you’re bipolar and off your meds. You do stupid things.”
“You never told me that you had a brother. Was Joey named after him?”
I nodded. “I suffer from depression too.”
“I knew you took anti-depressants. I kind of guessed, but it doesn’t matter to me. You know that, don’t you? Hell, I suffer with anxiety. It’s nothing we can’t work through.”
I returned my gaze to the window.
“When I was twenty-one years old, my boyfriend got his girlfriend pregnant. Yeah, that was said correctly. See, I thought I was the girlfriend, but no, I was the other woman. The relationship exploded when I called his mom and told her she was going to be a grandmother. I felt the need for revenge. Needless to say, Jay never spoke to me again. That was the first time I got severely depressed. I barely left the house. I slept all day. I was barely there. My parents were so worried about me, so my father bought me a horse.” I laughed to myself even though it wasn’t funny at all.
“Your dad sounds like a good man,” Roman spoke.
“Not really, but he knew I always wanted one, and Mom and Dad were getting desperate for me to care about anything. With a horse I had to be responsible. I had to get up and feed her and groom her. I loved it. I loved her.” I drifted into my own thoughts, but when he spoke, I pulled my attention back to him.
“What was your horse’s name?”
“Angel. She was a beautiful chestnut Racking Horse with a star between her big beautiful eyes. She was at least sixteen and a half hands tall, and my father always had to find a dip in the land to put her so my boot could reach the stirrup.” I paused. “We were glorious together. Angel had a certain amount of intelligence to her, if I would just let her go where she wanted, she would never steer me wrong. Angel made me look like I knew what I was doing. It was like we had this deal. She would let everyone think I was in control, but we both knew it was her.”
“What made you think of her today?”
I could tell that Roman was a little troubled by this conversation. He probably wasn’t expecting to be in here talking about horses.
“The rain…there was this one day when the clouds were threatening a possible thunderstorm, so I asked my dad if we could go riding. We tacked up our horses as fast as we could. Angel was excited, frisky, like me. She wanted to run and I wanted to fly, so we went to the meadow near our house and I looked at my dad and said, ‘Daddy can we run?’ He smiled and dismounted and he said go for it.”
“I’m confused. Didn’t you always run with a horse?”
I could tell he was trying to keep up with my line of thought.
Good luck, buddy.
“No, not if you were responsible. My dad was always worried I would ruin Angel’s gate. Racking Horses were known for their smooth ride. To gallop her would be irresponsible.”
“Oh…”
“Angel and I took off. We ran and ran. The wind was whipping through my hair and I had never felt so alive. It was possibly one of the best top ten things I ever did in my life. When the lightning shot down through the sky, Dad motioned for me to come back in. Angel and I ran back to him at full speed and then came to a sliding stop right beside him. He said, ‘Beth, you two looked beautiful!’ My dad never was one to compliment me. He actually died hating me, but on that day we were beautiful to him. Here was this complex man who could give his love so easily and then, in turn, take it away with a blink of an eye.
“Angel was getting restless and I started to dismount and that was when I saw it. There was this huge hole in the ground one step in front of Angel. If we had gone one more step the odds were that my horse would have stepped into that hole. With the speed we were running only one thing would have happened. We both would have fallen and Angel would have broken her leg. Normally, when a horse breaks its leg, it has to be put down. It was dangerous, what I did. I knew after that moment we would never run free