The Mare

Ginger

After just a week with us, she came back from the barn one day and asked could she please, please, please take a bareback riding class. I said, “Let’s see,” and we went over to the barn. Pat introduced me to the woman who she said would be the trainer and I thought, no. The woman had a powerful body, a hard, blunt voice, and an insane face. Her eyes were simple mentally but emotionally snarled, aggressive and shrewd like an orangutan’s. She looked out of her eyes so hard you couldn’t look into them. She was verbally polite to me while her face dismissed me with the fast scorn of a teenager. She looked like the kind of person who could really mess up a child.

But then I saw: She respected Velvet. Or at least she was paying attention, she was interested, and I felt the woman wasn’t interested in much. I could feel Velvet change around her, come to attention in a way I hadn’t seen before. So I decided to risk it. It was a four-week class, just enough to take Velvet through the summer. It was a thousand dollars, which would be hard to explain to Paul. Unless I took it from the private money my mother left me. Which is where I got the money I’d started sending Velvet’s mom every month. Two- or three-hundred-dollar checks that she never asked for or acknowledged but always cashed.