The Mare

Ginger

She called me and told me her mother was going to die. “What? How? What happened?” She has a disease, sobbed the girl, in her stomach. The doctor said she’ll die and she couldn’t even tell Dante because her mother made her promise not to. Because Dante would be scared.

She was calling from school, from the social worker’s office. I asked to speak to the social worker, but it turned out she had no idea what was going on. She’d called Mrs. Vargas at work and was waiting to hear back. She said she’d let me know when she did.

“What are we going to do?” cried Velvet. “Ginger?”

“I’ll do anything I can to help, baby.”

I hung up and walked from the kitchen to the dining room to the living room and back, over and over. Maybe we could take Velvet and her brother could get into foster care here so they could see each other. Maybe it would be better to keep them together in foster care but up here so Velvet could stay with us on the weekends and ride horses. Maybe we could become foster parents and they could both live with us. Maybe I could divorce Paul and become a foster mother.

Break apart, come together, break apart. The rooms and their furniture were there before me. But invisibly, it all seemed to break, re-form, and break again and again.

The phone rang; it was the social worker. She said she had spoken to Velvet’s mother, and she was not dying; she just had irritable bowel syndrome. When the social worker asked why her daughter thought she was dying, Mrs. Vargas laughed. She said she was teaching the girl a lesson.

“About what?” I asked.

“I didn’t ask,” said the woman. “I’ve been doing this upwards of five years and I’ve never heard anything like that before.”

Break apart, come together, break apart.