The Wilder Sisters (2 page)

Austin nodded. “Wouldn’t mind a little of that myself. Now, where’s my buddy Max?”

At the sound of his name, the gelding brayed. He was a smart old horse, and he always recognized the noise the vet’s truck made long before Rose saw it coming up the gravel driveway. Austin had been seeing to Max since the animal came to the Flynn house as an eight- year-old ex-schooling horse. Rose had grown up on a breeding ranch. She knew there had to be a reason anyone would sell a gelding that young

and handsome at such a low price. Amanda, twelve at the time, and horse-smitten, a state that preceded boy-crazy by three incredibly short months, swore she could not take another breath on this earth without Max for her very own. Philip, Amanda’s father and hero, had caved in to her demands and purchased the horse over Rose’s objections. Amanda possessed the attention span of a goldfish and always would, but Philip had been father-blind to his daughter’s shortcomings.
You’re awfully cynical for a mother
, her husband had often pointed out. Philip traveled weekdays during their marriage, staying in hotels and enjoying room service on a sales rep’s expense account. He’d come home on weekends when the kids were as far from the house as possible.
Rose, with all your free time, can’t you keep this place picked up
? Though his words still echoed in an uncomfort- able way, they no longer mattered. Philip was dead. Two years ago Christmas, some liquored-up vacationing skier from California had broadsided him on Highway 84. The drunk driver had better lawyers than Rose could afford, and no amount of money was going to bring her husband back. She accepted the insurance settlement and par- layed her job from part-into full-time. Amanda was twenty now, running around the country with some tattooed drummer whose hairstyle resembled that of a puli dog. The boyfriend smelled like bad cheese, and his clothes never matched. He’d made enough of an impact on Amanda that she’d adopted the same fashion stance. Given the state in which she’d left her room, it was clear that Amanda and dirt were destined to have a long-term relationship.

Not surprisingly, over the past two years, Max’s back problems had emerged. He was going on eighteen, getting up there in terms of horse years. It was Rose who had to deal with the medical situ- ations and find the money to pay for them. Austin was trying out different therapies, but vet care wasn’t the only expense. Max needed special shoes that cost more than Rose had ever paid for a pair of her own. If he wasn’t regularly schooled, he nosed the gate open and “exercised” himself, across the road toward the highway. While Winky made a temporary pal for Max, companionship wasn’t enough. The fact was, if you owned a horse, it deserved a consistent relationship. Most vets wouldn’t, but if Austin needed to assess the animal’s problems firsthand, he’d sometimes take Max for a couple of laps around the corral himself. Then again, Austin Donavan wasn’t most vets, Rose thought as she watched

him kneel down and put his hands in the dirt in front of him. “Austin? she asked. “Have you taken up yoga?”

Without looking up at her, he lifted one knee, plucked a piece of gravel out from under it and flung the offending stone away. “Sometimes if I get down on all fours, I can look at the world the way an animal does.”

“Really? And how is that?”

“Well, for one thing, it’s all hard ground down here. Imagine if you’ve already got a sore back. When there’s only gravel between you and the open road, just moving forward can seem like a trial.” Rose wondered if he meant she should shovel her driveway down to dirt. If she did that, when the snow fell and the road froze over,

Max could slip and break a leg, or she could.

Apparently Austin hadn’t learned everything he needed to down there, because after awhile he stood up, brushed off his knees, and climbed onto the horse’s back. He executed a few diagnostic trans- itions from the walk to the trot. Rose hoped that in addition to dia- gnosing Max’s problems Austin was also giving her vacation request serious consideration.

Austin sat a horse the same way Rose’s father did. His long skinny legs hung loose, his barely two handfuls of muscled butt straddled the thousand-pound animal with ease. He didn’t need a saddle; his body melded to the horse’s back. Rose climbed the fence and settled herself on the top rail. Watching him, she believed she understood the origin of the centaur myth: Some early literate woman had been rendered speechless beholding this very sight.

She said a silent prayer that the gelding wouldn’t pitch her boss into the sand. Lately—if one could call the last five years lately—her life had felt so unpredictable. Things that generally moved along in a plodding, predictable fashion went strangely awry. There were entire weeks she felt on edge, and usually they centered around her children.

What Austin said was true. Rose could blame her daughter, but it wasn’t going to accomplish anything. Neither Amanda nor her brother Second Chance stopped by the house much at all these days, finding life outside Floralee far more intriguing than in it. Second Chance raced motorcycles and seemed to have made a parallel career of breaking girls’ hearts. Sooner or later they tracked down his home phone number and called Rose in the wee hours of the morning.
Is Second

Chance there
? they’d whimper tearfully at two
A.M.
, and when Rose sleepily explained she had no idea where he was, they tried to unload on her.
He promised he’d
: call, write, pick her up from work—the list had no end.

Rose’s son had a face so handsome girls threw themselves at him, but even if he looked like a man, he was still a boy more enamored of motorcycles than women.
There are two sides to every story
, she told the girls who telephoned.
Don’t get me wrong. I believe he let you down, and I’m sure sorry about that. Go back to college, honey. Join a church group, and date somebody with both feet on the ground
. Beware of the entire male race. She never actually said the last part out loud, but sometimes she thought it. She lay awake in her bed until the sun came up, wondering how on earth her two genius offspring had made such bona fide messes of their lives. Those times her children did show up, they spilled detergent on the tile, swiped money from her purse, inferred that she was one step away from housecoats. Second Chance delivered Max a pat on the muzzle and threw the ball for Chachi, his Jack Russell, who literally bounced off the walls with joy until the last long toss, which sent him running so far on his stubby little legs that by the time he retrieved it, her son had lost interest or driven away. The curmudgeonly dog then tore the ball to bits and returned to his life’s work, which consisted of digging to China in what remained of Rose’s front yard. Austin had sugges- ted filling the holes with water, but that only awakened in Chachi a latent love of mud, so Rose left the front yard in ruts. Let the neighbors think she was one of those women who allowed everything go to hell when the husband died. Maybe she was.

In the years since Philip’s death, her daughter had come to hold her mother responsible for loosing such anarchy on her well-ordered world.
Maybe Daddy wouldn’t have been working all the time if you’d paid him more attention
, Amanda had accused. Rose understood Amanda’s grief better than she did her own.
Oh, honey. Your father was in the wrong place at the wrong time
, she patiently explained.
People die, Amanda. Never the ones who deserve to, and never when it’s conveni- ent. It’s one of life’s more mysterious lessons, just like men getting craggier and more handsome as they age, and women, no matter how generous our souls, how polished our wit, just growing old
. Second Chance had inher- ited his grandfather’s tact. Instead of hurling accusations at his mother, he took things out on himself. He rode the most difficult dirt-

bike tracks at record-breaking speeds. He broke bones the way some people bit their fingernails. Rose couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her son without a limb cast in plaster. She prayed for her children so often that she wondered if God was growing weary of her appeals.

“I don’t know,” Austin said, frowning in the direction of the horse’s neck. “He’s still tender on his front end, Rose. But I can’t find any trace of lameness there, and he isn’t navicular. How is he for you at the lope?”

“Max never had what you call a rocking-horse canter. Amanda all but tore his legs apart with that barrel-racing. He’s a willing horse. There’s times I’d go so far as to call him stoic.”

The vet reached up under his glasses to rub his eyes before he re- sumed the trot. “Half the horses I treat have been barrel-raced into lameness. The others have been run hard and turned left team-rop- ing. If you’re going to blame one group you’re going to have to blame them all.”

“My father brought me up to treat animals like first-class citizens,” she explained to Austin. “He doesn’t say it outright, but his silence speaks volumes. Pop believes I failed to educate my children in the basic Wilder family tenets, which means I misfired as a mother. Well, my therapy group says it’s good to share my views,” she added, aiming her words to the horse as well as the vet. “Max isn’t big on feedback, though he makes a superb listener.”

“Therapy? Since when did you start going in for that New Age crap?”

Rose smiled and ran her fingers through her dark, curly hair, which was cut in layers to fall just at the top of her shoulders. “Since never. I made that up to see if you were listening.”

Austin looked skyward as if seeking divine assistance. Slowly he shook his head from side to side. The tenderness in his fifty-five- year-old face elevated him from an average man emerging from a year of grief to nearly handsome. When Leah walked out on him last fall, Austin, only an occasional drinker, had fallen deep into his cups and stayed there all year. With a duplicate set made from the keys he misplaced all over the office, Rose had let herself into his house every week. While the vet slept off his drunken sorrow, she packed his fridge with food. She couldn’t help but stop now and again to admire the Donavans’ kitchen. Saltillo tiles, a six-burner restaurant cookstove, a Swedish stainless-steel dishwasher that ran whisper quiet, the adobe

oven tucked into the wall so a woman could make bread the tradi- tional way. How she could cook in this room! she always thought. Any meal put together here would have to turn out right. Her Pyrex casserole dishes looked small sitting there atop the oven mitts sur- rounded by so much silence. Knowing how deeply enmeshed Austin was in his drinking made her gestures seem pitiful, but Rose had never been one to give up trying just because a situation was difficult. Austin’s drunkenness made for another country, one Rose didn’t care to visit. She’d yank off his boots and cover his skinny shoulders with a blanket, but she wouldn’t mop up vomit or drive empty bottles to the dump. He needed to get sober and stay that way. As much as she ached for him to go there, she could not draw him a map. She delivered macaroni and cheese with toasted bread-crumb crust, potato-topped shepherd’s pie, lasagna with hidden grated vegetables. Sliced and served cold, it tasted as good for breakfast as

it did for supper. She fed the man, and she waited.

Her official job title was bookkeeper, but to Rose there didn’t seem to be any good reason she had to lose two good men in her life as a result of alcohol. Leah’s divorcing him had caused Austin to forget so many things. He forgot that the animal population of Floralee depended on his expertise and generous heart. He forgot that he had friends who also were hurting. Rose and Paloma, Austin’s re- ceptionist, put their heads together and hired substitute vets anxious for extra cash to fill in so the practice didn’t fall completely to pieces. On the days Austin made it to the office, Rose handed him his ap- pointment schedule and reminded him that the coffee decanter was right there on his desk. He always nodded politely and said thank you. Periodically they heard the clank of bottles hitting the trash can, an indicator that Austin’s dipstick had hit the full mark. He’d take tentative steps back toward an orderly life; then a call from Leah’s lawyer wanting more alimony, or somebody reporting they’d heard she was whooping it up in Santa Fe, would trigger a backslide and he’d drink again. Nobody mentioned his slips. The unspoken Floralee code went something like this: You can shoot a horse that rears up, but people are only human.

The gelding appeared anxious to move beyond the trot. He began twitching his ears, and his long black tail kinked up. “Max,” Rose said sternly. “Try anything funny, and I’ll climb down off this fence and brand your ass myself.”

Austin smiled. “You’re what my daddy called a
pistola
, Rose Ann. I can hardly believe some of the things that come out of your mouth.”

“If I’m boring you, tell me to shut up.”

“Mrs. Flynn, nobody could call you boring around me and get away with it.” He dismounted, untied the lead rope he’d fashioned into a makeshift rein, laid it over the horse’s back, and faced his pa- tient.

The basic tenets of chiropractic medicine—align the spine and court good health—seemed far too simple to work. Needles Rose understood. Pain, too, because it was a wake-up call that couldn’t be ignored. Healing often hurt more than the original injury, but that kind of pain was good for you. It forced you to listen. It tore your heart out by the roots. Then it was up to you to plant what re- mained back in the earth or leave it uprooted to rot. But the sight of Austin’s beat-up hands caressing the old gelding’s backbone, his tobacco-brown eyes shut deep in concentration, that moment when doctor and patient found a connection—oh!—this was arcane busi- ness, sensual in a way that made her flinch deep inside her belly. While it felt natural to sit by the cages of the dogs and cats in the hospital, to stroke furry heads, hold on to paws, and soothe the anxious, this felt beyond intimate. Yes, the way Rose felt when she watched Austin adjust Max embarrassed her to death.

“Okay, then. Here we go.” Austin planted his bootheels firmly in the dirt. He laced his hands around the horse’s massive black crest. In order to achieve maximum release, he had to heave his weight forward into the gelding’s left shoulder while pulling down on the animal’s neck. He shut his eyes and appeared to travel deep inside himself, past his wife’s walking out, past the year’s worth of bottles stacked up in his living room, past the mundane business of human survival into the peculiar, compelling realm of man knowing horse. It made the hair on Rose’s arms stand up, and though there was no good reason for it, her nipples stiffened beneath her T-shirt. Then, as the vertebrae moved under his hands, there came the sound of machine-gun fire, followed immediately by an equine groan of profound relief. It had been so long ago that Rose wasn’t sure if what she was hearing was an echo from her former life or the longing for similar noise in this one, but the sound her horse made was eerily close to that of male orgasm.