Chosen by a Horse by Susan Richards Page A

on for dear life. I thought if I could remember that moment, remember loving someone that much, I’d be able to love like that again. “What did I say when she died?”
    “You didn’t understand. You kept asking me when she was coming back.”
    “What would you tell me?”
    “I’d say, never. She’s never coming back.”
    “You understood death?”
    He’d pause. “I knew she wasn’t coming back.”
    There was no laughter when we talked about our mother or what it was like before she died. We found nothing funny about those years. However, we laughed about everything else in our childhoods.
    “Jean beat me with a belt once because I answered the telephone,” I told my brother. Jean was my grandfather’s second wife, and for a time I had lived with them in Baltimore. “She said twelve-year-olds had no business answering the telephone.”
    My brother and I would look at each other wide-eyed and laugh.
    “I’d do anything to avoid being punished for wetting the bed,” he’d say, “so I’d sleep sitting up in a chair and then wet the chair.”
    His bed-wetting stories could send us into hysterics. His wife and children would hear the laughter and return to the table.
    “Tell us about the time you buried the suitcase full of dirty sheets,” his daughter, Marguerite, would urge.
    He’d tell us: a nine-year-old boy walks into the woods next to my grandmother’s house carrying a suitcase containing a week’s worth of urine-soaked sheets and buries it. Unbeknownst to him, the boy is followed by a servant. Later the servant digs up the suitcase and presents it to my grandmother while she and the boy are eating lunch. The boy is dragged from the table by his hair and locked in a bedroomno one uses, with just a mattress on the floor. He is left there for a week with someone bringing his meals and letting him out to use the bathroom. At night he wets the mattress.
    Why did we laugh? Why did the endless repetition of this repertoire of our childhood horrors strike us as so funny? We didn’t laugh at the painful memories of others, just our own.
    “We’d go nuts if we didn’t laugh,” my brother said.
    “Hey, remember when they had our dog put to sleep and told us they had given her away?”
    “Yeah, that was
really
funny.”
    What he said about Hank going through the Rolodex was more like being tripped than being handed a piece of Juicy Fruit, but it lessened some of the pressure I felt about having a date. If I wasn’t someone special Hank had been losing sleep over for six years, I didn’t have to live up to anything. I was just an R in the Rolodex after A through Q hadn’t worked out. Maybe the Rs wouldn’t either and he’d move on to the Ss. It gave me the courage to meet him.
    As I stood in the kitchen, trying to absorb the idea that I had a date for the first time in almost ten years, the phone rang again. This time it was Allie. Before I could tell her about my date, she launched in about the horses. She said three days of letting the mares sniff each other over the stall door was plenty. Any longer and I’d be creating more tension by not allowing them to meet face to face. I should just turn them out in the pasture together. Right away.
    “No lead lines,” she said. “Just get out of the way and let them work it out.”
    “Lay Me Down is so stiff,” I argued. “She won’t be able to run if she needs to.”
    “Give her bute, wait an hour, and then let her out.”
    Bute is a painkiller and anti-inflammatory that comes as a white paste in an oral syringe. I gave Lay Me Down a moderate dose, waited an hour, and then it was time.
    I decided to give Lay Me Down a head start, so I let her out first, hoping she’d wander to the far end of the pasture. She didn’t, but she did go far enough to give her plenty of time to see Georgia coming. The bute had worked, and her gait was smoother, less labored. If she had to run, she could. Hotshot stood right next to her, and I wondered if he’d be a