Changes of Heart (5 page)

“Listen to me for a minute, Maggie. This is—”

Brad stopped speaking when Janice nudged his leg with her toe under the table. Their eyes met as they listened to Maggie’s footsteps hurrying up the stairs. “She hasn’t walked that fast since Richie died,” Janice said. She took
the check from her husband’s hand and tore it once and then again—and then again.

“She’s going to make it,” Janice said.

Ten days later, early, with the sun barely nudging the horizon, Maggie stood next to her dad’s SUV with her father and mother. Cartoon balloons drifted from the mouths of each of them as they spoke, and a sharp, hostile wind stirred up dust devils and whisked the breath steam away.

Maggie studied her parents as they embraced one another, memories of her childhood flooding her mind, at least for short moments taking her back to an idyllic time when everything seemed perfect and peaceful and so wonderfully full of promise.

“Maggie?” Janice brought her daughter into the family embrace. The scent of the Clubman cologne on her father’s freshly shaved face tickled Maggie’s childhood memories once again—he’d used the product as long as she could remember. Janice’s hair had a very light scent of lilacs, another sensory bit of her parents Maggie stored in her heart.

“Do me a favor today?” her father asked, his voice slightly muffled in Maggie’s hair.

Maggie nodded, still embracing her parents, almost afraid to let go of them. “Sure... what?”

“Ride today, Maggie. Run the barrels, go out on a trail—but get on a horse.”

“I will, Daddy. I promise.”

The ground was flinty-hard that afternoon, but the persistent night wind had scoured the snow from the paddock. Maggie tugged her Stetson down at the brim, securing it against the sniping breeze. Happy was a good mare, a pretty fifteen-hand dappled gray with almost perfect legs. She was a fast and agile barrel horse, but, equally important, Happy was an endlessly willing mount with a heart bigger than the state of Montana.

Maggie shifted in her saddle, standing in the stirrups and then easing down onto Happy’s back. She took a deep breath, and the familiar scents of Lexol saddle cleaner, sweet-feed breath, and the pure, clean aroma of cold horsehide enveloped her. The
chunk-chunk
of Happy’s hooves hitting the ground was the only sound in the entire world, and that was just fine with Maggie. She eased the mare into a lope, following the three-railed fence and easing the corners of the rectangle into smooth left turns.

Maggie felt in control of this fine mount, if not in control of anything else in her life. She knew the feeling would last for only a mere speck of time—a quick shard that really changed nothing. But it felt good, at least momentarily.

She leaned forward slightly in the saddle and touched Happy’s sides with her boot heels. Clumps of frozen soil pelted the air behind the mare as she hurled herself forward, scrambling to a full-out gallop within a few strides. Maggie rode with rather than on her mount, moving with the fluid, stunningly fast, controlled rampage. Her eyes streaming
from the battering of the arctic air, Maggie touched Happy’s mouth with a breath of rein pressure on the low port bit, easing her through a gentle turn to the left.

It wasn’t until that moment that Maggie noticed the black GMC with Danny Pulver standing next to it in her driveway. Sunday, his copper and white coat gleaming in the harsh sunlight, stood next to Danny, apparently watching the barrel run as intently as his master.

The moment of solace Maggie had found in the saddle evaporated, leaving her once again empty. She raised a hand to Danny and hooked her horse in a turn to the far end of the paddock, away from the man and his dog.
A friend stops and I have to turn away from him so he can’t see my face, the look that I know is there, the one that says “Leave me alone
.”

Danny waited where he was until Maggie turned her mare and rode at a walk to the fence near him. “Good to see you, Maggie,” he said.

“Good to see you too. C’mon into the barn while I put Happy up.” Her eyes dropped to Sunday, whose tail was moving tentatively as he watched her. A genuine smile crossed her face as she met the big dog’s eyes, much different than the one she’d forced to greet Danny.

“Hey, Sunday,” she said. She’d met the collie a couple of times before, but only through the open window of the vet’s truck. Still, even in those brief exchanges of ear scratching and hand sniffing, she’d felt a quick bond with the dog. He was a beautiful tawny creature, in vibrant good health, with a coat as polished as that of Lassie on the old TV show. That wasn’t what attracted her to the collie, though. Sunday’s
eyes had reached into her own at those first meetings, just as they did now.

“OK if I let him explore?” Danny asked. “He won’t get into anything.”

“Sure, no problem. Come here, Sunday—say hello.”

Danny snapped his fingers, and the dog rushed toward Maggie, tail swinging much harder now, his paws pattering over the frozen ground. As any male dog would, he skidded to a stop at the fence, sniffed a post, and swung his body to leave his signature scent.

“Does he know about...” Maggie began.

Sunday hefted a leg, and a stream of urine dashed against the fence post—as well as the resistor that held the smooth gray electrical wire that ran a foot off the ground around the entire paddock. The wire served a pair of purposes: it kept bored horses from toying with the fence, and it stunted or killed the weeds that grew along fence lines with its pulsing electricity. The power followed the liquid. Sunday was thrown back a yard by the assault, a yip punctuating his scrambling retreat. In the smallest part of a second, the eighty-pound collie turned into a warrior—and he attacked the post. This time, as his fangs slashed at the resistor, the wire pressed against his tongue and the jolt rolled him over in the dirt. His yowl of surprise and pain was almost puppylike as he got his feet under himself and stood glaring at the fence. A feral growl rumbled from his throat, the fur along his spine raised in challenge and his lips curled back, revealing snowy white eyeteeth.

Maggie turned away from the scene, her shoulders
shaking, laughing for the first time in what felt like forever. Danny, too, ducked his head and turned to his truck. The pulse of electricity was far too small to do a horse or Sunday any harm, but the collie’s reaction—and the fact that he backed a full dozen feet away from the fence while issuing his challenge—was like an absurd pratfall from a silent movie. Even so, both Maggie and Danny realized that laughing out loud would hurt the animal’s pride.

Danny, his face under strict control, walked to the gate and worked the latch, opening it for Maggie and her mare. Sunday waited until the gate was closed and Maggie and Happy were several steps toward the front door of the barn before he scurried up to her. She crouched and hugged the dog. “What a good, brave boy! You sure showed that fence, Sunday!”

Danny dropped to his knees next to Maggie, and Sunday turned to him. The vet rubbed his dog, hugged him, and then pointed away from the barn. “Good boy, Sunny—good dog. Go, now—go.” The collie lapped Danny’s hand and hustled off toward Maggie’s house, knowing he was free to explore.

“He’s magnificently trained,” Maggie said.

“I wish I could claim credit for that, but I can’t. Sun’s a rare animal. I’ve had dogs—mostly collies—all my life, but he’s... well... something else.”

Maggie nodded and rose to her feet to bring Happy to her stall. “Yeah. The same thing happens with horses every so often. There are good ones and smart ones and
willing ones—but then a really special horse comes along and captures a person’s heart.”

“Like Dancer?”

“Exactly.” Maggie paused for a moment. “The same thing’s true with people. The majority of us are good people who lead good lives, but we don’t have that rare spark that some do.”

“Like Rich?” Danny asked quietly.

“Yes. Like Rich.” Her voice was barely a whisper.

“I didn’t come up to you at church, Maggie, and I’ve stayed away until now because I didn’t know what to say or how to say it. I still don’t, I guess, but I didn’t want to wait any longer.”

Maggie began stripping Happy’s saddle and saddle blanket off, looking over the mare’s back at the vet.

“Rich was important to lots of us,” Danny said. “I know what you mean about the rare people, the special people, and he was one of them. The thing is,” he paused for a moment, searching for the right words, “I always felt good around him. He had a way of making a person feel better, somehow—more worthwhile, maybe. And there was no more prejudice to Rich Locke than there is to a newborn kitten. He was interested in each person he came across, wanted to know about them, what they thought, what they believed, how they lived. And that was real about him, Maggie. It wasn’t hype or a façade—it was the way he was.”

The barn was totally quiet for a long but not uncomfortable moment. The sun, ignoring the frigid temperature, streamed through the windows of the barn with mid-July clarity.

“Thanks, Dan,” Maggie said. “What you said helps me.”

“I want to do that. I want to help you all I can. I mean it, Maggie.” Danny reached over Happy’s back and touched Maggie’s shoulder with his fingertips. Then, in a second, his face flushed and he withdrew his hand quickly. “I gotta go,” he said. “I’ll see you soon, OK? I just wanted to... I’ll see you soon.”

Maggie listened as the veterinarian whistled for Sunday, and then a moment later, to the grumble of his truck’s engine as he drove the length of her driveway. She began roughing Happy’s coat with a rubber curry comb, the familiar motions automatic. She was strangely unsettled by Dan Pulver’s visit, and she wasn’t at all sure why.

Maggie stood at her kitchen sink, running water over a cereal bowl. Outside her window the Montana sun played its duplicitous winter game: the light was exuberantly cheerful and the sky an impossible, welcoming blue, but the thermometer attached to the siding next to the window read four below zero.

She turned off the water and put the bowl and spoon in the drying rack. As she turned from the sink her eye caught a green spot on the shoulder of her work shirt. She looked closer. It was a strand of spittle—saliva mixed with bits of well-chewed hay—from Dusty’s nudge of greeting that morning. “Yuck,” she said aloud, reaching for a paper towel and cleaning away the deposit. Something ticked at the back of her mind as she tossed the paper towel into the trash can—something to do with the horses. She walked to the calendar tacked to the wall next to the telephone, but there was no entry made for the date. The horseshoer wasn’t due, she didn’t expect a hay delivery, and the supplement and sweet-feed barrels in the barn were full.

Maggie sighed.
Some days are better, some are worse. It’s going to be a long haul. Time doesn’t really cure all ills, but it diminishes the pain—makes it bearable for longer and longer periods of times. At first it was a frantic, screaming thing—knowing Richie was dead but not accepting it. But now some acclimation is beginning—I guess. Or maybe it’s apathy. Maybe I just know my life is over
.

Maggie did her best to shrug the thought away. The task she’d promised herself that she’d complete this morning nagged at her like a toothache. She picked up the three large cardboard cartons she’d gotten at the grocery store the day before and started up the stairs, balancing the boxes in front of her. She stood staring into the closet she’d shared with Rich for a long moment, motionless, her mind rushing with confused, sharp-edged images.