The Blessings of the Animals_A Novel

CHAPTER Thirteen

AFTER GABBY WENT TO BED, I E-MAILED BOBBY, SAYING, “Gabriella is very upset about what happened today. Please talk to her.”
I tried to sleep, but I worried over that “No man is going to wreck me” like a terrier with a bone. Is that how Gabby saw me? And when I wasn’t mulling that, I was picturing Zayna and Bobby with their puppy. The image made me feel like someone sat on my chest.
I woke up in the wee hours, with a slight hangover headache, to Gerald and Gingersnap growling at each other at the foot of the bed—deep, demonic rumbles, punctuated by spitting and hissing. “Shut up,” I warned, but they were in full throttle. Max stood with his two front feet on the bed, whining, trying to be the peacemaker.
I finally kicked the two cats out of the room and managed to get back to fitful sleep for an hour or so before the whole routine started again. This time, there was no Max trying to moderate. It was barely light outside.
I padded past Gabby’s room, but her door was already open, her bed made. Max must be with her, down in the barn. Poor Gabby. I lay briefly on her bed, breathing her pillow.
Downstairs in my office I cursed to discover Gerald had emptied my purse and shredded my checkbook, a pad of sticky notes from the Advantage drug rep, and what appeared to have fortunately been only a one-dollar bill. “You little paper-loving shit,” I muttered. I cleaned up, then checked my e-mail. There was one from Vijay, saying he was heading to the airport to fly back to the States. While I sat there, an e-mail popped in from Bobby. Just one line: “Please tell Gabriella to talk to me.” You bastard. Why did she have to do the work? Why would you put the burden on the child? Okay, a seventeen-year-old intelligent young woman, but still a child. I rolled my eyes at the way we both said “please.”
While I was waiting for the coffee to brew, I jumped when Gabby’s cell phone went off in her backpack on the floor. The ring tone was the Sopranos theme song. I dug out the phone, even though I knew who it was—and sure enough it said “Dad.”
We’d teased Tyler the first few times he’d encountered Bobby’s crazy family. “So, what do you think of the Binardis?” I asked him after one Sunday family dinner.
He smiled, wide-eyed, and said, “It’s kinda like The Sopranos without all the guns.”
I couldn’t help myself. I said, feigning surprise, “You haven’t seen the guns?”
I had him for a minute.
Here in the kitchen, Gabby’s phone beeped. New voice mail.
I was not a snoop. But I was Gabriella’s mom, and occasionally I scrolled through her call history to make sure I recognized who she talked to. I didn’t listen to her messages—I just liked to be sure there wasn’t some name I couldn’t identify. So, I flipped open her phone.
“Dad.” “Dad.” “Dad.” I scrolled down. Since seven o’clock last night, Bobby had called her fifteen times, and she’d never answered. There was not one call dialed from Gabby to her father.
Here I’d been e-mailing Bobby to call her. But, damn it, where was he? Why wasn’t he showing up? Tracking her down? Why wasn’t he trying harder?
The coffeemaker finished dripping, and I carried a steaming cup outside, where Muriel met me on the porch and escorted me down to the barn, her little tail twitching.
Biscuit’s stall was empty. I looked at the rosy sunrise and figured Gabby was out on a trail. A bike path and bridle trails ran between the end of our back fence line and the highway.
I gathered the buckets, hoof pick, and Epsom salts I’d use once Helen arrived, then sat on an upside-down bucket in the barn lot. I watched the sun rise, cradling my coffee cup in my lap. Muriel knelt beside me, only her front legs folded, her rear high in the air.
My daughter’s soft laughter—one of my favorite sounds in the world—made me turn to see her approaching bareback on Biscuit. “You two look like you’re praying,” she said.
I smiled. “Maybe we are.”
Gabby walked Biscuit close to me. “Yep,” she said, lying down along his neck and hugging him, her dark hair intermixing with his golden mane. “This is my church.”
I scratched the coarse hair along Muriel’s back. “Mine, too.”
Gabriella wore a helmet but it wasn’t snapped, and she had only a cotton lead rope looped through Biscuit’s halter, no bit.
Biscuit nickered amiably to Moonshot, who bared his teeth. Biscuit flicked his ears, nonplussed, then bent his nose to Muriel. They exchanged breath. “I read somewhere,” Gabby said, watching them, “that if you blow into a baby bison’s nostrils, he’ll follow you anywhere.”
“Hmm. Too bad I don’t know any baby bison to test this.” I’d personally always thought that animals smell our breath because they’re able to smell our intent. I’d lately become envious of this ability. “I wish you would talk to your dad.”
She sat up and entwined her fingers in Biscuit’s mane. “Did he call you?”
I didn’t answer one way or the other. “We’re all trying to figure out how to make this work, but he’s your father, Gabriella. I don’t want you to lose your relationship with him.”
“He’s your husband, and he threw your relationship down the toilet.”
I swallowed. Her anger seemed to radiate from her in waves. “I just want you to know,” I said, choosing my words carefully, “that what happened between your father and me has nothing to do with you, and it did not ‘wreck’ me. It’s a whole separate—”
“And what did happen between you?” Her face was flushed, her lip curled back. Even sweet Biscuit raised his head, agitated. “Nothing, right? He just up and left. He’s an a*shole.”
“Gabriella. It’s more complicated than that. He’s been very unhappy for a—”
“God, listen to yourself, Mom. Why are you defending him? Have some self-respect.”
Thank God, she swung herself down from Biscuit and led him into the barn before I could speak. If a horse hadn’t been between us, I might have yanked her by that auburn hair and slapped her face. I felt like she’d slapped me. But what smacked the hardest against my cheekbones was the realization that I’d said those same things to my mother.
I sat seething until Tyler walked into the barn lot. He carried a box from David’s Hot Buns. He could barely meet my eyes, and two red spots appeared high in his cheeks.
Oh, God. I remembered what I’d asked him. He was smart enough to know what his bungled answer had revealed.
“Hey,” I said lightly. “I’ve got a veterinary situation you might be interested in.”
When Gabby walked out of the barn, I saw the flash of pain that crossed her face before she hid it behind a mask of cool indifference. “You’re early,” she said.
“I know.” Tyler held up the box. “I thought we could have breakfast. I got your favorite.”
“I still have to shower,” she said, walking away, not even thanking him.
I itched to follow her up the path and shake her shoulders. She was a better person than this! Why was she being so coldhearted? She was acting just like Bobby.
Tyler looked crushed. “She and I just had an argument,” I said to him. “I think you got blasted with the aftereffects.”
He looked grateful but said, “That’s more than she’s spoken to me all week, unless we’re talking about debate.”
Fortunately, Helen arrived, distracting us.
Helen held Moonshot’s halter as she had last night while I leaned into him to pick up his foot. Again he seemed in worse pain when the foot was held off the ground, which didn’t make sense to me. I tried to work quickly with the hoof pick, prying loose the embedded layers of dirt, gravel, and manure. I got down to his frog and felt the hard, hot lump. “Yep. He’s going to abscess. Feel that?” I let Tyler feel the hoof. The way his face changed heartened me. The interest, the curiosity—the heartache with Gabriella temporarily forgotten. I strained to keep Moonshot’s leg up while Tyler pulled the bucket of hot water and Epsom salts into position.
Moonshot was so eager to put his leg down that half the bucket’s contents splashed out on my jeans. He snorted in surprise, then groaned a sound that was unmistakably relief.
I bent over, hands on knees, peering at his back feet. “Look at that.” I pointed to his left rear hoof, near the coronet band. “He’s abscessing in two feet. This poor guy.”
Sure enough, the head of the abscess was visible—angry, hot, and ready to open.
I tried to clean that back hoof, but Moonshot was too inclined to kick with it. I managed to pry some layers of muck from the bottom before my aching back insisted I give up. Three tries got that back hoof finally planted in another bucket of hot water.
While Moonshot stood in buckets, I took off his too-big halter. Ideally, I’d leave his face naked to let those raw rub marks across his nose heal, but he was still too tough to handle. I rustled up another halter that fit him properly, with lambskin pads across the noseband.
Tyler helped watch Moonshot’s head while I took scissors to the worst of the dreadlocks in his mane and clipped the clumps of matted hair hanging from his belly and legs.
“Can’t you just give him antibiotics?” Tyler asked. “Wouldn’t that be faster than all this soaking and dealing with . . . pus?”
I rested a hand on the horse’s withers. He let me, although he ground his teeth, the munching-gravel sound making my skin shudder. “Some people do. But you know what I’ve found? It makes the infection appear to get better. Everything clears up for three or four weeks, and then, just when you think you’re out of the woods, it comes back. There aren’t any shortcuts. You’re better off going slow and letting the ugly stuff come through.”
Helen looked at me from across Moonshot’s back. “You gonna take your own advice?”
I looked away.
AFTER THE KIDS AND HELEN HAD LEFT, I CALLED A FARRIER to check Moonshot’s hooves and a large-animal vet I liked to take a look at the abscesses. With their help, I discovered that the back hoof’s abscess was caused by a nail—probably from the stall he’d been in the process of dismantling when I’d met him—but the front hoof was still a mystery. I was to soak him three times a day.
I welcomed the time this ritual was going to take. I wanted every moment filled up. I was not wrecked. I would show Gabriella I was fine.
I hauled branches to the county refuse yard, chatted with the roofer who came out to fix the missing shingles, and managed to reattach the gutter to the barn myself, injured arm and all.
I propped St. Francis upright, balanced his head in place, and stuck my chewing gum in the space between as a temporary fix. Unless you looked closely, you didn’t notice the split.
MY “STAY BUSY” ROUTINE DIDN’T PREVENT ME FROM SEEING my daughter’s heartbreak. She returned around four that afternoon. My “How’d it go?” was met with a shrug as she opened the fridge.
That Sopranos ring tone sounded again from her backpack, but she ignored it.
“You think we’re ever going to have real food in the house again?” she asked.
I winced but didn’t answer. “Are you ever going to talk to him?”
“Maybe.” She took a pear, a Diet Coke, and a yogurt from the fridge. “Maybe not.”
She carried her food up the stairs to her room and shut the door.
I sighed, glad to know the ring tone she’d picked for me was Wonder Woman. That is, unless she’d changed it.
My own cell phone rang while I was in the shower. I didn’t have special ring tones for different callers, never having bothered to program such things. When I checked the display and saw it was Helen, I shut off the water and answered, standing in the tub naked and dripping.
“Feel like tackling a crazy cat lady? Got a report on one downtown.”
“Aren’t we supposed to handle large animals?” I complained, already knowing I would do it. It would fill more time. It would show Gabby that I was just fine, thank you very much.
Gabby’s door was still closed, so I stood in the hallway and called her cell. I listened. Yep, sure enough it was still Wonder Woman.
“You’re such a freak,” she said into her phone. “Why are you calling me?”
“I’m going on a rescue with Helen.”
She opened her bedroom door and we stood there, yards away from each other, phones to our ears. Still speaking into her phone she said, “Okay. Good luck. I’m sorry I was a bitch.”
“Apology accepted. Call your father.”
She made a face at me and snapped her phone shut. “Sorry! We got disconnected!”
“You are a bitch.”
“But you love me anyway, right?”
I thought about saying something like “maybe” or “don’t push it,” but some things you don’t mess with. This was my daughter. There was only one right answer. “Of course I love you.”
She stood in her doorway. “I love you, too.”
“Call him.”
She slammed the door.