Vivi Ann tossed the two flakes into the iron feeding rack and closed the door behind her. While Clem ate, Vivi Ann stood beside her, stroking the big mare’s silky neck.
“Are you ready for the rodeo, girl?”
The mare nuzzled her side as if in answer, almost knocking Vivi Ann off her feet.
In the years since Mom’s death, Vivi Ann and Clementine had become inseparable. For a while there, when Dad had quit speaking and started drinking, and Winona and Aurora had been busy with high school, Vivi Ann had spent most of her time with this horse. Sometimes, when the grief and emptiness had been too much for Vivi Ann to handle, she’d slipped out of her bedroom and run to the barn, where she’d fall asleep in the cedar shavings at Clem’s hooves. Even after Vivi Ann had gotten older and become popular, she’d still considered this mare her best friend. The deepest of her secrets had been shared only here, in the sweet-smelling confines of the last box stall on the east aisle.
She patted Clem’s neck one last time and left the barn. By the time she reached the house, the sun was a smear of butterscotch-yellow light in the charcoal-gray winter sky. From this vantage point, she could see the steel-gray waters of the Canal and the jagged, snow-covered peaks of the distant mountains.
When she stepped into the shadowy farmhouse, she could hear the telltale creaking of floorboards and knew her father was up. She went into the kitchen, set three places at the table and then started breakfast. Just as she put a plate of pancakes into the oven to warm, she heard him come into the dining room. Pouring him a cup of coffee, doctoring it with sugar, she took it to him.
He took it from her without looking up from his Western Horseman magazine.
She stood there a moment, wondering what she could say that would start a conversation.
Dressed in his usual work clothes—well-worn Wrangler jeans and a plaid flannel shirt, with a saucer-sized silver belt buckle and leather gloves tucked in his waistband—he looked like he did every morning. And yet there was something different, too: a subtle collection of lines or wrinkles that aged his face.
The years since Mom’s death had been unkind to him, sharpening his features and adding shadows where none belonged, both in his eyes and in the fleshy bags beneath. His spine had curved; it was the mark of a farrier, he said, the natural result of a lifetime spent hammering nails into horses’ hooves, but loss had played a part in that curving of his spine, too. Vivi Ann was certain of it. The weight of an unexpected loneliness had reshaped him as surely as the hours he’d spent hunched at work. The only time he really stood tall anymore was when he was in public, and she knew how much it pained him to appear unbowed by his life.
He sat down at the table and read his magazine while Vivi Ann readied and served breakfast.
“Clem’s made some awesome practice runs this month,” she said, taking her place across from him. “I really think we have a chance of winning the rodeo in Texas.”
“Where’s the toast?”
“I made pancakes.”
“Fried eggs need toast. You know that.”
“Mix them in with the hash browns. We’re out of bread.”
Dad sighed heavily, obviously irritated. He looked pointedly at the empty place setting on the table. “You seen Travis this morning?”
Vivi Ann glanced through the window toward the barn. There was no sign of their ranch hand anywhere. No tractor out and running, no wheelbarrow by the barn door. “I fed the horses already. He’s probably out fixing that fence.”
“You picked another winner with that one. If you’d quit rescuin’ every hurt horse between here and Yelm, we wouldn’t need no help around here at all. And the truth is we can’t afford it.”
“Speaking of money, Dad . . . I need three hundred bucks for the rodeo this week and the coffee can is empty.”
He didn’t respond.
“Dad?”
“I had to use that money to pay the hay bill.”
“It’s gone?”
“The tax bill just came, too.”
“So we’re in trouble,” Vivi Ann said, frowning. She’d heard it before, of course, had always known there wasn’t much money, but for the first time, it really hit home. She understood suddenly why Winona was always harping about saving money for taxes. She cast an upward glance at her dad. He sat hunched forward, with his elbows on the table. Her sisters would have seen that as rude; Vivi Ann was sure she knew better. “Your back hurting you again?”
He didn’t answer, didn’t even acknowledge the question.
She got up, went into the kitchen, and got him some ibuprofen, setting the pills gently on the table between them.
His splayed farrier’s hand closed over them.
“I’ll find a way to get the money, Dad. And I’ll win this week. Maybe as much as two thousand bucks. Don’t you worry.”