5. Mandy
Mandy
She woke into pain.
Her bitten thumb throbbed beneath the bandage. Her lower back had opinions. A place above her hipbone had joined the complaint overnight. Then everywhere.
The window was the color of weak tea.
Late.
She had not slept the thin listening half-sleep she had kept for a year. She had gone all the way down in a stranger’s spare room behind a door that locked.
Her body had accepted the locked room before her mind did.
It frightened her.
Sitting up was a small civil war. Standing was a larger one.
The slip was on the chair where she had left it. She looked at it for a long time, like a remnant from a long-ago time.
Nothing else in the room was hers. She pulled on another shirt of his.
Three steps into the hall and her knees told her exactly what they thought of her. She used the wall.
The brown hat she’d taken off the hook the day before was on the back of a kitchen chair where she’d hung it, brim down, which her grandmother had told her once was unlucky. She fixed it without thinking.
The kitchen smelled of coffee that had been there a while, and it was empty. He’d left at five.
Of course he had.
The clock above the stove said seven-twenty. She had never in her life slept until seven-twenty without three people knocking.
A mug sat at her place, apparently left there after Andrew used it. The mug still smelled faintly of his coffee. She filled it slowly with her left hand.
The coffee was bitter and strong, and she drank it standing up because she was afraid that if she sat down, she wouldn’t get up again.
She made it down the back step in his boots on the second try. The yard was lined with hard snow, and the light was the thin, mean Colorado-morning kind that made everything look bruised. The barn door was already pulled back the width of a man’s shoulders.
No sign of anyone, which she was grateful for. An audience would have killed her.
Vinegar took one look at her over the gate and laid his ears back.
She frowned back at him.
“Don’t,” she said. “I am not in the mood.”
He showed her his teeth.
She showed him her bandage, which was his fault.
“You and me are going to come to terms,” she said. “Behave.”
She moved him into the empty stall next door, the trick she had worked out yesterday by accident and lived to remember, and he went without much fuss, which she chose to take as progress.
She mucked his stall and forked the fresh hay and broke the ice on his trough and tried not to think about how slow her hands were and how much she wanted to lie down on the clean hay and weep.
A truck came up the lane.
Her body went cold before her mind supplied the reason: the car at the pass, the service button, the lit pin that might have gone up before the battery died.
Here.
She kept her head down and worked because lifting it would make the arrival real.
The door slammed twice—the first time it stuck, she would learn later.
Boots on gravel.
A pause at the open barn door, a body taking the measure of the dark inside before it came in.
Then a voice that was unmistakably someone’s sister.
“Well. Christ on a cracker, Andy.”
The ice went out of her so fast it left her dizzy. Mandy lifted her head.
A woman stood in the doorway in a barn coat, ranch jeans, and scarred work boots. Mid-forties. Hair pulled back in a working knot.
A face that knew what it knew.
“The little princess,” she said. “You going to make it to lunch?”
“Yes.”
The woman considered her.
“Hm,” she said. “We’ll see.”
She crossed the aisle in four strides and held out a hand.
“Mary Jo Stevens. I run the office in town. My brother is a horse’s ass.”
“Mandy.”
“Mandy what?”
“Mandy is what I’m going by.”
Mary Jo smiled.
“Fair enough.”
She looked down at Mandy’s outstretched hand, which Mandy had remembered too late was a disaster, and her face did one more thing Mandy could not read.
“Put down the fork.”
“I’m not done.”
“I can see that. Put down the fork.”
“I have seven stalls left.”
“I can count, sweetheart. Put down the fork.”
Mandy held the fork.
It was a small, ridiculous mutiny. Mary Jo waited her out with the same patience Walt had used at the rail yesterday.
The fork was heavier than it had been a minute ago.
Her hand was wet inside the bandage.
She wanted to cry.
She wanted Mary Jo to leave so she could finish.
She wanted Mary Jo to be her mother, which was a thought she was going to have to murder before it could speak again. She set the fork against the rail.
“Good girl,” Mary Jo said, not unkindly. “Come on. Inside.”
The kitchen looked different with another woman in it.
Mary Jo had moved through this kitchen forever and a day and stopped seeing it, and it showed in every motion she made.
She put a kettle on without asking.
She found a clean towel without asking.
She found the first-aid kit in the cabinet and set it on the table next to the wrong mug.
“Sit.”
Mandy sat.
“Hand.”
She gave her the hand. Mary Jo’s fingers were warm and dry and not exactly gentle but careful. She unwrapped the gauze in a long, unhurried unspooling and made one small sound at the back of her throat when she saw what was under it and said nothing about it.
“Whose idea was this?”
“Mine.”
“Mm-hm.”
“He offered the bus station. I took the deal.”
“Mm-hm.” She turned the hand over and looked at the palm, which had finally stopped bleeding sometime in the night and had committed to a fresh swelling. “And the nails.”
“What about them?”
“They’ve got to be trimmed.”
Mandy looked at the three broken nails and the one already lifting. The standing Thursday appointment on Knox Street had been one small thing she chose for herself. Mary Jo did not know she was taking the last neat piece of that life.
“Fine.”
She had clearly done this before, for horses and nephews and probably for her brother more than once. The nails came down to a working length that looked, when she was done, like the hands of a person who lived in the world and not above it.
“There,” Mary Jo said.
Mandy looked at her own hands and didn’t recognize them and couldn’t decide if she was about to be sick.
“Breathe.”
She breathed.
“Now I’m going to bandage you up properly, and you are going to drink this tea, and then I am going to get the box out of the truck, and we are going to put you in clothes that don’t humiliate me to be standing next to. You with me?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t say yes like that. Say it like you mean it.”
“Yes.”
“Better.”
Mary Jo bandaged her, palm and thumb and the two worst fingers, with strips she cut to size from a roll Mandy had never seen anyone but a medic touch.
The tea was black and sweet enough to insult an Englishman.
Mandy drank it and her hands stopped shaking, mostly.
The kitchen was very quiet. Outside, somewhere far up the meadow, a single cow called.
“He told you Vinegar bites,” Mary Jo said, looking at the bandage and not at her.
“He did.”
“And you stayed.”
“I stayed.”
Mary Jo nodded, just the once, which by now Mandy understood to be the whole sentence in this family. She didn’t say what she was thinking. She didn’t need to.
The box, when Mary Jo set it on the kitchen table, was bigger than Mandy expected.
She pulled out things in stacks. Wranglers in three sizes because she had guessed.
Two flannels, soft from washing. Three plain shirts.
A Carhartt coat the color of brown gravy.
A wool hat. A pair of work gloves still in the tags.
Six pairs of socks that looked as if they had been sold by weight.
A brown belt she said had been her ex-husband’s and would do.
“How do you know my size?”
“I don’t. I know yours within two or three. Try the middle ones.”
“You did not have to.”
“I did not, no.”
“I can’t pay you for these.”
Mary Jo gave her a look that contained a small amount of weather. “Sweetheart. Do I look like a woman who is here for her money?”
Mandy looked at her. At the truck through the window. At the worn cuff of the barn coat and the working knot of her hair and the boots that meant business. “No.”
“Good. Change.”
She changed in the spare room. The jeans fit on the second try. The flannel was Andrew’s in the shoulders by a country mile, which she suspected was on purpose. The Carhartt was hers. The boots were still his. She left them his.
She stood in front of the small mirror over the dresser and looked.
A stranger looked back.
She balled the slip and dropped it in the corner. The new clothes were a costume too, but this one had pockets and had been bought expecting her to work.
For a moment, the clothes looked settled on her.
The thought came before she could stop it.
Mary Jo was in the barn finishing the stalls.
“Hey.”
“Hey, sweetheart.”
“I was going to finish those.”
“I know.”
“I don’t need you to do my work.”
“Honey, I’m not doing your work. I’m doing this.” She kept forking. “If you want to finish, take that end.”
Mandy took that end.
It was an entirely different morning with another woman in the barn.
They worked worked some around Vinegar (who watched Mary Jo come in and decided, for reasons of his own, not to bite anyone today), and Mary Jo didn’t talk while she worked, which Mandy hadn’t known a woman could do, and which she found, in spite of herself, a kindness.
When they were down to the last two stalls Mary Jo said, “Who taught you to move a biting horse?”
Mandy kept forking.
“You moved him into the next stall to muck his,” Mary Jo said. “That is an old trick. That is not in a book. Who taught you?”
“My Nana, my grandma.”
“Yeah?”
“On her place. When I was little. Before.”
Mary Jo nodded again. “Hm.” And then, with what sounded like the beginnings of a plan, “Can you saddle a horse?”
“Yes.”
“For real or for show?”
“For real. It’s been a long time.”
“How long?”
“Fourteen years.”
“It comes back. Come on.”
The mare Mary Jo brought out of a stall was small and brown and quiet and looked at Mandy with the calm certainty that this would not take long. Mary Jo handed her the lead rope. Mandy took it in her left hand because her right was still the worst.
“Tack room is there. Saddle and pad and the bridle on the third hook. Take your time. Talk to her while you work or she will forget about you and step on your foot.”
“What’s her name?”
“Junebug. Be polite about it. She knows.”
She tied Junebug to the ring at the post, a slip knot her grandmother had taught her, left long enough to undo with one hand if she had to.
Her hands shook getting the rope through.
They settled, slowly, on the knot. The knot held.
It was a small private victory, which is the only kind that counts.
She got the saddle pad off the rail and shook it once and laid it onto Junebug’s back, smooth and high on the withers.
She got the saddle, which was heavier than she remembered every saddle being and lighter than she’d feared it would be today, and she swung it up.
She missed the first try. Mary Jo didn’t move.
She swung again, got it, and set pad and saddle straight on the second try.
She walked around to the off side. Her grandmother’s voice came back without being asked.
Always check your off side. That is where a saddle goes wrong on you.
She dropped the cinch on the off side, checked the rigging, walked back around, reached under for the cinch, and brought it up.
Cinch knot. Her hands knew. They didn’t think; they did.
She pulled it through the D-ring and looped and tucked and pulled the end snug, not tight, because horses bloat themselves on you when they think you don’t know.
She walked Junebug two steps. Junebug let out the held breath.
Mandy pulled the cinch the second inch and tied it off.
Bridle. She took the headstall in her right hand even though it hurt and put her thumb in the corner of Junebug’s mouth.
Junebug opened, and the bit went in. She pulled the headstall up over the ears one at a time, soft, and buckled the throatlatch loose enough for a fist and snug enough not to drift.
She stepped back.
Junebug stood square beneath the saddle, calm and settled.
Mary Jo, behind her, said, “Huh.”
Mandy turned around.
Mary Jo leaned on the rail with her arms crossed. She said nothing else.
The feeling came up through the soles of her feet and stopped beneath her ribs.
She was good at this.
Her hands had remembered the knot, the bloat, and the buckle without being asked. Her body had remembered the off side. Fourteen years had not taken it from her.
Dallas had taught her other competencies. Which fork. Which donor. Which smile. None of them had felt like this.
She laid her good hand flat on Junebug’s neck and stood very still.
“Easy, girl,” she said. Junebug turned her head and looked at her with one big calm eye.
After a long minute, Mary Jo, from the rail, said, “Take your time.”
Mandy did. She stood in his too-big boots and the wool hat and the brown Carhartt that was finally hers, with one bandaged hand on a saddled horse who had taken her at her word, and she breathed, and breathed, and breathed.
Behind her, Mary Jo pushed off the rail and came up alongside, easy. She didn’t look at Mandy’s face, which Mandy was profoundly grateful for. She put one hand on Junebug’s withers and the other on the saddle and gave each a small, firm pat.
“All right,” she said. “Tie her off. Come on inside. I told my brother I would not feed you for free more than once in a day, but it turns out I’m a liar.”
Mandy laughed. It came out wrong, raw and surprised and too loud, and it scared her almost as much as the saddling had, because she couldn’t remember the last time she’d made it.
Mary Jo didn’t turn around. She kept walking toward the house, hands in her coat pockets, and over her shoulder she said, “There you go.”
Mandy stood in the aisle and watched Mary Jo go. The coat was hers. The boots were still Andrew’s. Her clipped, bandaged hands had saddled a horse.
Someone had come up the lane that morning, and it had turned out to be kin.
For a few hours, she had forgotten to listen for the next one.