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Show Moon - 33 into my dreams at night, when I wanted to dance away the sudden storms of sadness, dance up to the sun, wanted everything. In my years with Josh I'd come to middle age, was trying to become a quiet, undemanding woman I could live with. "We don't need a horse," I said. "She's exactly the amount of our surprise tax refund," Josh said. "I've already paid for her. I've named her Windfall." I smiled at the wonderful name, but I said, "A horse is a luxury." Josh stepped close, took my hand, looked at me with his earnest eyes. "She's a bargain, a beautiful horse, but her jockey papers got lost and she can't be raced or bred. You'll love her, I promise. You deserve her." Yes, I would love her. But no, I did not deserve her. I deserved to live as I had been living, as someone who made soup from leftover vegetables, who put up tomatoes and weeded the garden until her back would hardly let her stand, who worked on her art quietly at home, taught painting in small classes, lived in peace with a good man. A horse would complicate the simple happiness that made my life focused and clean, without desire for more. A horse would make me lose hold of the person I'd invented as me, pull me back to things I'd left behind. But I did not have the courage to refuse my husband's eager gift. Josh put up a fence around an acre of our little farm and built a tiny barn with a hay shed and an enclosed stall we could seal up tightly when the Sisters swept their cold wind our way. The day he finished building it, he led me to the open doorway of the stall and bowed with a great flourish. I tried to smile, to praise him as he expected. Like everything he builds, it was a work of art: fir boards perfectly joined and finished smooth as furniture, brass fittings on the |
