The father of Travis is named Gus Weller, and he runs a hardware store on Third Street, and he read the warranty deed under his breath twice. When he reached the bottom he laid it on the table and spread his big flat hands on either side of it as if to keep it from blowing away. “Ilene,” he said. “You are the owner of this house. You have been the owner since August.” I said I was. “And the notice that your daughter taped to your door.” I said I had read it twice, and smiled. The wind rattled the storm door. Across the table, Shelby had not moved her hands from her lap, and her lips were parted slightly.
“I wrote no notice,” I said. “I would not raise my own rent.” I let that rest in the room, between the elk steaks and the baked potatoes. “I sold the plowing company in August for seven million, four hundred thousand dollars, Shelby. I bought this house through Snowy Range Holdings because I wanted to see how you would treat your mother if you thought she had nothing.” I took a breath. “You told me that Biscuit was at a friend. You told me to stay out of the barn. I stayed out. And I have not slept a night since without wondering where that horse was.”
Shelby covered her face. Her shoulders were shaking, and I thought, not for the first time, how small she looks when she cries, the way she did at four with a skinned knee. She is forty two, a lean, weathered woman who works as a veterinary technician, and she has the hands of her father and none of his steadiness. “I sold him because the vet said he had a cough,” she said. “And I could not pay for the treatment. He was twenty one. And I could not afford the hay. And I could not tell you, Mom, because you were so proud that I kept him.” She sobbed. “I did not take the money for myself. Please believe me.”
An empty corral stood in the blowing snow behind a house and gave one plow contractor the dinner hour to bring her daughter back to the barn.
“Ninety five hundred dollars,” Travis said quietly. He had been sitting very still in his chair with his fork in his hand. He laid the fork down. “Shelby. You told me the money for the snowmobile was your tax refund. You said it was ours.” She did not look up. “Was any of it for the horse?” She was silent. “Was it?” “Most of it,” she said. “Some of it went for the vet, and the rest, the rest went to the credit card from the divorce. The one I never told you about.” Travis sat back.
I looked at my daughter, with her face in her hands, and I thought of the dust and the cold and the long winters of my life. “Shelby,” I said, “you could have told me about the horse. I would have paid the vet, and the hay, and the card. I would have paid it all and said nothing. You did not need to lie.” She raised her head. “I did not need to lie, because you were never going to say no. That was the thing.” I paused. “It is a terrible thing, to be loved so surely that you cannot ask.”
She stared at me. Travis cleared his throat and said he thought he should go and get some air, and Gus Weller said he would go with him, and the two men went out the back door together into the wind. I was alone with my daughter in the kitchen with the elk steaks cooling on the plates and the smell of the woodstove. “Mom, I am so ashamed,” Shelby said. “I know,” I said. “I can see it all over you.” I got up and went around the table and laid my arms around her shoulders, from behind, and put my chin on her head.
“Here is what we are going to do,” I said into her hair. “Tomorrow morning I am calling the family in Fort Collins. I would like to buy Biscuit back.” She went rigid. “Mom, the little girl rides him. She loves him.” “Then they will not sell,” I said. “And I will pay them what they paid, and fifty dollars a month for the rest of his life for hay, if they will let me visit him. I want to see him in the spring. I want to see him run.” She turned in my arms and looked up, and her face was blotched and wet and so young. “Would you do that?” she said.
I did it. I drove to Fort Collins in April with a thermos and a horse trailer I did not use. The family lived on twenty acres in the foothills, and the girl was nine years old, with braids and a gap in her teeth and a face lit like a lantern. Biscuit was in the corral, fat and gleaming, nosing at her pockets for sugar. When I got out of the truck he lifted his head and whinnied, a long rolling call that went through me like a bell. I walked to the fence. He came to me. He put his big sorrel nose in my hand, as if no time had passed.
They would not sell. The mother told me so with tears in her eyes, standing at the gate with her arms around her daughter. “But you can come any time,” she said. “For as long as he lives.” I said that was what I had hoped to hear. I stayed the afternoon. The girl taught me his favorite place to scratch, behind the left ear, and I gave her the old roping saddle of Clint from the barn in Laramie, wrapped in a blanket in the bed of my truck. She stood holding it with both arms. “It smells like him,” she whispered. I told her it did. I told her Clint would have wanted her to ride.
Shelby sold the snowmobile. She took a second job at the feed store and paid off the credit card in fourteen months. Travis stayed. He told me one night over the dishes that he had considered leaving, and had decided against it, because he thought a woman who confessed was a better bet than a woman who did not. On the first anniversary of the dinner, the three of us drove to Fort Collins in the snow. Biscuit was standing in the corral with his breath smoking in the cold, and the girl on his back, bareback, in a red parka. She waved. Shelby waved back, and then, quite suddenly, she was laughing.