Large Animals in Everyday Life by Wendy Brenner

of glasses, though I did not wear glasses. Tucked away in my bathroom closet were fresh tubes of toothpaste and sealed bottles of sinus tablets, of which, it was beginning to occur to me, I should be ashamed. So I went upstairs and sat on the fold-out sofa—where he slept—and got what I could from Claire, but it was never enough.
    In February, when they’d been living upstairs for six months and the early morning swampiness in the air was almost unbearably sweet, I finally broke down about the stables, and then only because it was an emergency. Dale was at my door, suddenly, in a bright absurd slam of unexpectedness, telling me his truck had a bad clutch and would I mind? I put on my hard-soled shoes, the picture of straight-faced concern, and noted my comb and blusher on the dresser, unused and useless, and he bent idly to look at my one nice print. It was a Hondecoeter poster from an art museum, a somber group of birds exploding around a fallen crow, an allegory. “I’ve seen this,” Dale said, improbable in his cowboy boots. “A Dutch guy?”
    â€œRight,” I said. “He was the one who knew how to paint birds.”
    â€œOh, good, good, Caroline’s finally going to ride,” Claire said from the open doorway. We swept out, Dale leaving, I hoped, a shed hair or fingerprint or dried mud crumbling from his boot—in this way I might as well have been fifteen. I had once saved two curled hairs from the chest of a man I loved, storing them like contact lenses in an envelope, as if I could save enough to build another, more controllable him. It wasn’t that I was superstitious, though, having had enough people love me or stop loving me for the wrong reason or for no reason—I was just starved for small encroachments on my small successful life.
    â€¢ • •
    The stable was set back from the highway by a yard of mud and gravel, overhung with Spanish moss that a few tied, waiting horses were chewing. Their stretched necks were clean and reflected my Chevy’s headlights, but they didn’t pause or look, though with their eyes in the sides of their heads I thought they might be taking us in. I had been on a horse once at camp or a carnival, and remembered only the stupid, clumsy way its neck looked from above, not storybook graceful or powerful in the least but more like a dead branch on a tree. “Don’t even look at those duds,” Claire said. “We ride the privately owned ones, who haven’t been ridden by eight hundred brats a day until they can’t even feel their own tongues in their mouths.”
    Dale, in my rearview mirror, had his head bent, and was fixing or playing with a button on his flannel shirt cuff. “That’s right,” he said. I saw his deliberate fingers on his cuff, on my sweater. I cut the engine, thinking:
snakes
.
    The smell of the place was perfect, Dale a hundred times over: sawdust, leather, sweat, mildew, coffee, cedar. Three women even prettier and happier-looking than Claire stood in skin-tight breeches in the stable’s office, drinking machine coffee out ofpaper cups and teasing a runny-eyed cat with their whips. “Connie, Rachel, Lynn,” Dale said, nodding and leading us through.
He can’t love all of them
, I thought.
    â€œLook out,” Claire said behind me, and we stepped around another cat who had a mouse or vole opened up on the concrete. Another memory came to me: a drunken man approaching me on my parents’ front lawn and offering ten dollars and the end of a fifth of tequila if I gave him our Dalmatian. I wanted the money and the dog was boring, but I was afraid of being found out and of the tequila and so said no. This seemed an embarrassing corollary to Claire’s raffle story, saying something about people who knew when to take a hint from their lives versus those who wouldn’t, and I kept it to myself. Dale took us down aisles of cramped lead-in stalls,