Ned some more painkillers until it was time to prep him, which would be in just a minute. The bit of finger had been taken by a nurse who had met them at the doors to the hospital—put, everyone assumed, on ice. Her father talked sense to Ned until Ned told him, in a harsh voice her father had never heard him use, I don’t need it, Ben. I can live without it. And when her father had creased his eyes in a show of patience and opened his mouth, Ned had said, Get off me, Ben, I’m in too much pain.
That had done it, Ned said. His head was in her lap when he finally told her the story himself. Knox watched his face redden and his mouth twitch into his sorry, half-formed smile as he spoke of pushing her father away. Her father had promoted him to stallion manager when he was only twenty-two. He had paid for Ned’s first car and cosigned for the Lexington apartment that Ned’s mother still lived in.
It was the shock, Knoxie, he said. All I could think was I wanted to get home. I was embarrassed. That horse had bullied me.
I know, Knox said. She tried to imagine how Dynamite had gotten enough leverage to rip the flesh off at the knuckle. She wanted to ask about that, to pull Ned away from himself and back into a recounting of the action, the quick yank of the stallion’s head. Embarrassed—she had felt embarrassed, too, when Ned grazed her cheek for the first time with the bandaged place, and she had barely been able to keep herself from jumping.
I could have waited, Ned went on, but I just yelled for them to stitch me up, and then your dad drove me home. I am one idiotic fuck, Ugly.
He was trying to laugh, which made Knox look away. You’re not, she said, before shaming herself into looking back. She didn’t want him to laugh just then, when he didn’t mean it. It had been too late to do anything about his finger by the next morning, when her father called her, assuming that Ned had stayed over when he hadn’t answered the phone at his own house. “I thought for sure he’d be with you,” her father had said, forcing Knox to ask what had happened. She drove to Ned’s and found him asleep on the couch, still in yesterday’s clothes. When she woke him, he looked at her in fear, as if he knew that she would be angry with him for his foolishness and regret.
But what he told the nosy tourist in the barn that day, the day Knox came upon him with a group and decided to watch him from the threshold, was: “You know, my girlfriend shot it off. She hated for me to point out better-looking women.” He was moving as he spoke, pulling a brass rod out of its latch and sliding a stall door smoothly open to reveal the stallion inside. His voice was sure and easy.
After a second, people began to laugh. Knox could hear release in the laughter, which lasted just a beat too long: the young man hadn’t felt the need to satisfy their curiosity with something true, thank God. Knox zeroed in on a guy in maroon University of Alabama shorts and a silvery brush cut as he clasped his wife closer and nodded with exaggerated vigor into her face. She grinned up at him, nodding back. Marlene probably wouldn’t appreciate the fact that Knox had found this funny. It had been all she could do at the time not to walk up to Ned and grip him in a half nelson, just to give the people their money’s worth. Play the pussy whip, the ball breaker—it would be easy. She could improvise her indignation, would prefer some light fakery to the reality of Ned’s need for her, his sad, sweaty head in her lap. Other women seemed to crave weakness in their men—or at least frequent displays of vulnerability. Charlotte had seemed to, for some unknown reason, in her own husband, who trailed her like a puppy, Knox thought. But Knox craved moments like these, when Ned, or her father, held people in the thrall of a joke or gesture and kept the world in love with them and their maleness. She didn’t know why. In the end, she had decided to stay hidden, and made her way to the little shaded