The Blessings of the Animals: A Novel - By Katrina Kittle Page 0,53
“No man puts my sister on the floor. You hear me? You wanna cry, you can cry in a chair. On the couch. In your bed. But not on the floor.”
The thing was, I wasn’t crying. I’d been too stunned, too leveled to cry. When I nodded, he kissed my forehead, then held me at arm’s length. “Let’s get you dolled up. You look like shit.”
As he supervised my makeup and hair and selected clothes from my closet, he asked, “Bobby’s gonna be there, right?”
I shrugged. “I told him about it—but who knows.”
“He better not bring that little slut with him.”
Slut made me wince. I thought Zayna had proven herself terribly misguided and much more shallow than I’d originally thought her, but I didn’t blame her the way I blamed Bobby. I could see her line of reasoning and understood it: this seductive, sad man—of course she wanted to try to save him, to lift him up, to be the reason for his smile. It was an instinct old as time—I will be the one. I will love him the way he needs to be loved.
Turns out Bobby did attend the concert, but with his mother, not the slut. My parents attended, too. Fortunately, Davy and I were late. The auditorium was crowded enough that we all ended up far away from one another, and no one had to worry about logistics.
Two soft, hymnlike songs in a row made me close my eyes. When I did, I pictured the farm. Pictured Moonshot. Could feel that clean, luxurious tail under my fingers.
Afterward, I expected to feel gleeful when Gabby came to me first with a big hug, but instead I felt wretched to realize: this is her life, forever dividing her affections, doling out her love. We’d failed her.
ONE AFTERNOON—AFTER ZEPPELIN HAD BEEN HAULED away by a family with an eleven-year-old girl who would worship him—I filled groundhog holes way out in the back pasture (which is a chore that does indeed need to be done, but perhaps not with such daily diligence as I’d been doing it lately). After I’d emptied the wheelbarrow of gravel, I returned to the barn to find a horse—a fetching gray mare I recognized as one of my dad’s old event horses, Caroline’s Cantata—dozing in the goat’s stall. One of my parents was here.
Their trailer stood by the scrunched-necked St. Francis. An aroma startled me as I went into the house—lemon roast chicken. One of Bobby’s recipes. The aroma ambushed me with the image of Bobby rubbing butter over the chicken’s skin and putting half a lemon into the chicken’s cavity while we talked over the day in the kitchen.
I walked into that buttery-lemon smell and found my mother in Bobby’s kitchen.
“Hello!” She smiled too brightly, not making eye contact, and spoke quickly. “I was in the mood to cook and thought I’d bring you girls a nice meal. I hope you don’t mind. I brought Cantata and hoped you and Biscuit would join us for a trail ride in this lovely weather.”
Was it lovely? I hadn’t noticed as I shoveled gravel from the wheelbarrow. I tried to think of an excuse. Why didn’t I want to? “I need to go back to the clinic this evening. I’m sorry.”
My mother’s frown bruised me, a frown of sorrow, not of judgment.
To divert her, I asked, “Is this the chicken Bobby always made?”
Mom nodded. “He told me how to do it once, when I asked.” She said it absently, looking inside one of the stacked ovens. Then she turned, took a deep breath, and said in a rush, “I’m afraid you kids are going to wreck this. Things are being set into motion that can’t be undone.”
Oh. That’s why she came. “It’s already wrecked, Mom. No ‘going to’ about it.”
“Have you tried talking to him? I mean sitting down and really talking?”
My sleep deprivation and hunger made me vicious. “To say what? Look, not everybody forgives a cheating spouse, okay? Some people have more self-respect than that!” Oh, shut up. Shut up. Why couldn’t I stop myself? I knew what this felt like!
Mom flinched but didn’t look as offended as I thought she deserved to be. “It takes great self-respect to forgive,” she said.
“You forgave too much. I’m not you, Mom. I can’t do it.”
She watched my lips move as if she were deaf and trying to lip-read. She spoke slowly, as if figuring out a puzzle. “You think I forgave too much?”