Chosen by a Horse by Susan Richards

and felt ready to “get out there again,” as he put it. Would I like to have dinner next Saturday?
    “I’d love to,” I said, but what I really meant was, I’d love to be able to. I’d love to be able to throw on a little black dress and head out the door next Saturday night like thousands of women all over America. That he’d asked, that he’d remembered me six years later and called was enough excitement. The miracle had already happened. Getting to know him could ruin it. But I can’t tell him that. I said I’d love to. I could call and cancel later.
    Being asked for a date was big news, big enough to make me want to tell someone, so I called my brother, Lloyd, a lawyer who lived in Vermont with his wife and three children. I could count on getting the sensitive male perspective from my brother.
    “He’s probably going through his Rolodex and it took him a year to get to the Rs,” he said.
    I could also count on getting the
insensitive
male perspective, the reality check. It was impossible to forget that I was the
God-you’re-so-dumb
little sister, still getting my nose flicked every time I fell for the
What’s this on the front of your shirt?
routine. That was my earliest memory of him. I trusted him, and he tripped me every chance he got.
    After our mother died and our father left, for a few brief weeks we crawled into each other’s beds at night and whispered about what was to become of us. On one of thosenights he gave me a piece of Juicy Fruit gum, the first thing he had ever given me, and it was as though he had given me the Hope Diamond. Those few weeks huddled together at night, along with the gift of gum, created a connection to him that was so strong in me it survived the next twenty years we were to be separated.
    By our forties, our pattern hadn’t changed much. Sometimes I got tripped, and sometimes I got Juicy Fruit gum, but our connection was deep and unbreakable. We liked to talk about the past.
    When I’d visit him in Vermont we’d sit around the table after dinner and start talking about
What Had Happened
.
    “What was it like before she died?” I’d ask. I had almost no memories of our mother, no memories of our family doing anything together. My brother was seven when she died, I had been five. He remembered a lot.
    “In the summer we’d go to the beach,” he’d say. “Dad liked to cook out on the beach.”
    “Did we have fun?” I’d ask. “Did Mom and Dad get along?”
    “Sometimes,” he’d say. “She didn’t like his drinking.”
    After a while, my brother’s wife and three teenage children would start to fidget, and one by one, they’d slip away from the table and leave us to our excavating.
    “Did she know she was dying?”
    He’d nod. “She told me to take care of you.”
    And in a way he had. Not then, not when he was seven and sent away to a boarding school in South Carolina thathad created a third grade especially for him. And not during the years when I was sent from relative to relative and eventually to a boarding school in Massachusetts in eighth grade. It was after college, when we were both in graduate school in Boston, that we started to get together regularly. Two or three times a week I’d drive to his house in the suburbs, and we’d take a walk or have dinner and catch up on the past.
    I needed to do that. I needed to know what had happened to us and, as much as possible, why. And I couldn’t do it without my brother’s early memories of our family, because I had almost no memories of my own. He never got tired of answering my questions, even when I asked the same ones over and over again.
    “Did I love her?” That was what disturbed me the most—not remembering her love for me, but mine for her.
    “The last time we visited her in the hospital, you climbed into her bed, and it took two nurses to pull you away from her. You screamed all the way to the car.”
    I pictured a little girl who looked like me, clinging to her mother, holding