Chapter 14 #2
She straightens. She wipes her face with the heel of her hand, smearing barn dust, not caring. Then she recovers, fast, stepping off the feeling and back onto solid ground before it can pull her under.
"Okay." She sniffs hard. "Okay. She needs her feet done, that back left's been long for months, I can see it from here.
And she's underweight, whatever your fancy vet says, I'll put it back on her.
And she's mine. You understand me? Not a loaner.
Not a thing you let me use. You found her, fine, you spent your dirty money, fine, but she's mine now, in writing if I have to redline you again. "
"She's yours." I can't leave it there. "She always was. I just paid the shipping."
That reaches her. She has to look back at the horse to deal with it.
"You know normal husbands buy flowers," she says, to the mare, not to me. "A necklace. A bad poem. You went and found a twenty-year-old horse on a kill list in another county."
"Flowers die."
"That's the most you thing you've ever said." She scrubs at her eyes again, half a laugh in it now. "Most men buy a young horse to show off. You bought an old one nobody else would feed. Of course you did. You probably ran the numbers on her teeth."
"The vet says she's got good years left in her.
I checked." I don't say it as a joke. That's what makes her laugh for real, and the laugh is worth more than anything I've ever bought.
Provision is the only language I've ever been good at.
She's the first person who heard the wanting in it instead of the price tag, and it knocks the wind out of me worse than it does her.
She busies her hands instead. She pulls the box of her father's tack close and goes through it, finding the mare's old halter, the worn one, soft as cloth from use.
To get at a hackamore underneath she lifts out one of the trophies, the big sterling cup, the one Lev wants to melt down to its weight. She sets it on the rail.
The cup won't stand level on the rail. She taps the base flat with her palm, twice, the way you'd settle a fence post, and it tips back off plumb the second she lets go.
The wood under the silver is paler than the rest, a replacement.
She mutters that her dad wasted sixty dollars rebasing a trophy that was fine, props it against the wall so it'll quit falling, then goes back to the halter.
I watch her do it. I think nothing of it.
It's a cup with a bad base and a daughter who can't throw out a single thing the man touched.
"There's something I have to tell you," I say, before I can talk myself out of it.
"The broker who had her. When my man went to buy her, he said there'd been someone else asking after Calloway stock.
Recently. By name. Your father's brand, your father's bloodlines, somebody putting out feelers for what came off that ranch when it sold down. "
She goes still over the halter. "Who?"
"He didn't have a name. People in that trade don't keep them, it's the whole appeal.
" I watch her face, because her face is where the real information always is.
"It's probably nothing. Old stock from a dispersal sale gets picked over by everyone with a trailer.
But you sold a lot of good horses cheap in a bad year, somebody is walking the same list I walked, and I don't like a coincidence I didn't arrange. "
"You think someone's looking for Daddy's horses."
"I think someone was looking for one of them and found me first." I straighten off the rail. "I bought every Calloway animal I could find. Tell me if that sounds insane."
She looks at me a long moment, the mare's breath stirring her hair.
"It sounds like you can't stop buying things you're scared of losing," she says. "I'd find it funny, if I weren't one of them."
It isn't a no. I notice that. From Nora, the absence of a no is a country I could live in.
She turns back to the horse, gets the soft old halter on, telling the mare she's a fat lazy disgrace and the prettiest girl in California in the same breath. The mare drops her head into it like she's been waiting fourteen months to hear that exact voice say that exact nothing.
I came into this marriage to keep an asset.
Now I'm in a barn I had cleaned for a horse I'll never ride, watching my wife come back to life over an animal I bought off a kill truck and hid like a crime, for nothing I could ever get back.
The horse was the right call. The mistake is that I've stopped being able to tell where the long game ends and the truth starts.
I keep calling it strategy because I learned the other word too young, in a place that made me bleed for it, and I never learned to say it without flinching.
"Isaak." She doesn't turn around. She's got her cheek against the mare's. "Thank you. I know you didn't want me to say it. I'm saying it anyway. You don't get everything your way just because you own the barn."
"You're welcome." It comes out rougher than I mean.
"Now get out. We're working." She finally looks back at me, eyes still wet but quiet now, her mouth gone gentle, nothing held back in her face at all, which scares me worse than her fury ever has.
"And send Yuri down with the good grain, not the maintenance pellets.
She's earned the good grain. She came all the way home. "
I go. At the door I stop, because I can't help it. The barn with the two of them in it's warm, the rest of the property isn't, and the cold is waiting for me up the path with a phone full of men who need deciding about.
She's already forgotten I'm there, running a hand down the mare's bad leg, frowning at it, a horsewoman at work.
The morning light has finally climbed the barn wall and laid itself across both of them, the gray horse beside the woman who used to be a girl in a round pen.
For one second the whole machinery of my life goes quiet, and I let it.
Then I take out my phone to go ruin somebody's morning, because the job doesn't wait.
But I send Yuri down with the good grain first.