The Mare

Ginger

When she came downstairs, sleep-dazed and a little sullen, I asked her if she wanted to stay for another two weeks, and she woke fully and said yes in the soft voice that meant she was happy and scared to trust it. So I told her, quick and soft, before Paul came, that when we called her mother, she and I, we shouldn’t tell her mom everything about the horses, that it might be best to wait until she could really ride and then…I started to say “surprise her” but trailed off. It didn’t matter. The child simply said okay.

I called the agency right at nine o’clock. I had to talk to several different people, each sounding more suspicious and displeased than the last, like parts of a machine that didn’t like its operation reset for any reason. Finally somebody told me that if Velvet’s mother agreed, we could keep her as long as we wanted, but that it would not be under agency auspices and that they would not insure us. If we didn’t want to send her back to her mother on the bus, we would have to bring her back to the office and deliver her to her mother there. After that, we could do whatever we wanted as long as we understood they weren’t involved.

Then we called her mother, who was not a machine. First Paul talked, using his Spanish, cajoling her to politely talk back. Then Velvet came on, wheedling like a teenager in a movie about adorable teenagers. Yelling came from the handset; her mother obviously thought that movie was a piece of crap. Velvet yelled, cajoled, wheedled. A slow smile spread over her face; she looked at me and nodded. The whole thing took about ten minutes. “I told her I was working at the barn,” she said. “That they were teaching me how to work.”

It wasn’t a lie. Velvet planned to work at the barn. Pat had already agreed to give her a lesson every day in exchange for several hours of work.