The Tow Girl and the Icy Ditch

Brandon

Brandon called my cell about ten minutes later. I almost didn’t answer. We don’t talk much, and when we do, it’s about a piece of mail that went to the wrong address.

“Jess,” he said. “Tiff called me. She said you got them out. All four.”

“All four,” I said. “Earl was there. Earl did the horses. I did the cables.”

There was a long breath on the other end. He was on a job site up by Emporia, two hours north, and I could hear a generator running behind him.

“I told her to call you first,” he said. “I told her you were the only one who’d come in twenty minutes.”

“She didn’t call me,” I said. “Earl did.”

“I know,” he said. “She told me. She told me some other things too.” He was quiet for a second.

Then he said, “I should have heard what she’s been saying about you at those shows. I should have stopped it. I didn’t, and I’m sorry.”

Brandon was never a cruel man. He was a man who didn’t notice things until they were in front of him, and then he did the decent thing, mostly.

It was a lot of the reason we split. It was also the reason I never hated him.

“You should tell her the horses are good,” I said. “Not cute. Good. She needs to hear it from you.”

He was quiet again. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I should.”

What it cost her

I want to be fair here. Tiffany didn’t get off free, and she’d tell you that herself now.

She missed the winter show in Oklahoma that weekend, the one she’d been aiming at since November.

Dwight found a strained tendon on the bay mare and some swelling on the gelding’s hock, and he wanted both of them on stall rest for three weeks. That ended her winter points run.

Her trailer went to a body shop in Parsons for the crease in the skin, and the bill was a little over two thousand dollars.

Her insurance covered part of it. She paid the rest, along with Dwight’s farm call and two follow-up visits, out of her own pocket.

And she had to go back to every one of those shows and stand at the same concession stands with the same women and be the one who’d been wrong.

Marlys told it. Of course Marlys told it. Everybody did. It was the story of the winter.

People said she handled it well. They said when somebody brought up the tow girl, she’d say, “No, she’s a wrecker operator, and she got my horses out on ice,” and then change the subject. That takes something. I don’t know if I’d have had it.