When Horses Had Wings by Diana Estill

all over like he’s some kind of dandy dude.” She looked at her empty driveway and shook her head. “I’d sure miss talking to you and Little Sean but, honey, you’d be better off out there a-workin’ so you can have some kind of life.”
    I was contemplating what Granny had just said when an auto marked, “County Sheriff,” pulled into her side of the drive. A deputy stepped from the vehicle and approached us.
    “One of you two ladies Mrs. Henderson?” he asked, scraping the mud off one of his shoes onto the sidewalk Granny had just swept.
    She looked at the man like he was a ten-year-old who needed scolding. “I am.”
    “Ma’am, could you come with me to the Sheriff’s Office? We believe we may have found your husband’s vehicle down off the Hawk Creek Bridge embankment.”
     
    ~
     
    Folks speculated about what might have happened to poor Old Man Henderson. I had my theory. Granny had hers. I thought he was probably driving with that cane of his, misjudged the distance between him and one of those rock-haulers, and at the last minute swerved to miss the narrow bridge that wasn’t wide enough to carry both of them at once. Granny said she believed he was looking at a girlie magazine, the one found inside his car at the scene, and missed the bridge entirely. No matter who was right, I only hoped there hadn’t been any grape seeds stuck to that men’s journal.

 
    ELEVEN
     
     
    J udging by the way salesmen kept showing up on my doorstep, someone must have sent Sean’s birth announcement to the Lolaville Chamber of Commerce. Either that or I had the same name as a recent sweepstakes winner. Whatever the cause, I was grateful for any interruption that offered a break from my daytime monotony. My life as a stay-at-home mom had become long on habits and short on thrills. I’d read Sean’s Little Golden Books so many times that I could recite them without looking at the pages, and I’d come frighteningly close to falling hard for Mister Rogers.
    The sales calls began with a guy wearing a seersucker suit and a pompadour hairstyle. He did his best to convince me I needed life insurance. Or rather, Kenny did. “For just fifteen cents a day, you can have five thousand dollars’ worth of protection and peace of mind,” the salesman enthused. But I didn’t need an adding machine to know I couldn’t afford his offer. And Kenny’s short fuse and frequent outbursts guaranteed I’d never have peace of mind.
    After the insurance man dropped in on me, I received a visit from an elderly gentleman who offered to bronze Sean’s baby shoes. He said, “As a mom, you’ll naturally want to have these keepsakes preserved.” I’d been saving Sean’s first pair of Thom McAns in a box I’d set up high on a closet shelf. It had never occurred to me that I should have smothered them first in melted copper. I didn’t understand why anyone would want to destroy a perfectly good pair of baby shoes that way or how it made sense to waste precious dollars on what looked like melted pennies.
    I had to laugh when the encyclopedia salesman with the earnest look and desperate message arrived. He insisted Sean was at risk. It was his duty, he said, to warn me about what happens to children who don’t have good study aids. Considering that Sean’s second birthday was still weeks away, and he wouldn’t be learning to read for another four years, I wasn’t overly worried.
    I explained to the encyclopedia guy that Momma had already begun collecting a set of children’s reference books with her A & P Grocery stamps. She’d acquired volumes A through M, minus the H. But the store manager had promised to help Momma find the missing copy. I was hoping she’d get it soon because I’d read all the other volumes, from front to back—twice.
    Granny marveled at the way I attracted “peddlers.” For some reason, salesmen avoided her house. Granny’s explanation was, “They know if they come ’round here, they won’t get a