by Lisa Preston
* * *
“Dead.”
Patsy-Lynn’s face popped into my mind. “Who’s dead now?” I asked Guy, seeing he was distracted by something in the utility room so bad it kept him from having an iced tea on the ready for me. Since he was home for lunch, he’d no doubt be working late.
“The washing machine.”
I had a shrug for that news. “Well, you do all those towels and aprons all the dag-blamed time.” Really, my jeans and shirts get beyond filthy, stinking of burnt hoof and horse pucky. How bad can kitchen stuff ever be?
Guy pulled a face. I just didn’t see a problem. There’s an old peanut butter jar full of quarters on the bathroom counter where we dump loose change. It’s next to the water glass that holds our toothbrushes.
“Got to get a new washer,” he said. “And a dryer too, this time.”
There’s no dryer in the utility room even though there’s a hookup for one, so we’ve always used a clothesline out back or the one strung across the inside of the garage, my room. The wind works well enough and I’ve told Guy as much, though honestly, I’ve waited a week in winter for jeans to dry even in the garage.
“We can wash stuff at the coin-op place in town,” I said.
Laundry World’s next to the grocery store, so it’s not like a person has to sit in the laundromat and pick her nose or other orifices while waiting for clean clothes. But Guy looked put upon, so I had to ask, “What’s the big deal with using the public place?”
“I have a theory about laundromats. Would you like to hear my theory?”
I nodded and lied. “Love to.”
“I think laundromat time is deducted from your life. Like every cigarette is supposed to be five minutes off—”
“You don’t smoke,” I pointed out. I like an accurate, complete theory.
Guy swung his hands around impatient-like. “Well, yes, I know I don’t smoke. Perhaps you miss the point—”
“The pointy part being?”
“The pointy part being that time spent in a laundromat is just the most infernal drag I’ve ever suffered and I think getting a new washing machine plus a dryer in the utility room here would be just great.”
I figure I told the truth next. “Guy, you haven’t suffered much.”
“Well, no. I’ve been pretty fortunate, haven’t had any of what could be called suffering. Have you?” He wrinkled his forehead like we were having A Moment.
We weren’t. I turned my pink self away. “I’m not saying I have. I’m just saying you haven’t.”
I’ll never go down that self-pity road. I’ve done worse to another than’s ever been done to me.
Guy was still working up some genius plan. “Well, new washer and a dryer, even on sale, would still cost a bit. What do you think?”
“Why in the world do you want my opinion?”
“This is a decision we could make together. Come on. What would you do with, oh, a thousand dollars? That’s probably the least we’d pay for a new washer and a dryer.”
“Huh?”
He gave me one of my very own looks. It was the I Ain’t About to Repeat What I Know You Heard, So Don’t You Huh Me look. And he was pretty good at it, probably because he’d been blessed with plenty of opportunities to study on it.
I said, “If I had a thousand bucks to blow, I’d buy a good shoe rack, up my inventory, maybe get a better forge.” Mine’s an old two-burner that’s not as quick and consistent as I’d like.
“So buy it.” Guy shrugged.
“You’re hilarious. Where would I get a thousand dollars? B’sides, all the stuff I said is just too much money to think about. More’n this grand you’re talking.”
“Downscaling your dreams?”
I’d sure done some of that and I gave one nod with my chin. “Seems appropriate.”
Guy sighed and handed me back a wry smile, also a look he’s copied from me. “All right then. A few hundred to splurge with. What would you do?”
A splurge? That wasn’t too difficult. “I’d get a Pocket Anvil.”
“A pocket anvil?” His eyebrows headed for his hairline.
I nodded.
“And they’re a few hundred bucks?”
“Yep.” But worth it, I thought.
“Well, fine. Go buy one.”
A snort is what he deserved and what I gave him. “Still hilarious. Where would I get that kind of change?”
“The cookie jar springs to mind.” Guy’s tone was still mild. “We’ve got a chunk of change stashed in there.”
Guy’s cookie jar is a chubby-cheeked, fat-bellied ceramic teddy bear, painted in rosy browns and yellows. His head comes off and the whole inside of his body can hold a good half-gallon of cookies. His other job’s to hold down the inside corner of Guy’s kitchen counter. Not being a cookie kind of gal—Milk Duds are my thing—I can honestly say I’d never had my hand inside the cookie jar before.
Cash money is what Guy pulled out of the bear now. He kept stacking the money, fifties, twenties, hundreds. He had thousands of dollars stashed away. The first thought that popped into my mind was that Suit Fellow didn’t know about this and it needed to stay that way.
Chapter 15
IT WAS LIKE GUY WAS DARING me to ask, the way he grinned over the piles of cash on the kitchen counter. The teddy bear cookie jar stared, too. Double dog dare.
I don’t take dares any more. I took myself outside, got in Ol’ Blue, and drove off without lunch.
My afternoon held two resets at one barn, a bunch of yearlings to trim at a small time breeder, then one of my on-again, off-again clients who shops shoers too much.
Truly, as the days get longer, so do my working hours. In wintertime, I’m limited in the late afternoon on account of not all my clients having a decent setup for after-dark shoeing. Besides, horses’ feet grow less in the winter. But there was enough spring sun left for me to tack on one thrown shoe after my usual working hours.
Abby was orbiting when I got to the Langston place, more upset than a thrown shoe should warrant. Apparently, a horse had gone missing from the neighbor’s pasture early in the week. It bothers a lot of horses when their neighbors move. They like a set herd. Over-the-fence pasturemates count just like a horse they live with proper. Now an old gelding was alone in the neighboring field. With his pasturemate suddenly gone, he trotted a fuss and Liberty had been doing fancy footwork too, running around, joining the protest of a mare being suddenly gone from the neighbor’s outfit. The little mare whinnied and stared, missing her horse-friend.
“We’re gonna walk this field and find that shoe,” I told Abby.
And we did, while I fussed in my head about her mare being pregnant. But I didn’t want more experience of Abby shushing me. At the back border, I raised my eyebrows at the girl and stretched the bottom string of the double twist wire, letting it ping back like an over-plucked guitar string.
Abby wrung her hands, knowing my meaning. “But this isn’t even our fence. You think I’d have wire, if it was up to me?”
I grinned then, because she’s so flipping cute, so Little Kid, and eager to be a grown-up. Take time, I wanted to tell her. But I know better than to act condescending. I wrenched my face straight and nodded severely.
“Guess not. This is the neighbor’s fence, huh?” I jerked my thumb toward the house beyond the pasture that backed up to the Langstons’.
“The Solquists,” Abby said, her voice pitching high, near whining. “It’s been days and days now. They were out real late and didn’t notice Misty missing until the next morning.” Tears burbled down Abby’s face. Pretty distraught, given it wasn’t her horse, but then kids can be that way, wrap themselves around an axle for something to do.
There wasn’t much for me to say but “Huh.”
A vague recollection of Guy saying something about a horse gone missing simmered. Bad fences are the usual cause of gone horses. This fence wasn’t great, but it hadn’t been laid down. The staples were rusty on the old cedar posts, b
ut there. The metal T posts, driven in to bolster the works, were straight. The wire was taut enough except for the low strand of one segment and that’s where I found the pulled shoe.
“I don’t know how I missed it,” Abby said. “I did look.”
Probably she missed it having her mind elsewhere, I figured.
Abby fretted something fierce while I put Liberty’s front left tire back on, so to speak. The kid was awful worked up about her mare being so shrill and excitable even though I told her just to lock Liberty up in the stall ’til she settled down, and to get plenty of miles rode. If Abby didn’t want to talk to me about what was eating her and how her mare came to be bred, then I couldn’t force her confidence.
She looked ready to bust. “Is that deal with my dad and Mr. Kittredge still going on?”
At first, I wondered who this Mr. Kittredge of hers was, then I realized she was talking about Guy. My Guy. “What deal’s that?”
“I don’t know. The deal they were working on.”
Darned if the girl wasn’t full of secrets. I frowned and looked away. Guy makes a big act sometimes about supposedly telling me everything and being Mr. Up Front. And now little Abby wouldn’t look at me, back to freaking out about the fence and the neighbor horse that wasn’t there. Liberty shivered, fit to scream, too. I pointed my clinchers at the kid to get her attention.
“What do you know?”
Shrugs are a blasted means of communication in my coloring book. I’d have liked to rattle the teeth out of the kid for the little shoulder toss.
“I heard ’em talking about it the other day, just before Mr. Harper left.”
“Left here?”
A nod.
“And Guy was here with them?”
Another nod.
Driving away, it irked me that the kid was so unforthcoming. What was Guy doing at the Langstons’ place? I took Ol’ Blue slowly by the dirt road next down from Langstons’, where the Solquists lived, and pulled over across from the driveway to their farm. I felt sticky about Abby and her secrets.
Heckfire, according to her, Guy was hiding something from me, too.
And I still just plain felt bad about Patsy-Lynn. That might have been my real problem. It was certainly the last black thought making me stare out Ol’ Blue’s window.
Abandoned there on the road shoulder was something worth a good forty dollars, and I could slide it in the back on top of my tools. A full sheet of plywood. It looked to be in decent shape and who couldn’t use such a thing? I dismounted Ol’ Blue and grabbed the goods, then grunted with the weight, realizing it was three-quarter inch stuff. And marine grade, a really good find. Beaming, I canted my new sheet of plywood around my forge to get it in the truck bed.
Something about road shopping just makes me happy.
I was near starved by the time I got home. I do love having a physical occupation that leaves me raring for a dinner plate by the day’s end.
And I got home to Guy pinching pastry crust.
He looked pleased. “I’m making veggie quiche.”
Oh, dandy. Is it just me or has real food gone completely out of fashion? I failed to stifle a moan. “I could murder for a hamburger.”
Guy looked at me real quick. I felt clammy for no reason. “Just a figure of speech. I thought you were working at the Cascade tonight.”
“I get a night off once in a while.”
Come to find out, over green pie for dinner, that Guy’s goosey about the word murder because the police had been by and had a chat with my landlord, cook, and sort of boyfriend. I sure hoped Guy wasn’t counting the contents of the cookie jar when they dropped in. And he didn’t have much more to say about that, getting all distracted by what he did want to blabber about. Namely, my growing up years.
Unable to help himself, since I let slip about my previous marriage, Guy flooded me with questions.
Sighing, I told Guy what he straight asked about. I don’t know why I shared more stuff, but I was glad my mama hadn’t when they spoke the other day. While neither of my schools was virgin village, I reckon I learned more stuff that I didn’t need to know in California. They never taught me how to gentle a horse in Los Angeles, and they tried to tell me all about coffee and condoms. Besides, California folk talk funny. People there had issues and wanted empowerment and complained about enablers. Classes were facilitated, not taught. It was everywhere, their speak, their chic clothes, their food. One sort-of-friend’s mom wore a weighted vest to go mall-walking and called it spinning when she rode an exercise bicycle. We got a trophy when we lost at lacrosse. They called tortillas wraps.
How a good-ol’-boy, cold-blooded, ultra-conservative ranchhand-turned-truck-driver like Gerry Dale and a hot-blooded hyper-liberal gal like Dara Kuhnt got together is beyond anyone’s figuring, except that Mama was mighty glad to get a new last name.
Can’t imagine anyone was surprised when they couldn’t make the marriage stick after a few years’ try. Then they started passing me back and forth across the Southwest.
They probably both breathed a burp of relief when I emancipated, then again when I got back in touch after those late teen years on my own. After my shoeing internships, settling myself up here in Oregon was the first I’d truly stood on my own back legs. I’m still getting the feel of it. And sometimes it seems like I’m cheating, not enough on my own, since I’m living in Guy’s house and he does all the cooking and whatnot.
Bacon inside green pie fills it out nicely. For dessert, Guy browned an R into flavored sugar over a custard. Most evenings, by the time I give Red and Charley some time, maybe forge-weld some hooks out of old horseshoes and generally putter with my tools, I’m beat. Tonight, I needed to get something off my chest first.
“What deal you got cooking with Keith Langston and Winston Harper?”
Guy waved his hands even as his face went to pulling his eyebrows back down from his scalp. “Uh, it’s a surprise. Not ready yet.”
“I don’t like surprises.”
He tried a smile. “What else are you thinking about?”
“Ugly stuff.”
He sort of frowned. “There’s ugly stuff on your mind?”
Him wanting to talk set me in the other direction even though a little spark of a thought, something I wanted to say, tried for birth.
But he was too chatty, asking again what was running around in my head.
“Just for the sake of it,” I said, “explain what good reason is there to gab about ugly stuff? If there’s no fixing it, why talk about it?”
“Well, if it’s hard on you, it creates stress. It drains your energy.”
“Sounds sort of like your laundromat time theory.”
Guy nodded, like he was all pleased with my learning. “Very much like that.”
“I have a theory of my own,” I said, “on jabbering about things that are ugly.”
He beckoned with both arms, begging for it. “By all means, let’s hear your theory.”
“Well,” I explained, “it’s like a butt pimple.”
He molted to a shade of pale I’d never seen before. I waited for him to get some color back. It was his turn to talk anyways. In a minute, he was pink again. “A butt pimple,” he said, savoring the words.
“Yeah. A butt pimple is annoying and unattractive, but, like ugly stuff in the past, is not something other people need to know about.”
Guy didn’t have any snappy retorts for this good answer I’d served up. All he did was repeat three words in wonder.
“A butt pimple.”
Charley followed as I marched myself outside. My good dog tried to lick the mood off my face. Last year when I found him, he’d looked pretty well used up, but with me caring for him—how I’d wanted to care for someone—he started looking loved.
At first, I’d taken my new old dog in Ol’ Blue as I made my shoeing calls. As Charley got settled at Guy’s place, I let him hang around the house while I was away working. But he’s still ready to keep me company anytime.
Since he was with me when I got Red back, Charley thinks he’s been in my life the longest. My dog and horse are the only ones I talk to with complete trust. My good dog knows how to keep a secret and, while he does have his quiet side, he’s not a pouter. So I tried not to be a pouter, tried to shake the black cloud that’d been dogging me. Shoeing’s tough stuff most days. But starting up as a shoer is tougher. My first shoer’s toolbox was a five-gallon bucket. Before I had enough good tools, I blocked horseshoe nails with my nipper’s edge and I hammer clinched. I didn’t have chaps, pull-offs, or crease nail pullers when I started either. Not even a rasp handle did I have in the beginning. And no spares of anything. If I’d ever broken, say the handle on my driving hammer, I was done shoeing for the day. Now I have full tools plus spares, and I’ve spent the bucks for touches like a clinch blocker and the magnet I wear on my right wrist to hold nails. Still, I do look forward to the days when I feel like I’ve truly come into my own, and have the bonuses like a hotter forge, a substantial shoe inventory, and a Pocket Anvil.
Tonight, it was time to better my outfit with an improved toolbox. Getting to putter at home, I enjoy. Guy wanted to work on his goose pen anyways, in his version of carpentry. Mostly, he used his arm to measure and his fingernail to mark where he wanted to cut or nail something, so I didn’t hold out much hope for the little geese getting improved quarters.
A new toolbox would be a great use for the three-quarter inch plywood sheet I’d collected from the road by the Solquists’ place. My mistake in my first box was the plywood was too light, I’d nailed where I should have used screws, and I’d never glassed it where extra strength was needed. This time I’d cover my box with fiberglass cloth and epoxy. Later, maybe I’d add casters. Tonight I’d get the new toolbox roughed out unless I had to drive Guy to get stitches, which was a maybe, given the way he was using the hand saw as a measuring stick now.