Borrowed Horses (13 page)

Casual as could be, I picked an orange from the pyramid she was reconstructing with the meticulous slowness of those paid by the hour. “Scorching hot lately,” I said, trying to stall while I thought of tactics.

Brenda, speaking with the same slow care with which she arranged her fruit, said, “Before you get any further,” she said, “I think it’s only fair to tell you that I’m under strict orders not to reveal any names.”

“Brenda,” I said, picking up another orange, “I’m hurt. Really. I can’t believe you think that the only reason I’m talking to you is to find out that guy’s name.”

“No, of course not.” She smiled but didn’t look at me. “You have a deep and abiding interest in meteorology and wanted to compare notes on the day’s heat. You’re right. Scorching hot,” she glanced at me slyly, “like some checker we know?”

“If I were to agree to that remark,” I said mimicking the mock-serious tone she’d adopted, “I suppose said acquiescence would reach the ears of said anonymous someone, thus building on what is obviously an over-inflated ego.” I plucked another orange from the pile. “No, I reveal nothing.”

“Whatever, dude,” her quiet voice was light with restrained laughter.

“O.K., O.K.,” I said. “But, seriously, who is this new guy? I mean, what the hell? I’ve been shopping here for years, and you all take up allegiance against me? Take us, for example. You’ve known me for months, and your father’s known me since I was a kid shopping here with my parents. You guys are deserting me for some fly-by-night checker? I’m hurt, Brenda. Really hurt.”

Brenda shrugged. “Store loyalty, man.” She looked at me, then laughed softly with the air of a much older, more experienced woman resigned to the foibles of life and humanity. “You guys sure have a weird way of flirting.” Before I could object, she gave me a parting smile and pushed her plastic cart toward the Red Delicious.

I had six oranges in my sack—when was I going to eat six oranges? I grabbed a head of Romaine, and a six-pack of Newcastle. My luck with the bakery was no better. Arlene stonewalled me before I even had a chance to ask if they had any loaves of wheat still available. “No names,” she called to me as I walked up. “Otherwise, I’ll get you whatever you need.”

“Where’s the loyalty?” I asked. “Where’s the love? I’m like family to you people.”

“Tough love, darlin’,” Arlene said. “Can’t ask for more from a family than that.”

“Tough love’s supposed to prevent bad things from happening. You think this new guy … what’d you say his name was?”

Arlene only smiled. She held up a loaf of wheat and raised her eyebrows. I nodded. She put it through the slicer.

“You think he’s that bad?”

“Honey,” Arlene said, “he’d be the best thing in the world for you, and I’m still not going to tell you his name.”

I groaned. “That doesn’t make any sense. Besides, this isn’t about romance. This is a quest. You’ve got to help me win. We’re both women, right? We can’t let these guys beat us.”

“No dice.” She turned to a birthday cake she was preparing to decorate. “See you, Joannie.”

“Hey, not so loud. You at least haven’t told him my name, right? Right?”

Arlene didn’t answer. There was nothing left to do but pay. I hoisted my basket and resolutely made my way toward the checkout. He looked away and sighed as I reached the front of the line. “Not you again,” he said. “Don’t you work? I mean, really. Get a job.”

“Early shift,” I said.

He scanned my cheese and held it up. “Oregon Blue. Don’t you worry that this’ll make your breath stink?”

“It keeps the vampires away.”

Judging his face, I’d say he was baiting me, testing me, and for a moment, I thought he’d add another remark. I noticed that he hadn’t commented, for instance, on whether or not he liked cheese. Instead, he scanned the oranges.

“Hmm. Either you love fruit or you have a visitor who does.”

“Good work, detective,” I said.

“Which is it?”

“Just me and the oranges,” I said. I raised my chin and looked him in the eye. “No name tag today?”

“Not once I saw you in my line.” He met my gaze unflinchingly. “$24.97.”

I handed him a twenty and a five and his fingers brushed my palm as he placed the three pennies in my hand, resting lightly there. “Normally,” he said, “this is the part where I say come back and see us again.” His fingers hadn’t moved. “But with you, that seems totally unnecessary, so I’ll just say, ‘scram.’”

“Thanks. Very good business sense you have there.”

We were looking at each other a little too long in a store where everyone knew us. I let my hand drop. “See you tomorrow?” he said.

“Let’s leave that a mystery. Give our lives some suspense.”

He laughed and turned to smile for the next customer.

The waning moon rose in the twilight. Heat still radiated from the asphalt, though the air itself was cooling toward night. He hadn’t called me by name; the game was still on. I wanted to be angry with myself, to remember Dave and complications, but somehow the brush of fingertips on my skin pushed all other memories aside.

Saturday, the girls and I saddled up early. The still quiet of that peaceful morning imbued itself in us, and there was little other sound except the clink of stirrups against girth buckles.

Once astride, Dawn and Jenny chatted softly about their husbands, and I allowed Foxy to fall back. Russ had been complaining that Dawn and he never had pancakes on Saturday mornings anymore. Eyes flown wide, Jenny looked shocked that Dawn wasn’t at home making breakfast. “What’d you tell him?”

Dawn slumped back in the saddle like an old cowboy. “I told him his options. One, he could get his lazy ass out of bed earlier and we could have pancakes; two, he could fix his own damned breakfast; or three, he could have pancakes with me on Sunday.”

“What’d he say to that?”

“He whined a bit.” She leaned over and plucked a piece of wheat to stick between her teeth. “Men always whine.”

Jenny laughed. “Dave complains sometimes, too,” she admitted. “It’s weird. Sometimes he’s all supportive, saying maybe he should buy me a horse of my own so I wouldn’t have to lease Zip. Other times, he says I spend too much time at the barn. He hasn’t been like this since we first started dating. Back in high school, he’d barely let me out of his sight. He’d get so infuriated if I went off with my friends. So jealous. Like I was going to flirt with other guys when he wasn’t around.” She laughed at this. “My friends said he was too possessive—Daddy, too—but they never understood him.”

I wished the wind would blow their words far from me, but they seemed to float in the still air even longer than the dust we stirred. Nine months ago, he hadn’t wanted to let me out of his sight either. Again, I felt the pressure of his grip on my arm as we parted.

Jenny turned again to Dawn. “It’s like he’s jealous of the horses or something.”

Dawn nodded. “They all get jealous. You read the riding magazines, they’re all full of advice columns on how to make your husbands and kids feel better about your riding. I understand it, though. I’d be jealous, too, if I lost Russ every weekend to some hobby, and it isn’t exactly a cheap sport. If you’re not a rider, it’s tough to understand the time and money.”

The hooves made soft crunches in the gravel of the road. Foxy snorted, clearing the dust from his nostrils. The late August sun was growing quickly hotter.

“Dave did the funniest thing last night,” Jenny said. “There’s this guy, Rick, who’s been annoying him at work, and you know what Dave did?” Jenny waited only a minute, knowing full well we wouldn’t guess. “Dave stole Rick’s hat and burned it in our kitchen sink.” She laughed at her own story.

“Uh oh,” Dawn said. “A man’s lucky hat is a sacred thing.”

“I bet Rick’s wondering where on Earth he lost it. Dave looked pretty pleased with himself—at least while it was burning. We laughed and laughed.”

My mind wandered. As a kid riding the bus, I used to dream of the day I would finally own a horse. I’d lean against the square windows each school day morning, watching the green hills pass outside, imagining galloping across them, my horse’s stride keeping pace with the yellow bus and jumping the wide creeks in amazing bounds. Now, riding my horse, I watched the hills around me and thought of the anonymous checker and imagined walking these fields hand-in-hand with him. We strolled along slowly, him stopping to pick a wild poppy. He’d smile quickly and say something ironic and witty as he slid the flower behind my ear. I’d lean in and rest my forehead against his tattoo, pressing the length of my body to his.

Dawn turned to me. “You picked out a man for yourself yet?”

“Picked out?” I said. “What? Like found one on the shelf at the man store?”

Dawn turned to Jenny. “She always denies it, but Joannie’s got her pick. Guys always love her.
Why
they do beats the shit out of me, but they do. And she just walks away like she couldn’t give a damn about any of them.”

“You two have been bitching all morning about your men,” I pointed out, “and now I’m supposed to feel like my life is incomplete without a guy of my own?”

Dawn rolled her eyes. “You sound like a fucking feminist.”

“That’s rich coming from you, Miss ‘Fix-Your-Own-Damned-Pancakes.’”

Jenny looked from Dawn to me, clearly concerned.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “Dawn and I always talk like this. In a previous life, we were married to each other. It’s all love.”

“Which brings us back to the subject at hand, Joannie. What’s the fucking story? I want Russ and I to be able to go on a double date with you before we’re all too old to walk unassisted.”

“Yeah, all right,” I admitted, just to get her off my back. “There is one guy who looks kind of interesting.”

Dawn pulled Sunny to a dead stop. “Holy shit.” She stared at me for a moment, jaw dropped. “Jenny, this is a fucking first. I have been asking Joannie about men since I first met her, and this is the first time she’s so much as mentioned a fleeting interest.”

“Don’t get too excited,” I said. “I don’t even know his name.”

“Tell me what you do know.”

“Tall, dark, handsome. Sarcastic, funny. That’s all I know.” I didn’t mention the sideburns, tattoos, or Clint Eastwood.

“Where’d you meet?”

“In the express lane. He works at Rosauer’s.”

She paused, considering. “You should ask him out for coffee.”

“I don’t even know if he drinks coffee.”

“He lives in
Idaho
. Of course he drinks
coffee
. You’re avoiding the point, Joannie.”

“What if I don’t want to ask him out?”

Jenny, silent and perplexed by our conversation so far, asked, “You want him to ask you out?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know that I want a boyfriend.”

Dawn groaned. “Always the same thing from you. I don’t need a boyfriend, I don’t need a boyfriend.” Her voice, mimicking me, was high and false. “No one
needs
a boyfriend. You have one because they’re fun, if infuriating, and because you can’t spend all your life at work or the barn.”

“Sure I can,” I said. “It’s worked well so far.”

Again, Dawn rolled her eyes. We’d had this talk nearly once a month as long as we’d known one another. “You said yourself that this guy looks interesting.”

I didn’t answer. The truth was, I didn’t know what to answer. Dave’s arms around me had felt so warm and natural. Foxy couldn’t fill that absence.

Jenny and Dawn had forgotten me, talking about some romantic comedy my story had recalled. I was happy to fade quietly into their wake, absorbing the sunshine. I was getting strong again—strong in a way I hadn’t been in the dark of El Mercado’s.

Back at the barn, I shoveled up buckets of manure for my mother’s garden, turning down Jenny and Dawn’s offers to help. I wanted to be alone, and odd as it may sound, I relished this work. The sun beat down across my back, but my back was strong and equal to it. I felt the skin warm against the damp cotton of my shirt, my back contoured by the flex of muscle as I shoveled. In this world, nothing was wasted. It could be as true for me: I regretted nothing. Dave was a shitty experience but a necessary one. I’d learned, grown. “Black gold,” my mother called her compost. Shit and refuse fertilized. Connie’s brother had died for the other black gold over in Iraq. His body was composting a small square of land on the other side of the country in the silent graves at Arlington. Everything seemed connected, light fractured by a prism. Soldier Bill grazed in the next pasture, strong and black in the golden sunlight. Behind him, the Bitterroot Range stood immovably blue and distant at the edge of the horizon, a natural border to the sky.