The Mare

Ginger

When I was in kindergarten there was a series of books meant to teach kids how everything in the world was put together. At least I guess that was the point of them. In the one I remember, each cardboard page showed a picture of a farm animal — I think there was a farmer too — and each of the pages had three sections: instead of turning a whole page, you could turn them section by section and make a rooster with a pig’s body and farmer’s legs. That’s what it felt like trying to act normal around Paul with Velvet there. It felt that way even in the days before she came, like a hand was grabbing my midsection and turning me into a cow with cat legs, and something hairy and disgusting in the middle, and it kept happening, pictures flipping randomly. How could I even bring her into this shit-storm — but if I didn’t, when would she ride? “Listen,” said Kayla, “I’ve had to smile and put food on the table when I was so depressed I didn’t want to move. Ginger, that girl isn’t made of china and neither are you. You can handle it.” Paul said the same. “We can do this,” he said. “Even if we break up right after she leaves.” I said, “We can’t break up until after the event.” “Okay,” he said, “we won’t.”

Because I had not told him the event was off. Because as far as I was concerned, it wasn’t.

So we got up together and made eggs and bacon and orange juice; the picture split and got joined with the first time I made us bacon and eggs in that house. He had looked at the food and said, “Breakfast!” so softly, like it was the dearest thing, and that’s what it was to me too. But now that feeling had been divided into pieces and stuck together with the impossible present and something else down below it, something hard, misshapen and too big. I laid the dishes out, and through the chaos came the special feeling I had whenever Velvet was there and I made food for her. Well now here was the other side of that privilege, a tiny, tiny taste of what people mean when they say parenting is hard. I remembered my mother, our mother; the day after Dad left she made us pancakes, exhaustion and will mixed up in the sweet taste. It was maybe a year later that she sent Melinda to a mental hospital for running off with a married man when she was basically still a kid. When we were grown I confronted my mother about it and she said, “I didn’t know what else to do!” and I despised her. Well, now I didn’t know what to do either. So we ate and smiled and asked Velvet about the horses, and then she went to the barn, and I went upstairs to my laptop to look at sites about cheating spouses with lists like “5 Reasons You Should Take a Cheater Back” and “10 Reasons You Shouldn’t Take a Cheater Back.”