Part 3
“Twenty-eight hundred,” Owen said, before he could name a price that would make Earl go away.
Earl nodded. He wanted a check by his own veterinarian and another ride over the weekend. After that, if nothing unexpected came up, he would buy her.
Owen put the saddle away and went into the house. Ruth was peeling an orange over the trash can; she’d bought a bag of them because everyone at the café seemed to be catching something.
“He wants Fern.”
“I thought he might.”
“You knew?”
“He asked how you were setting your prices.”
She separated the orange and gave him half. Owen stood eating it, angry with her for having been ready for a conversation he hadn’t known was coming.
“She’s the first one that—” He stopped.
Ruth waited. He couldn’t finish without sounding as though all the other horses, all those months, had been something he wanted credit for.
“Earl can give her a good home,” he said finally.
“Yes.”
“And he needs her.”
Ruth picked a piece of white pith from her orange. She didn’t say he had bought the horses to find them homes, though he had said it often enough himself.
Fern passed the examination, and Earl came for her the next Saturday. Owen had written out her feeding routine and the things Dr. Price wanted watched. He gave Earl the veterinary records and said the bit about the shoulder twice.
“I’ve got it,” Earl told him. “I’ll call if anything changes.”
Fern put her feet on the trailer ramp, paused, and went in. Owen shut the rear door and checked the replacement latch.
He had nothing else to do, but stayed there until Earl asked him to step clear.
Back in the kitchen, Ruth divided the payment among expenses already waiting for it. Owen watched the amounts leave the check in pencil. After the hay account, care bills, and a payment toward the taxes, there was less left than he had expected.
He went outside at feeding time with one scoop too many. Fern’s empty place at the rail caught him before he remembered the money.
That night Earl sent a photograph of her beside his old gelding. The message said only, Settling in. Owen showed Ruth, then looked at it once more before putting his phone away.
Other horses were coming along. A sorrel whose feet had needed patient work found an owner willing to keep up that care. A quiet brown gelding went to a woman who wanted company on short rides and brought her veterinarian before she brought her trailer.
Owen learned to put the awkward facts in the first conversation. One caller lost interest when he described a horse’s limitations. Another thanked him and never came to see it. Ruth stopped asking why an appointment had disappeared from the calendar; when someone did arrive, she brought the horse’s folder outside herself.
By early March, eight of the original eleven remained. Mack could walk through the barn in either direction, though he still disliked a person standing close behind him at an entrance. Nell had recovered from the fall, but work around her belly remained uncertain, and Owen hadn’t asked her to carry a rider.
Ruth had circled the last day of March on the calendar by the phone. Neither of them mentioned it. Voss did, once, stopping at the fence to say that the grading crew he’d booked for April would need an answer before then, one way or the other.
He had made a different promise to the old gelding, Otis, without ever saying it aloud. Otis was sound enough to enjoy turnout and too worn down for what most callers meant by useful. He stood beside Mack at the fence, shifting closer whenever the younger horse moved away.
One evening Owen penciled in what eight horses would cost through summer. Then he calculated six, then four. He used Ruth’s figures for hay rather than the cheaper ones he had been hoping to find.
Earl had spoken about Owen’s work at the feed store. A woman called about boarding a mare, and a man wanted someone to get his gelding loading again before a trip in April. Owen began to count the empty stalls as income that could carry the horses nobody wanted yet.
Ruth let him explain. Then she asked who would be there when the mare arrived at ten on a school morning.
“She could bring her after four.”
“And if she’s sick at noon?”
“I’d come home.”
“How?”
He rubbed out the boarding figure. It hadn’t been income yet, but removing it felt like losing money.
Ruth put on her glasses and pulled the paper toward her. “We need to ask the insurance people what taking customers would cost. And you need to finish school. Neither one goes in that little space you’ve left.”
He looked at the paper with her. There was no room in it for the roof, either, or for Earl to be unavailable, or for Ruth to get sick instead of another horse.
The next day she went inside the little house near the café. She told him before she left. When she came home, he was on the kitchen floor with a screwdriver, fixing the drawer that had been sticking since summer, and he managed to ask about it.
“The second bedroom’s small,” she said. “You’d have to choose between the dresser and that desk.”
He had imagined her looking at houses for herself.
He put the screwdriver down.
“You thought I’d stay somewhere else?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, don’t start packing yourself off without telling me.”
She brought him the bowl that had been sitting on the loose drawer front and held it while he tightened the last screw. He took longer than the job required, testing the runners after they were already straight.
“Do you want it?” he asked.
“The house?”
He nodded.
Ruth leaned against the counter. “I want to sleep until seven once in a while. I want the back door to shut without lifting it. I’d like to buy a pair of shoes because they’re comfortable, without deciding which bill can wait.”
“I can pick up more work.”
“You’re already working.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?”
She set the bowl down harder than she meant to. Neither of them spoke until she had moved it away from the edge.
“I’m answering what you asked, Owen. You don’t have to argue me out of it.”
He knelt beside the drawer, though there was nothing left to fix. She stayed at the counter, and after a while he sat back on his heels.
“I thought if we had horses again, you’d want to stay.”
“I did want them.”
“You said we couldn’t afford—”
“Both things were true.” She pushed her glasses up into her hair. “I liked hearing them out there. That first night, I kept getting up to look.”
Owen had done the same thing from his bedroom. He had seen the kitchen light and assumed she was adding figures in the book.
Ruth went on more quietly. “I don’t regret saying yes. I’m not saying yes to every year after it.”
He stayed on the floor until she asked him to move so she could start supper. He got up, put the tools away, and took the potatoes from the cupboard without asking her which job she wanted him to do.
Voss’s offer was due to expire in two weeks. On Saturday morning Owen meant to mend a loose length of wire in the lower pasture. Mack found it first.
Owen heard a truck horn before he saw anything. By the time he reached the bottom fence, the gelding was through the gap and standing on Voss’s gravel entrance, halfway up the steep drive, with a truck and stock trailer stopped below him. A little girl in a riding helmet had her face pressed to the back window of the cab.
Voss came down from the arena at a jog, one of his instructors behind him with a lead rope. They closed on Mack from both sides of the drive. The gelding backed toward the trailer.
“Stop,” Owen said. Nobody did. “Mr. Voss. Please. Get out of his way.”
Voss turned. For a second Owen thought he would argue. Then he put an arm out, and the instructor stopped too.
Owen walked up the shoulder of the drive, not the middle, and stood well off to one side with his hands empty. The gap in the wire was behind him. Mack looked at the trailer, at Voss, at the open space Owen had left, and came down through it at a walk. He stopped at the fence and put his nose into Owen’s coat.
Owen took hold of his halter and led him back through the gap. His knees didn’t feel like his own.
Ruth reached the fence as Voss did. She had run from the house in her slippers.
“That truck had a seven-year-old in it,” Voss said. He wasn’t shouting, which made it worse. “If he’d gone under that trailer, I’d be calling her mother. Then my insurance company. Then yours.”
“It was my wire,” Owen said. “I was going to fix it this morning.”
“I know you were.” Voss looked at Ruth. “I need an answer by the thirty-first. After that I’ll cut the entrance in behind the arena, whatever it costs me, and I won’t be making you another offer. I’m sorry. I can’t keep running my business around your fence.”
He went back up the drive. Below him, the truck began to move again.
Ruth didn’t say anything until they had Mack in the barn. Then she sat down on an overturned bucket in the passage.
“He’s not wrong,” she said.
“I know.”
Owen went back down with the fencing pliers and spent an hour on a job that should have taken fifteen minutes, checking every staple along that side. When he was done, he found himself measuring the distance from the road culvert to the old corner post. Beyond the fence, another truck and trailer labored up Voss’s steep entrance.
Owen had planned to put more paddocks here one day. Henry used to point out where water collected after heavy rain and where a gate would stay dry. Owen could still remember being too young to care, wanting to get back on the pony instead of listening to another thing he’d need to know later.
He left the tools by the post and walked to the barn. From there he could see both upper paddocks, the house, and the smaller stretch of pasture along the creek. He walked that boundary, too.
That evening he cleared the supper dishes, found Voss’s drawing, and laid it beside the account book. Ruth watched him trace the old field boundary with his finger.
“He wants a way in,” Owen said. “He doesn’t need our house for that.”
“He offered for all of it.”
“I know.”
Ruth didn’t reach for a pencil. “The lower field gives us hay. And somewhere to put horses while the other ground rests.”
Owen turned to his summer figures, leaving the column for four horses uncovered. Then he drew a line across the property map. The house and barn were on one side. The field where Henry had taught him to ride was on the other…
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