The Blessings of the Animals: A Novel - By Katrina Kittle Page 0,17
. . . reciprocal. I pressed my fingers to the angry bumps on my arm.
“What happened, Mom? What did he do? He’ll be back, right?”
What did I say? Pretend it was just an argument? Would he come back?
I told the humiliating, scalding truth, then watched everyone reprocess this information.
Davy asked, as if sorting out complicated directions, “Wait. He left you?”
WHEN MY MOTHER’S CAR PULLED INTO THE DRIVE (GABBY had called her), I put my forehead on the kitchen island. My parents were professional stoics, and at the moment, I was too depleted to do the work to put on a brave face. I clutched my hands to my muddy hair. I couldn’t face my mother like this. My mother could stand in the dustbowl of a summer horse show, judging class after class of riders she’d allowed to remove their jackets in the savage heat—never removing her own jacket, of course—and look like she’d just stepped out of an air-conditioned room. Davy urged me upstairs to take a shower.
Bobby had taken his shaving mirror from the shower, but his razor stubble peppered the tub. This sight had greeted me nearly every morning of our life together.
Why hadn’t I told the truth to my friends? Who had I been kidding? At our Girls’ Nights Out (referred to by my friends as GNOs), Olive, Helen, and Aurora talked with equal passion of their love and irritation for their men. Nick wouldn’t stand up to his mother. Hank always forgot to ask before he committed them to plans as a couple. One of Aurora’s dates had never voted. Olive had turned to me: “So, your turn, Cami. Don’t hold back just because he’s my brother.”
When I smiled and shrugged, they insisted, “Oh, come on. Don’t make us hate you!”
Finally, I said, “He never rinses his damn stubble down the shower drain.”
Silence. Then, joking, “You suck. That’s all you’ve got?”
Now, with Bobby gone, I stepped into the shower—that stubble gritty under my feet—and wondered why I hadn’t told them about the burden of his unhappiness. Or the fact that he’d never dance. That a gift certificate for salsa classes died a quiet death in his dresser drawer. That the holidays I used to love became tense with his gloomy moods.
He hadn’t really left me, had he? He’d come back. He had to come back.
I washed my hair for a long time, partly because of my tender arm but also because I was stalling. I was too spent to talk to my mother. Oh, God. I didn’t want to be my mother. Just thinking that made me crouch down under the shower’s stream, my arms wrapped around my knees.
Suddenly I was eleven, scrunched down like that with Vijay, hiding in my parents’ hayloft, overhearing my parents argue.
Vijay and I had been walking on the ceiling beams that went over the indoor riding arena, from one loft to the other inside the barn, pretending to be tightrope walkers. When we heard my parents’ voices, we scampered off a beam and hid behind some bales of hay.
My parents never argued, but Dad’s word bitch rose to me and punched my stomach.
Beneath us, my father saddled Stormwatch, while my mother followed his every step.
“I’d do anything, Cleve,” Mom said.
Even at that age, my mother’s desperation and pleading tone sickened me. Her repeated “please” stung me as much as Dad’s rude insult.
“You ask a lot, Caroline,” my father said.
But as far as I could see, my mother hadn’t asked for anything. Ever. She toiled away behind the scenes. She wiped his boots. She wiped the horse’s mouth. She walked the course. She timed. She carried. She fetched.
My father mounted Stormwatch, clucked his tongue, and cantered out the open door.
“Don’t take it out on the horse!” Mom called.
When Dad rode away, Mom said, “That’s not who you want to hurt.” She stood, staring after him, hands on her head, frozen. When she finally left, Vijay and I climbed down and took off to report everything to Davy.
Terrified that our parents were going to split up, Davy and I spied on them both, recording observations and clues in black-and-white speckled notebooks. We witnessed more whispered arguments. Phone calls our father would end abruptly when we entered the room. I crept downstairs several nights to find Dad asleep on the couch, covered in our dogs and cats. Twice I found our parents’ bedroom empty, Dad’s truck gone, and Mom crying in the barn lot.