The Mare

Ginger

The next weekend she was supposed to come, she didn’t show. I waited at Penn Station for half an hour before calling her at home. Her mother yelled into the phone; it was somehow comforting, like she was yelling on my behalf. Her brother came on and said Velvet was asleep. He said she’d been out late and a social worker was coming. I asked him why a social worker was coming. He said, “I don’t know, she’s from the school. She comes when my sister does something bad.” “Like what?” I asked. But I guess something interesting must’ve happened on the TV because he didn’t answer me. I said, “Can you go wake your sister up?” and he said, “Okay.”

I waited on the phone for almost ten minutes. I was about to hang up when a tornado of screaming voices came up behind the cartoon noise. I waited, thinking that Velvet was coming. The screaming went on. The cartoons got louder. I hung up. It was nearly winter and my toes and hands were cold. I went into Penn Station to get a hot chocolate and walked around drinking it. I stared at the jumbled food nooks and windows filled with cheap shit: crazy-print panty hose, boxes of chenille gloves and hats, teddy bears, glass roses, Empire State knickknacks, magazines crammed with exhausting opinions and worthless pictures it cost thousands of dollars to take. Pretzels. Pizza. Squashed sandwiches and big, biliously iced cookies. Lights buzzing, music pumping, people yelling orders and wiping surfaces; so much honest effort put into so much ugliness, everyone worn out by it but still doing their job to push it out the chute. All of it probably overrun by rats at night. A crazy guy pointed at me and laughed.

What was I going to tell Paul?

I called her again. She picked up the phone and said she was sorry. “I’m sorry too,” I said. “I spent time and money to come all this way for nothing and you can’t even come to the phone?”

She was silent.

“You know what, we don’t have to talk about it,” I said. “I’m too angry to talk.” I hung up.

I would tell him she texted and canceled because she was sick, and that I didn’t get the text until I was already halfway into the city.