The Saddle Left Half Finished

That is a wrong I did to her in public. I had never put it right in public.

The rest came to me sideways, the way everything does here. She had taken a job at an animal clinic in Billings. She had never taken that scholarship back. I had cost her that, too.

In the fall of 2022 I read in the Roundup paper that she had married a lineman named Anson. The notice ran two weeks after the wedding. I read it three times at the kitchen table.

I did not go. Nobody had invited me, and why would they?

The next November, in the middle of a snowstorm, Marit leaned on the counter at the Cenex while she rang up my coffee.

“Thora,” she said, in the careful voice of a woman setting down something hot, “I thought you ought to hear it from me. Hadley had a baby girl. Back in February.”

Nine months old, and I had heard it from a gas station clerk.

“Does she have a name?” I asked.

“Tansy,” said Marit.

I paid for my coffee. I drove home and sat in the truck in the driveway with the engine off until my hands went numb.

Did I pick up the phone? I picked it up a hundred times. I wrote three letters and burned all three in the stove.

Every time I got as far as the last digit, I heard myself say, “You have nothing in you for the real work,” in that smooth voice. I could not stand to be the thing that did that to her twice.

That was the excuse. The reason was uglier. I was proud. I was my father’s daughter, and apologizing felt like admitting that every hard thing I had done in my life was a mistake.

The shop went the way you would guess. I stopped taking custom orders, because I could not hold a swivel knife long enough to carve and did not want the work anyway.

I did repairs. Stirrup leathers, cinches, a bridle with a broken bit loop, boots for the fellows at the veterans hall, a collar for the pastor’s retriever.

The hands got worse. A doctor in Lewistown said arthritis and age. I think it was both of those and something he had no word for.

Through all of it, Dewitt was at the next bench.

He is seventy-four, with one good eye and a bad hip and a voice like gravel in a coffee can. He came to Everett in 1981 with a bag of tools and a drinking problem, and Everett talked him out of the drink over about five years of saying nothing.

He lives in the two rooms over the feed store directly across Main Street. He comes in Tuesdays and Thursdays for coffee and half of whatever the repairs take in. He sits at the bench Everett died at, which nobody else will use.