| OCR Text |
Show Moon - 32 Anne had tried to tell Esther to be nicer to Joy. Esther only looked up at her with her smiling yellow cat eyes and said, "You're the one who isn't nice. You leave her all the time. Mama doesn't want another baby in the house. Daddy's driving us crazy. And Joy whines. My God, she whines." "Whine" was a terrible word, used as if describing something factual. But, in fact, why not say, perhaps more factually, "cries," or "grieves," or "asks to be loved"? "Whine" says "pest," "fake," "bother." It says you aren't believed. When Anne saw a bruise, a little welt across her daughter's bottom, she fought down a sick feeling and hugged Joy to her breast, saying, "Try not to bother them. Don't ask for things. Be good." When her little daughter cried and cried then, she said, "We're going to move to Queens to wait for Daddy, and then everything will be nice. I promise." Anne pretended not to notice when her daughter shook her head and did not seem to believe her. Three a.m. presses my fist to my chest against a certainty: It's time. It's time. Time rolls out in front of me like a carpet of ashes. Time tastes burnt in my mouth. Why should it be time? This makes no sense. I have everything I've ever wanted. My horse, for example. Who would have thought it possible? One day Josh came home from a barn framing job near Portland and said, "I've found you a horse. You've said how you love horses." He stood before me, eager as a child, his kind yellow eyes alight, and I didn't have the heart to tell him of the vague dread I felt at his words. My longing for a horse belonged to my childhood. I didn't want anything tugging me back to that time of greedy passion and wild hope when white horses came |
