The Mare

Ginger

When she left, I walked alone. Snow and brilliant light poured through splotchy clouds. Family things were heaped on porches: boots, cheap round sleds, statues, hidden flowers sleeping in red pots. Somebody still had their Christmas lights up. Because there was no traffic, I walked in the middle of the road.

“You and she have nothing in common.” Paul always said that. But what did I have in common with these houses and the people in them? I thought of Velvet’s powerful music, the song of guns and dogs—“Ronca!”—and the song we sang in the Christmas play that time, Danielle running around with her blue face, Yandy pounding the piano, Mrs. Vargas looking out of her tank. The horsewoman who ruined the day with her bad Spanish, the horses running, Mrs. Vargas cursing me like I couldn’t understand her, then taking her daughter home and beating her. The time we biked on the broken pavement, me yelling “Lumpety-bumpety!” What did any of it have in common?

I told Kayla I was not sure I should keep sending Mrs. Vargas money if she had a job and a boarder. Kayla didn’t think I ever should’ve started. “When you have to cut that money off, trust me, she will feel anger at you. It’ll be like now you owe her, not the other way around.”

But I knew that wasn’t true. She wasn’t like that. I knew because of how she’d looked me back in my eyes.

It was Velvet I wasn’t sure about. Because it still felt like she asked me that question in the car out of aggression. Or anger. Or scorn. Because of something she saw.