The Blessings of the Animals: A Novel - By Katrina Kittle Page 0,52
for the barn after Olive left. I leaned on Moonshot’s fence—I’d given up on the electric tape and never bothered to turn it on anymore. Muriel stood beside me, butting her head against my leg.
I thought of what Gabby had said: You look like you’re praying.
So I practiced the form of prayer I’d practiced all my life, being in the presence of animals. I soaked Moonshot’s feet again. As I got his hooves settled in the buckets, I watched in awe as Muriel scaled the paddock fence as nimbly as a child. She and Moonshot snuffed each other’s breath, then she pulled mouthfuls from his hay pile, nibbling her sideways chews.
I brushed Moonshot’s matted coat. I’d put off trying to comb his tail, wary of those back legs, but now I eyed that gnarled mess—it looked like three or four bird nests knotted together. I pulled the tail to the side, out of range of those hooves, and began loosening the tangles, pulling out straw, clumps of dirt, and manure. To my surprise, Moonshot didn’t just tolerate this attention but seemed to enjoy it. He stopped eating, eyes half closed, ears drooped to the sides.
I massaged his tail’s dock—the portion with the bone and muscle—and his lower lip relaxed. He began to snap his front teeth together while bobbing his head, the equivalent of a dog involuntarily thumping his leg when you get just the right spot.
I tried to be in the moment, just as Moonshot was. I emptied my mind of Gabby’s bleakness, Zayna’s betrayal, Bobby’s cowardice. I just combed this horse’s tail.
The water in the buckets cooled. When I stopped finger-combing Moonshot’s tail, he moved his hind end abruptly toward me, knocking over both buckets, startling all three of us—Muriel springing to her cloven hooves and climbing out of the paddock.
After a rush of adrenaline, I recognized he was saying, “Don’t stop.” So I moved the buckets and combed his tail for twenty more minutes, soothing us both. He tried to get me to continue again, but I patted his rump and said, “That’s all for now, handsome.”
I exited his paddock, feeling calmer and centered. Feeling fine.
I SAW MY FIRST ATTORNEY AND HATED THE ENTIRE EXPERIENCE. I sat in the lobby, repeating, People do this every day, to calm myself, but I felt I should have had a giant red D emblazoned on my forehead. The attorney herself was too slick for my taste, whippet thin, with a face taut from plastic surgery. She wanted to take Bobby for all he was worth, the restaurant, all of it, even though I told her I only wanted to protect Gabriella and keep the farm. When the attorney tapped some figures into a calculator and told me the monstrous spousal support Bobby could owe me “for five years or more, and that’s before we even talk about child support,” I glazed over, wrote a few notes, and knew I would never return.
EACH TIME I SOAKED MOONSHOT, I WAS ABLE TO HANDLE him a little more. Whenever he grew agitated with my other ministrations, I returned to his tail. Over the course of two weeks, with nearly a bottle and a half of ShowSheen, a wide-toothed plastic comb, and my fingernails, I could run my fingers through the elastic black hairs with no knots or tangles stopping me.
BOBBY AND I WENT THROUGH A BRIEF SPATE OF E-MAILS AS he continued to call Gabriella seven to ten times a day (I checked; she never answered or responded, to his or to Tyler’s messages).
When I called Bobby on the “If I hadn’t done this, I’d be dead” statement, he wrote that “Keeping this secret was killing me. A good day was a day when I didn’t think about killing myself.” I’d suspected he’d been depressed, but the idea that he’d been suicidal and never shared it with me, his wife, supposedly his closest friend, brought me to my knees. Literally.
DAVY FOUND ME SITTING ON THE FLOOR OF MY OFFICE AFTER I read that e-mail. He’d come over to accompany me to Gabriella’s choir concert that evening. I’d heard him knock but couldn’t pull myself together. He came in, cursing as Muriel tried to squeeze past him. When he found me, I saw sympathy in his eyes, but only for a second before he turned tough. “Get off the floor.”
He pulled me, roughly, when I didn’t stand on my own. “Get the fuck up off the floor.”