An Inconvenient Elephant by Judy Reene Singer Page B

closed my eyes. It was here that I knew he remembered me, this giving of his body for me to make use of. Diamond was right: Horses remember the way you ride. The way you sit on them. How you hold your shoulders, the ease that releases your back into theirs. He remembered me, and I was exultant. He remembered my body, how I moved and breathed and placed my weight. I tightened my back against his movement, and he dropped to the walk, moving in measured steps, then halted, square and proud.
    â€œYou’re lovely together,” Diamond called out. “Now I can see it. In both of you. The bond, I mean.”
    I jumped off and gratefully threw my arms aroundMousi’s neck. He nuzzled me for a moment, then pressed his head against my shoulder just the way he always had.
    I held on to him for a long time. My sudden tears mixed into his white mane, wetting the coarse, curly ends. I rubbed my face against his neck and breathed in the smell of hay and warm horse, and I didn’t care that Diamond was watching. Mousi remembered me. Somewhere in his spirit and mind and body he was still mine. He would always remember me because my riding had left something of me with him.
    And, I thought with some satisfaction, maybe, unlike other exes, you never really end it with a horse.

Chapter 13
    SOMETIMES YOU CAN GO HOME AGAIN.
    But you might have to make some adjustments.
    I pulled into the driveway of the house I had grown up in, the house of my childhood, the gathering place for sentimental holidays, Sunday dinners, and even Reese’s wedding to Marielle, two falls ago.
    At first, it looked disconcertingly unfamiliar, so properly suburban, with its new pale gray siding and freshly painted burgundy shutters, sculpted box hedges, and disciplined rows of white and pink mums presiding over a well-trimmed lawn. Diamond and I got out of the car, and I stayed at the curb for a moment, forcing myself to belong here, to this house and its memories. I had just come in from sweeping, unfiltered blue skies and beckoning openness. It was all still part of my internal landscape—the acacia trees laden withgnarled, thorny brown branches and white star flowers, the red-brown dust and rolling moonscape savannahs covered with rocks and ragged yellow weed, clouds the color of a snow stork in an uncannily lit blue sky. I couldn’t yet make peace with suburbia, if I ever had.
    â€œWell, this is where I grew up,” I said to Diamond, giving her a self-conscious shrug over the perfectly square stone walls and orderly flowers in military formation. My car stood polished and waiting in the driveway. My father had kept it running for me.
    â€œCivilized,” Diamond sniffed, but a look of envy crossed her face. “I’m surprised you didn’t come here first. Family completes all the fingers on your hand.”
    â€œI suppose,” I said vaguely.
    â€œIt’s perfect,” she said, flushing. “I was raised by an alcoholic aunt. I never had anything this nice. I’ll wager it’s lovely inside, all thick carpeting and fat sofas and gold chandeliers. And none of it held together by duct tape.”
    Â 
    The front door swung ajar, and suddenly I was spun back to my childhood. There was my mother, dressed in pristine white slacks and a pale pink sweater, tiny rose quartz earrings, and perfectly lacquered hair still the exact honey color it was when I was growing up. I was home, like the many times I had come in from a day of playing in the yard, or returning from a friend’s house, or back from a date. Home. It was comforting.
    It was suffocating.
    My mother held her arms open, and I stepped forward for a hug and a kiss while she murmured how sunburned Ihad gotten, how thin, how I needed a good haircut, and oh my goodness , my eyebrows needed to be tamed immediately.
    Suffocating.
    â€œMom, this is Diamond-Rose Tremaine,” I introduced them, studying my mother’s face for signs of culture shock.