Borrowed Horses (12 page)

“Have a good day,” he said, nodding to me.

I nodded back and picked up my groceries, thinking about his cool, silky shock of hair and how it must feel against skin.

Even after all the beers and margaritas at El Mercados, I’d woken feeling miraculously good, no trace of headaches or queasiness. Now, I felt even better, like something that had been washed in pure water and dried in sunlight and air.

The lightness carried me home. Inside, the red flash of my answering machine blinked a warning I should have known to heed. Dave’s voice rose at the press of a button. “Joannie.”

He’d found me.

That night, I had my recurring dream. Mouse and I were in the Pod together, cruising around as we so often did in high school. It was a soft June night, and the Milky Way shone in all its glory despite my headlights. Mouse was reciting astronomical facts, as she often had. “The earth is, on average, 93.2 million miles from the sun,” she said. “Do you think we’ll ever reach the stars?”

The question hung in the car, as it did in every time. Knowing what was coming next, I tried to warn Mouse, but the truck hit before the words could form. We spun a disrupted orbit around the semi’s fender. I, the center of the vortex, gripped the wheel and remained still, but at the edge of our circle, Mouse flew. Her white dress flapped around her. I sat, watching, screaming to her, and she silently sailed away from me toward the too-hard earth.

I woke in a sweat and rose from bed, mad at myself for still being shaken by the same relentless vision.

Dawn was cleaning stalls and I was giving Foxy a post-ride rub-down when Jenny walked in. “Hey, strangers!” she chirped, all pertness and smiles. We hadn’t seen her all week.

“Hey, yourself,” Dawn said and laid another shovelful of manure on top of the pile in her wheelbarrow.

I nodded, brushing the sheen into Foxy’s smooth, summer coat.

“Dave totally loves you guys,” Jenny said. I cringed. Foxy bent his long neck to look at me, as if he knew the whole story.

“We’ll have to do it again sometime,” Dawn said.

Jenny stood in the middle of the aisle, apparently in no hurry. “We’d love that. Dave can’t stop talking about you two. He said you were sassy, Dawn, and he called Joannie fascinating.”

Dawn’s hoot of laughter filled the barn. “Jesus, Joannie—even drunk you manage to get ’em. Watch out, Jenny.”

I would have given Dawn a dirty look if she was in eye-shot, but she’d ducked into another stall. Instead, I closed my eyes and tried to look persecuted.

Jenny only laughed. “I’m not worried.”

My mind wandered outside, to the hills, and then into town, into Rosauer’s, to the man with no name. He was a challenge, that one. Worse, he had everyone in on the joke, maintaining the secret of his identity. Old reliable Dale wouldn’t tell me the guy’s name even when I offered to double my usual order of brats, and Alice openly laughed at my casual attempts to find out as she sliced the Swiss.

A snort of hot breath on my thigh broke me from my thoughts. Foxy’s clear, brown eye was on me, looking for the cause of the carrot delay. He was expectant and impatient as Dave on the answering machine, saying only my name and waiting for me to give whatever he asked. As if that’s all I was good for: filling his needs. “What makes you think you deserve carrots?” I muttered.

Dawn’s head darted out of the stall, the keen hearing she’d relied on when hunting caught my every word. “Don’t tell me Foxy acted up?”

“Never,” I said, reaching for the bag.

Once in my truck, the emptiness of the passenger seat struck me with renewed force, and I drove to my parents’ house to check in on my mother. She was reading the paper when I walked in; Dad was nowhere in sight.

“Oh, good,” Mom said, not looking up as she finished the article, “you saved me a trip. I was going to have Dad swing me by tomorrow to bring you these.” She nudged a brown paper bag on the coffee table, brimming with the first of her zucchini, tomatoes, and summer squash.

“You sneaking Miracle Grow on these?” The zucchini were as big as my forearm.

“That’s all organic.” She looked up from the paper and smiled. “Great compost this year. Speaking of which, can you bring some more manure when you get a chance?”

“Sure.” I was my parents’ horse shit connection.

Pilate walked up and pushed his head under my hand, asking for love. I settled down on the braided rug and stroked the silk of his ears. Pilate was never a licker, but on rare occasions he offered a tiny kiss, his tongue barely touching the skin and then disappearing. He gave me one now.

“Watch out, Mom. I’m going to steal Pilate and take him home with me.”

“And violate your apartment’s no pets policy?” She smirked, an expression I recognized as my own. The left corner of her mouth lifted and creased, and her eyes danced. We were good smirkers.

“They’ll never know, will they, Pilate?” He looked at me with steady, quiet earnestness. “Where’s Dad anyway?”

“Oh, wandering somewhere.” She didn’t look at me.

“Without Pilate?”

“Your dad’s walks are a little long for Pilate now.”

Pilate, the dog who once went on Mom’s walks, Dad’s walks, and any other walks offered. Pilate, the inexhaustible. Now, he collapsed on the rug next to me, rolling halfway onto his back, his paw lolling lazily in the air as I rubbed his chest. I felt coming loneliness lapping at me even here: Mom in her chair with vegetables from the garden she could no longer tend, Foxy and Pilate dying in increments.

Mom and I made falafel while we waited for Dad. I chopped tomatoes and mixed cilantro yogurt, wondering if Not-Jed liked cilantro, wondering if he ever held it to his nose as I did now, to inhale its pungent freshness, or if he only knew the number to punch into the cash register. It was an important question.

Dave called me at work Monday. After months of carefully constructed privacy, he had taken the home and work numbers listed on the emergency card outside Foxy’s stall—a card I’d never before seen as a vulnerability.

He wanted lunch. His voice was upbeat and hopeful, like there was nothing strange in this. “No,” I whispered into the all too public phone. Cheryl kept stealing glances at me.

He paused and the edge of urgency sharpened his voice, “You said, ‘I regret nothing.’ I can’t stop thinking about that, about the way you looked at me when you said it. I know what that look meant, Joannie.” He waited for a response I wouldn’t give. “Joan, I need you in my life. And you need me. You don’t regret our time together, and neither do I.”

“Having no regrets doesn’t mean I’m going to make the same mistakes twice.” I let that sink in. “Having no regrets also means I don’t regret ending it with you.”

That stopped him for a moment, but he rallied. “Listen, I understand what we did was wrong. Maybe we can’t be all we were before, but I need you as a friend at least. Please, Joannie. Don’t deny me this. Don’t deny me a chance to redeem myself.”

The words were a trap; there could be no friendship. If I slipped out of Imaging on that slow afternoon, whose foot would be the first to touch the other’s in the darkness under the table?

Cheryl, making a pretense of filing old paperwork, was listening to every word. She was never so busy as when there was a phone conversation she could eavesdrop on.

“I can’t take personal calls here.” I let the phone drop heavy into the receiver, wanting him to understand the finality of that conversation.

Cheryl gave me a conspiratorial smile. “He sounded cute.” She winked a heavily made-up eye.

“Not my type.”

Apparently hoping to draw her into this conversation, Cheryl turned to Doreen, the other receptionist in Imaging, but Doreen continued to stare, bored, out the door. Cheryl turned her red smile on me again. “Well it sure sounds like he thinks you’re his type.”

“He’s wrong.”

Doreen stood up. “I’m going for a cigarette.”

“Those things will kill you,” Cheryl chirped after her. Cheryl waited until Doreen was not quite out of hearing and stage-whispered, “I hate to see a young girl like that throwing her looks away.” Cheryl took a lot of care in this regard, with thickly applied make-up and Coke can curls. “Those cigarettes will turn her skin grey—I’ve seen it happen before—makes them look like ashtrays.”

I shrugged, “She’s fine.”

Cheryl pursed her red lips a moment. “Are you, a medical professional, honestly telling me that you think that she’s not hurting herself smoking those cancer sticks?” She smiled again, to show that she wasn’t serious, but I could already imagine how she’d twist my words.

I attempted some triage. “Well, obviously, smoking isn’t good for you, but she’s young and smart, and I’m sure she’ll quit when she’s ready.” Even as the words floated from my mouth, I could see them swirling like smoke rings, bending into Cheryl’s words. She’d lean toward Doreen like a co-conspirator.
You know Joan says that, if you’re smart, you’ll stop smoking
. I never seemed to be able to find my feet when talking to Cheryl. I decided to escape doing any further damage. “There’s a new article on head trauma imaging I want to check out. I’ll see you later.”

Again, she smiled that red grin, “Don’t wait for tall, dark, and handsome to call again before you come back up here. You’ll go stir-crazy in that room all by yourself, and you know how I enjoy our little visits.” I turned away before she finished, but her words followed me down the hall. “And don’t worry—I won’t mention that you’re getting personal calls at work. It’s hard enough to find a man once you reach a certain age. That old biological clock, huh? Our looks can’t last forever.”

A Silence

B
renda was stocking produce. She was Dale the butcher’s daughter and had inherited his sloping shoulders, but she wore them differently. On him, they looked resigned; on her, jaded, set low by the tremendous weight of a world designed by adults. Her hair, dyed black to contrast her pale skin and the burgundy of her lipstick, fell in backward-bending spikes, as if they too were tired of fighting gravity and other inexplicable forces. Brenda was a shy girl, for all her bold appearance, and I had always liked her.

I tore off a plastic sack and sidled up to her, thinking I had perhaps found the perfect co-conspirator. Brenda, a high school student, walked the same halls I once walked. We had an understanding.