When she’d pulled up with Catherine and Trackwork Ted, she’d stood on the porch, alone. She held her hand up, fleetingly.
We won, we won.
Then, in.
Dear Carey,
If you’ve done the right thing (and I know you have), you’re reading this when you get home, and Cootamundra has won. You took it away from them in the first furlong. I know you like that style of racing. You always liked the great front-runners. You said they were the bravest ones.
See? I remember everything.
I remember what you said when you first saw me:
There’s a boy up there on that roof.
I eat toast sometimes just to write your name in the crumbs.
I remember everything you’ve told me, about the town you grew up in, and your mum and dad, your brothers—everything. I remember how you said, “And? You don’t want to know my name?” It was the first time we spoke on Archer Street.
There are so many times I wish Penny Dunbar was still around, just so you could talk to her, and she’d have told you a few of her stories. You’d have been in our kitchen for hours….She’d have tried to teach you the piano.
Anyway—I want you to keep the lighter.
I never really had many friends.
I have my brothers and you and that’s all.
But okay, I’ll stop talking now, except to say that if Cootamundra didn’t win by some chance, I know there’ll be other days. My brothers and I, we’ll have put some money on, but we didn’t bet on the horse.
Love,
Clay
And sometimes, you know, I imagine it.
I like to think she hugged her parents for the last time that night, and that Catherine Novac was happy, and that her father couldn’t have been prouder. I see her in her room; her flannel shirt, jeans, and forearms. I see her holding the lighter, and reading the letter, and thinking Clay was something else.
How many times did she read it? I wonder.
I don’t know.
We’ll never know.
No, all I know is that she left the house that night and the Saturday rule was broken:
Saturday night at The Surrounds.
Not Monday.
Never Monday.
And Clay?
Clay should have gone back.
He should have been on a train that night—back to Silver, to the Amahnu, on his way to finish a bridge, to shake our father’s hand—but he, too, was at The Surrounds, and she came with a rustle of feet.
And us?