The Blessings of the Animals: A Novel - By Katrina Kittle Page 0,27
her.
“How nice of you,” I teased him, “to leave Mom the old, battered saddle.”
My mother raised her eyebrows.
Dad chuckled. “This ‘old, battered saddle’ is the most comfortable, well-made one we own.” He touched the pommel flap. “Looks like we may need another visit to Benny soon.”
I couldn’t count the times their saddler had tended to the Passier.
“Ever going to just give in and buy a new one?” I asked.
They exchanged a look full of meaning. “Nah,” they said, smiling at something shared that excluded me, tilting me a bit off balance.
“I remember when Stormwatch bit that saddle,” I said, hoping to bring them back.
Mom and Dad both reached out to touch the scar on the cantle. For no apparent reason, one day the stallion had chomped into the back of the saddle as it sat on his stall door.
I’d seen my parents rub countless hours of saddle soap and oil into the gash Benny had stitched together, each passing year making the mark less visible.
Dad ran his finger over the faint ridge. “These teeth marks?” he said. “These stitches? They add to the beauty of the saddle, to the value. They announce it was worth saving. I won’t replace it until it falls off in two pieces from the horse’s back.”
Mom pursed her lips, as if to comment on his rare sentimentality.
Once I had examined the fillies, I drove home. I passed the decapitated St. Francis still lying facedown in the mud, the shingles scattered in the yard, the branches down everywhere. I walked straight to the barn, where Muriel wandered in the aisle and the biter wouldn’t let me touch him.
What if you thought something was worth saving but you didn’t know where to begin?
HELEN AND HANK SHOWED UP WITH THE DAVIDS TO TAKE us to dinner. Davy had told them the news at an adoption meeting. Helen put her arm around me. “I’m so sorry, Cami.” She held me for a moment. “You pick the restaurant,” she said. “We’re not taking no for an answer.”
My heart lifted at this command invitation, at being taken care of, but my skeleton felt like it weighed a ton. I didn’t want to go anywhere but to bed.
Wonderful Hank—an attorney, like his wife—had brought a huge pot of homemade macaroni and cheese. “It has healing properties, I swear,” he said. “It’s good for the soul.”
Hank had run Cincinnati’s Flying Pig Marathon with Davy last spring. I envied these guys’ ability to eat any damn thing they pleased and still stay so greyhound scrappy.
I lifted the lid on Hank’s pot. Not your usual mac ’n’ cheese—fusilli and thin strips of red bell pepper peeked through the layer of bubbly golden-brown.
Hunger awoke in my belly, but with it came the image of Bobby, a towel tossed over his shoulder, expertly whacking a clove of garlic with the side of his knife.
I pushed that image from my head and joked I’d be content to sit on the kitchen floor to eat from this pot, but they insisted we go out and I eat Hank’s gift later.
I thought I could use Gabriella as an excuse to stay home and send everyone away, but when she returned, she seemed pleased to see everyone: “I’m starving. Are we going out?”
WE GOT A TABLE UPSTAIRS AT MY FAVORITE THAI RESTAURANT.
My eagerness for scraps about Bobby embarrassed me, so I was relieved when Gabby dove right in. “I met him at his apartment,” she said, “and we went to—”
“You met him where?” I asked.
I saw from Gabriella’s eyes that she’d thought I’d known this. “He rented an apartment.”
“Oh.” When I pictured him looking at apartments, signing a lease, making arrangements to move, then coming home to the farm each night pretending all was fine, the image cut into me with the precision of a scalpel.
“Everything he said sounded rehearsed and stupid,” Gabriella continued. “He said, ‘How do you tell someone you still love them but just don’t want to be married to them?’ ”
He had told me. He’d told me loud and clear last fall. My cheeks stung as I remembered.
A party at the farm. A crisp, first-sweatshirt-of-the-season night. A bonfire. Bobby grilled steaks. Gabby and Tyler searched the pasture edges to collect sticks for s’mores. The talk had turned to Ohio’s proposition to ban gay marriage. Gabby, the Davids, and I had spent many weekends chanting at rallies and pounding yard signs into the dirt of willing properties.
“Why shouldn’t gay people marry?” I’d asked. I’d stood on the patio