The Tow Girl and the Icy Ditch

What she said to me with the cables humming

About twenty minutes in, she spoke again. I had just stopped to let the trailer settle, and the gelding had gone quiet, and in the quiet her voice was very small.

“I know he didn’t buy you the truck,” she said.

I kept my eyes on the trailer. “Okay,” I said.

“He talks about your shop,” she said. “Your business. He says you run it better than he could run anything. He says your note’s paid on the fifth every month and you’ve never missed one. He says it like he’s proud of you.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything. I fed the lever another inch.

“Nobody talks about my horses like that,” she said. “Not him. Not anybody. They say it’s a hobby. They say it’s cute. I’ve been running barrels since I was nine, and I train every one of them, and they call it cute.”

I understood her then. It didn’t make what she’d done right, telling people Brandon set me up, laughing at me in front of people at every show for three years.

But it made it make sense. She’d wanted somebody to say about her what he said about me.

“They’re not cute,” I said. “That palomino’s the best-broke horse I’ve seen at Fort Scott in five years. I’ve watched him run.”

She didn’t answer. I heard her breathe out, a long shaky breath that turned to fog in front of her.

Over center

The hardest part came at about thirty-five minutes. The trailer had come up most of the way.

The low wheels were clear of the deep snow, and the high wheels were carrying weight again. It was close to balance, and that’s the moment everything wants to go wrong.

I could feel it in the lever. The main winch was getting easier, which meant gravity was starting to help.

That’s when you stop pulling and start holding. If I’d kept feeding the main line, the trailer would have come over and dropped.

So I switched hands. I eased off the main and started letting the holding line out, an inch at a time, so the trailer came down onto its wheels slow, like setting a full coffee cup on a table.

“Come on,” I said, under my breath. “Come on, now. Just sit down.”

Behind me, Tiffany said something that sounded like please.

The low wheels found solid ground. The whole trailer settled with a long sigh of leaf springs and a creak of the frame, and it rocked once, twice, and then it stopped.

I held the second line until there was no motion left at all.

Then I locked both winches and climbed down into the ditch.