That’s about what her lessons cost,” I said.

“That’s about what her lessons cost,” she agreed. “Be here at six on Saturday. I start feeding at five-thirty, and I want the stalls empty by the time the first lesson kids show up.”

“What about the Saturdays she’s at her daddy’s?”

“Then you’ll pick her up from her daddy’s,” Mae said, like it was the simplest thing in the world. “Unless he’s got some reason she can’t come ride for free.”

I traded my weekend rotation at the home so I’d work Fridays and Sundays instead.

When the scheduler asked why, I told her I had a new Saturday job, and it paid better than the old one.

That Thursday was Corey’s evening with Addison. When he brought her back I met him at the door and said, very quietly, “She’s riding again Saturday. Mae and I worked something out. You don’t owe anything.”

He stood there on my step with his hands in his jacket pockets and looked at me like I had spoken to him in another language. “Worked out what?” he said.

“It’s handled, Corey.” And I let him stand there with it. He opened his mouth like he was going to ask, and then he didn’t, and then he went back to his truck.

I told Addison that night while I was braiding her hair. “You’re going back to Miss Mae’s on Saturday,” I said. “Biscuit’s been waiting on you.”

She spun around so fast she pulled half the braid out of my fingers. “Did Daddy pay?”

“Miss Mae and I worked something out,” I said again. I had decided those were the only words I was going to use.

I would not lie to her, and I would not tell on her father.

She hugged me. Then she pulled back and looked at me with her eyebrows pinched together, the same look Corey gets, and I could see her trying to fit it in with what her daddy had told her.