I wondered what he’d thought of me (before he forgot my name), outside of the performative way he seemed to see me—as a leech, or a rival, or a threat, or a clown, or as an exact replica of himself, down to the way we stood, and belched, and cleared our throats.
I saved two photos that day at my parents’ house. One of my father asleep after I helped him to bed, hat pulled down, glasses askew. And one that Leah sent from Spain: a selfie of her riding on the back of a motorcycle, dutifully wearing a helmet, her cheeks pink from the heat, holding a pizza box. If you pressed on the photo, you could see three whole seconds of video, hear her laughing, and get a glimpse of Lucas in front, no helmet, shaved head, looking relaxed. She’d texted to say that they’d gone straight to the beach, and how good it had felt to swim after a long plane ride—“It’s a bit baptismal.” Where the fuck did she learn to talk like that?
Downstairs, I sat with my mother. “The girl” who owned the horse, she explained, was the daughter of her friend down the road. The girl and her husband had started a special-ed school, but the school had gone bust and the horse was homeless.
“Dispense with that ‘nevermore’ crap—the trick is to waddle and hiss, waddle and hiss.” Cartoon by Meredith Southard Link copied
“Who’s taking care of it?”
“I know how to feed a horse.”
“Are you mucking out the stall?”
“He’s mostly outside.”
I kept fidgeting, getting up to clean things.
“You should take him for a trot,” she said.
“I don’t know how to ride,” I said.
“He needs to get his ya-yas out.”
“Why don’t you get your ya-yas out?”
Then she tucked her pants into her socks and went for a walk. I cleaned the kitchen and enjoyed being in the quiet house with her outside and him asleep.
My mother had cried a little, while finishing her breakfast, and I’d held her hand and kissed it, but her sadness didn’t penetrate. I’d felt it in my face, the stony witnessing, waiting for it to pass. I couldn’t fix her life. I wanted to get home, or go somewhere far away. I cleaned out the fridge, changed light bulbs, and ran the vacuum.
I took the plants from my car and went out to the garage for a shovel. The horse came by the garden and clocked me with his big orange eyeball, dragging the cinder block, cropping grass around my father’s outdoor grill. I saw the stone gnome my parents had brought from our old house, the one we called Lorenzo Squink. I’d driven past that house not long ago and seen that it was for sale, and had gone in to take a look. The owners had put a pool where the chicken coop used to be, but left everything else—the rusty radiator in my parents’ bathroom, the crappy fireplace tools I made in eighth-grade metal shop. All it needed was some red velvet ropes and you could open a museum. When we lived there, it was the five of us, my mother and four kids, against him. We were a unit and we gaslit him, and it must’ve been awful for an only child who grew up poor, to be so alone. For us he had a job he claimed to hate, and I guess we could’ve been nicer. Or maybe he deserved it?
When I was done in the garden, I checked on my father, who was still asleep, then went into the kitchen and made a stir-fry with everything minced into tiny bites, enough to put half in the freezer. My mother came in and told me I’d left the garden gate open, and the horse had gone in there and eaten her lettuce, cucumbers, new basil, squash, zucchini, and watermelon plants.
“Sorry.”
We could see him out back through the living-room windows. His rusty reddish coat was the color my father’s hair had once been, and I wondered whether it was him, reincarnated aheadof schedule. He was throwing his head around and having a good time, and that was when I noticed that the lead line was still attached to his halter but there was no cinder block dragging on the ground. He’d sheared it off on the garden fence, and now he strolled freely beneath a stand of white pine trees, joyfully rolling in the bed of golden pine needles, hooves in the air, whipping his tail around, then springing up and charging down the hill. The next time I saw him, he was in the pond, taking a dip. My father had also loved to swim naked, and to sit by the pond, bare-assed, doing the crossword. The horse came out of the water, shining, dark, and sleek as a seal.
We decided that one of us would have to confront him. If you’re not a cowboy with a lasso, there is another way to catch a jumpy horse in an open field: put some oats in a bucket and shake it so that the horse can hear what sounds like dinner, then walk toward but also sort of away from him, in case he spooks. If you do this wrong, and even if you do it right, he might stomp you.
As I got closer, he started to whinny, a good sign, then he shoved his head in the bucket and ate some oats. There was the great wheel of his jaw, and the thick haunch of his neck. I could have grabbed his halter, but then he lifted his head and spun, heading for the road.
I imagined myself up there in a bone-jarring trot, sliding around in a saddle, trying to find my seat. Then he fell into a smooth canter, heading downhill. At the end of the driveway he cleared the fence, hooked left, opened his stride, and exploded into a gallop. His head went up and down, the sound of his hooves like the Pony Express. I thought of a mailman riding high, a hundred and sixty years ago, carrying the news. The President has been shot. He is grievously wounded. Ring the church bell.
I went back into the barn, put away the bucket, found my mother in the house, and told her I was leaving.
“Hey, what’s that horse’s name?”
“Chief,” she said.
I should have stayed, had dinner, slept over, getting up with my father every hour or so, giving her a night of uninterrupted sleep. But my dog had been locked inside all day, and Marla was flying in later. We hadn’t seen each other in a week. I had to go.
I looked for the horse on the road as I drove. There were double-wide trailers, and dead cars in front yards, and threatening political flags, and posted signs on spooky old trees with shaggy bark. He wasn’t there.
While driving, I noticed an empty lighter in the cup holder, a vape pen, and a soda can on the floor of the passenger side. Someone had drawn on the dusty outside of the glass of the sunroof—a smiling kitty face, a dick and balls, and “Hi Daddy.” All summer I’d been feeling subdued, stuffed down and worried, dreading Leah’s departure.
I remembered the first time I saw Lucas, even before he and Leah were together, when I went to pick her up from school and found her at the boys’ soccer game and watched him streak across the field to wipe out some kid with a slide tackle. He was brave and committed—short and barrel-chested—and it was a thrill to see him in action. A few weeks later, he tore ligaments in his ankle, and his soccer career ended. All last fall he’d show up at our house, hobbling around, looking bloated and sweaty, or I’d spot him on crutches on the sidelines with a video camera, and it was heartbreaking. By the time they started dating, he was a little tormented. He’d get into fights with his mom and be grounded, argue with Leah, scold her about something she drank or ate or said, then leave poems for her in the mailbox. At school he’d make a big deal of skipping lunch to do homework, but then not do it, and bomb the class. He hadn’t got in anywhere he’d applied and was planning to spend a gap year working on a farm for some program in Vermont.
There were other boys I liked more, like Leah’s friend Andre, who was going to Michigan, with his arm muscles and his handsome face, his shiny black curls, and a profile like something on a Roman coin. But Lucas was her first love, and he was honest, loyal, dutiful, sad, afraid of alcohol, drawn to conflict, self-pitying, valorous, and paranoid. And even though Leah had grown irritated at having to walk at his pace between classes and drive him places with his crutches sticking out the window, it had taught her to be considerate. Though it had made me feel out of sorts to see her accommodating him, even after he’d gotten off crutches, creating this space inside herself to console him, to contain his anxieties, having to be patient and lower her expectations, while they learned to be a couple. I wondered how they’d manage in Spain.
