The Stalls I Mucked So She Could Ride

I didn’t need to. I could feel them looking at me, and it was a different kind of looking than before.

Kim came into the barn before she left. “Heidi, I owe you an apology,” she said. “I believed what I heard.”

The next Saturday she left a thermos of coffee on the tack room shelf without a word.

Addison didn’t speak on the drive home. Not one word for nine miles of caliche and six miles of highway.

She sat with her helmet in her lap and turned it around and around by the strap, the way she had that day in September.

When we pulled into the carport she didn’t get out. She sat there, and then she said, very quietly, “Mama, did Daddy tell me a lie?”

This is the part I have thought about most since. I could have told her everything. I had every right to.

I had earned it, stall by stall. And it would have felt so good for about one minute.

“Baby, your daddy loves you more than anything,” I said.

“Whatever he said, you’re going to have to ask him about him. I’ll only tell you about me. I’m the one who signed up for the stalls. I’d do it again tomorrow.”

She looked at me for a long time. Then she leaned across the seat and put her arms around my neck and held on, and I sat there in the carport with the engine ticking and my daughter’s face in my collar, and I let myself cry for the first time since September.

On my next Saturday with her she was up before I was. I came into the kitchen at a quarter to five and she was sitting at the table in her jeans and her boots, with a pair of my old work gloves on, three sizes too big, flapping at the fingertips.

“I’m coming to help,” she said. “Before my lesson.”

“It’s cold out there, Addie. And it’s dark.”

“You do it,” she said. And that was the end of that discussion.

She lasted about four stalls before her arms gave out, but she lasted.

She picked out piles with the little manure fork Mae found for her, and she filled water buckets, and she sang to the horses, mostly songs from the radio with the words wrong.

Christmas was Corey’s this year. It’s every other year in the order, and the even years he gets the first half, so he picked Addison up from school the Friday the break started and had her through the twenty-eighth.

I was the one who drove her to his place that afternoon, with her bag and her presents in the back seat.

She had wrapped one present herself and wouldn’t let me see it, a flat package done up in the funny pages and too much tape.

When I pulled into his drive she sat for a second with her hand on the door handle.

Then she reached over and hugged me harder than she usually does, a real squeeze, the kind that means something.

“I have something to tell Daddy,” she said into my shoulder.

“What is it, baby?”

“It’s for him,” she said. And she got out and ran up his steps with the funny paper package under her arm, and Corey opened the door and swung her up, and I backed out and went home to my empty house.