The Mare

Ginger

The phone rang in my lap; I picked it up and said, “Honey, what’s going on? It’s late; why were you out?”

“It’s before ten,” she said.

I said, “It’s still late for you.”

She ignored that and said, “When can I come up there? I want to see my horse.”

“You know you can come whenever your mother says it’s okay. But your voice sounds different. Why haven’t you been talking to me?”

She was quiet a long moment. Then she said she hadn’t been going to school, that she thought I’d be mad at her.

“Honey,” I said, “why aren’t you going to school?”

“Something bad happened.”

“Listen,” I said. “Something bad happened this summer. You got thrown off a horse and got a concussion and you got kicked out of the barn. But you kept riding and now you’ve moved your horse to a better place where you can ride her again. You walked your path. You asked me how to do that; now you know because you did it. Keep walking your path.”

She listened to me. I could tell. Because I believed my words and she could hear it in my voice. Of course I believed it. If a man who had told me I wasn’t worth anything could hold me and kiss me and I could sing him a song, then any good thing might happen. If what I had longed for, blindly and brokenly, and struggled like an animal to find in the most unlikely form, if it had really been there and was now simply, gently revealed — any good thing might happen. Anything.

“Ginger,” she said, “somebody I know got shot. This boy who didn’t even do nothing.”