The Mare

Velvet

But the next time I came, I didn’t go to Estella’s stable or even to Pat’s house, not the first day. Because that lady at the party, her daughter Joanne invited me to come and see where she rode because she was Edie’s friend. I could visit and watch and Joanne would give me her lesson. I wanted to go, especially when Ginger said the name of the place was Spindletop — I remembered that was where Heather went, and Beth before their parents couldn’t pay.

Spindletop at first didn’t look better than Estella’s except it had a big sign with a fancy horse on it. You could see the barn from the road and it did not look scary like Estella’s place the first time I saw it even though it was a lot bigger — maybe because it was winter and there wasn’t thick green secluding it. Or maybe because I wasn’t young. Anyway, it was two big buildings with a big parking lot in front and big paddocks with horses in them.

Then Ginger dropped me off and I went in the office and saw how different it was. In this office there were no bags of horse treats or horse medicine or boxes of horse combs or boots or blankets or dirty rags — no dirty anything really. There was no radio playing country music and no cats hanging off anybody. There were desks with computers on them and neat-dressed ladies with manicures. When I asked for Joanne they smiled and took me back into this big stable that was warm and bright-lit and so clean it didn’t even smell like horses. I was starting to get nervous when this smiling girl wearing tall boots and tight pants came and said, “Are you Velvet? What a great name for a rider!”

That was Joanne, and she took me into the tack room, where everything was hanging so neat, bridles all tied the same way with the nose pieces standing out, on hooks with horses’ names on them — not just hanging on the stall door like at Estella’s or Pat’s. There were so many horses and their stalls were all clean and they looked perfectly brushed and chill, like yeah, they had something to say but you needed to be somebody to get their attention.

Joanne’s horse was named Major Tom and he was big like Joker, but different, not wild or funny, more like a soldier at attention, like he was clean on the inside too. While Joanne groomed him, she told me what a great horse he was, and how much he loved her, that he would jump in her lap if he could. While she talked, girls in the same kind of tall boots and tight pants walked by; their hair was so perfect that if Alicia saw it she wouldn’t know whether to bow and worship it or rip it out. Men wearing work clothes walked by too, Mexican men pushing wheelbarrows and carrying buckets and mucking forks. Joanne smiled and said hi to them the same way she did to the girls. But they were the only ones who looked at all dirty.

“So where do you ride now?” asked Joanne.

“At Wildwood. Pat teaches me.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I know her and Estella. They’re sweet.”

And I thought, Sweet?