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“That sounds just like you to get out of school as much as you can. Although, I bet they have to chase you out of the cafeteria.”
“Stop it. I don’t do that anymore.”
She laughed, but he thought she was a little sensitive to that. Which was kind of funny to him in a way, because she was so skinny. It wasn’t because she didn’t eat, although that’s the reason that she’d been skinny when he met her.
“All right. We’ll have to spend some more time together at some point while I show you everything. But I’ll keep things as simple as I can, and the hard part is working with the horses which you already know how to do.”
He hefted the last harness up and carried it over to the peg in the wall where he hung it when it wasn’t in use.
Becky already grabbed a currycomb and was brushing out Cinders.
They hadn’t worked up a sweat. It was cool out, and he hadn’t worked them hard at all. The girls could trot all day and not even breathe hard. They were true workhorses, and there was just something about working with them that gave him such a good and complete feeling inside. He couldn’t imagine spending his life without them.
As he watched, Becky pulled over the step stool that she needed in order to reach to the very top of Cinders’s head.
She was a good bit shorter than he was, almost a foot, and she still had to reach up on her tippy-toes to get to the top. But that didn’t stop her. She was the kind of girl that nothing would stop. She was gritty and determined and tenacious. He admired all of those things. He’d been developing those things in himself. Maybe it was because of his easy childhood, but he didn’t really have much in the way of any of those things when he had met Becky.
Anyone who looked at them would say he was the one who helped her, but in reality, she taught him a lot about life and about character in general. He owed a lot of the direction that he was going now to her.
They worked in silence for a while, with Becky leaving after they walked the horses out to the pasture and let them loose.
He watched her walk up the sidewalk, humming to herself as she did. He noted she did not turn around and look behind her.
He wasn’t quite sure why she’d shown up, but he suspected that she worried about him. He appreciated that, that someone cared enough to worry, but there was a part of him that even though he knew it was for the best for her not to, he wished that she cared about him, the way he cared about her.
Chapter 17
Mark tried not to grip Pam’s hand too tightly as they walked up the steps to their duplex.
His side was dark, but there were lights on Pam’s side, and he could see the silhouettes of two heads in the living room.
Great. Both of them had waited.
He wasn’t exactly afraid of Pam’s mom, but she could be intimidating and also very...difficult. Pushy. Everything that Pam wasn’t. It was kind of funny how opposite she was from her mother.
Living with someone like Lynn had made Pam the person that she was. He’d seen over and over again how the hardships in someone’s life had turned them into a better person.
