The Horse I Sold So She Could Hear

Mandy

Mandy came on Thursday, after the bank closed. She was still in her work clothes, slacks and a blouse, and she walked straight out to where I was weeding the garden by the pasture fence and stood on the grass in her good shoes.

“I didn’t know,” she said. “Steph, I swear to you, I didn’t know they told you no.”

“I didn’t figure you did,” I said.

“I should have,” she said. “I knew the surgery was coming. I knew what Matt’s insurance was, because I’ve seen enough of those plans come across my desk. I knew what a deductible was. I just didn’t put it together. I was so wrapped up in that house.”

She crouched down in the grass beside me, in those slacks, and pulled a weed, which I had never once seen my sister do in her life.

“I went out to see Mom and Dad on Monday,” she said. “I offered to give some of it back. Dad wouldn’t take it. He said it was given, and he doesn’t take back what he gives.”

“That sounds like him.”

“So I want to do something else,” she said. “The speech therapy. The auditory-verbal one in Enid. I called them. I know your insurance only covers twenty visits a year, and Karen told you she needs to go every week.”

I hadn’t told Mandy that. She’d done her homework. Of course she had.

“I want to pay for the rest of the first year,” she said. “Every visit the insurance won’t. It’s about forty-eight hundred. I’ve already talked to Jake. It’s done. I’m not asking you, I’m telling you, because if I ask you, you’ll say no, because you’re you.”

I sat back on my heels and looked at her. My little sister, with dirt on her good slacks.

“You don’t have to fix this,” I said.

“I know I don’t,” she said. “I want to be the aunt who did, instead of the aunt who got a house.”

I let her. I want that said too. It’s not easy for me to let people do things, but I let her, because it was for Harper, and because I could see that she needed to do it as much as Harper needed it done.