The Stalls I Mucked So She Could Ride

It didn’t fit, so she set it aside. Kids do that.

That first Saturday I was up at a quarter to five. It was the end of September, and it was still black dark when we drove out, with the wind already blowing the way it always blows up here.

Addison slept against the truck door with her helmet on her lap.

I let her nap in the tack room on an old army cot Mae kept there, under a horse blanket that smelled like saddle soap.

Then I took a pitchfork off the wall, a wheelbarrow from the aisle, and started at stall number one.

I am not going to pretend it came back to me easy. My granddad’s barn was twenty years and six stalls ago.

By stall five my shoulders burned. By stall ten my lower back had an opinion about every forkful. By stall fifteen I had stopped thinking at all.

You get a rhythm, though. Pick out the piles, dig out the wet spot down to the dirt, toss the clean straw up against the walls, haul the dirty load out to the pile behind the hay barn.

Dump it, walk back, do it again. Rebed with fresh straw, fluff it with the fork, fill the bucket.

At a quarter till nine Addison came out of the tack room in her boots and helmet, rubbing her eyes, and saw me in the barn aisle with the wheelbarrow. She stopped walking.

“Why are you doing that?” she asked. “Mama, why are you cleaning?”

“Because I’m helping Miss Mae on Saturdays now,” I said, and I leaned on the fork like it was the most normal thing in the world.

“Go get Biscuit. He’s been watching the door for you.”

She went. But she turned around twice on the way down the aisle to look at me, and I knew she had questions she didn’t know how to ask yet.

That fall turned into a routine. On my weekends Addison rode along with me in the dark.

On Corey’s weekends I pulled up at his place at eight-thirty, and he walked her out to the truck in his socks with his coffee, and neither of us said anything about it.

He never asked what the arrangement was. I think he knew, or half knew, and didn’t want to hear it out loud.

Twice I saw him look at my boots by the passenger door, and twice he looked away.

And Addison, I’m sorry to say, stayed a little cool with me through most of that fall.

Not mean. Just careful, like she was holding something against me she couldn’t put a name to. Her daddy had told her a story, and she still believed it.

“Daddy says you have money for your nails,” she said to me once in October, out of nowhere, while we were eating supper.

I looked down at my hands. I have not had my nails done since my sister’s wedding in 2019.

“Does he,” I said, and passed her the green beans. I wanted to say a hundred things. I said none of them.

The stable on a Saturday morning is its own little town.

By nine there are six or seven trucks parked along the fence, and the parents stand at the arena rail with their travel mugs and talk while the kids ride.