I'm Done Being the Family Joke novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Padlock

On Christmas morning Della loads her clients' horses out from behind her father's lock while Daisy films; Cal gives her the loft on one rule, and his father says one word at her.

I didn't wait for noon.

I drove to the barn behind the feed store at nine, and the padlock on the big door was new and bright, with a tag still on it.

Through the slats I could see four horses standing in their stalls, ears turned toward me.

None of them had been fed.

I called their owners one at a time, on Christmas morning, and told each of them the same thing.

"My dad has locked your horse in the barn, and I'm going to get it out. Can you come?"

Two said yes straight away.

One said she'd be there in an hour, and one said she needed to ask her husband.

Cal's truck pulled into the yard with a stock trailer behind it.

I hadn't called him.

"I was in town for diesel," he said.

"On Christmas."

"The station's open."

He got out and walked past me to look at the lock.

"I can take this off in a second," he said, and he reached into the truck bed.

"No," I said. "It's his barn. We wait."

He stopped with the bolt cutters in his hand and looked at me.

Then he put them back.

By ten, the first owner's trailer was in the yard.

By half past, my father's truck came down the alley, with my mother beside him and Daisy in the back, holding her phone up against the window.

Uncle and aunt and two cousins came behind them from church, still in their good coats.

They stood in a half circle by the fence.

My father got out slowly and let the door swing.

"You're early," he said.

"I'm here for the horses."

"They stay until you say sorry to your sister."

Daisy was already filming.

"Go on, Della," she said sweetly. "I'm not mad."

The two owners in the yard had gone quiet.

One of them, a woman who ran sheep on the east road, looked at my father and then at the phone.

"Russ," she said. "I pay Della, and my mare is in there."

"Then you'll pay her somewhere else," my father said. "That's my building."

"It's your building," I said. "You're right."

I took an envelope out of my coat.

I had written the check on the hood of my truck in the alley before anyone arrived, with Cal's coat still over my shoulders.

"It's four hundred dollars for hay, water and shavings through December," I said. "I'll bring my tack out. I won't touch a thing that's yours."

My father took the envelope, looked at the number, and tore it in half.

He held both pieces up so Daisy's phone could see them.

I felt Cal go still behind me.

My father had done that exact thing at the Ockenden gate eight years ago, with a different piece of paper.

I knew it, and by the way Cal's head turned, so did he.

"Open the barn, Russ," the woman with the sheep said. "I mean it."

He looked at the other owner, and the relatives at the fence, and finally at my mother, who was studying the ground.

He unlocked it with a short, hard motion.

"You'll be back by New Year's," he told me, loud enough for everybody. "You always are."

It was the truest thing he had ever said to me.

I had been back every time.

I walked past him into the barn.

It took two hours.

I led out four horses and loaded two into Cal's trailer, and the owners took their own.

Every one of them looked at my back when I bent to pick up a lead rope, and every one of them looked away.

I carried out my saddles, my bridles, and the old blue tool chest my grandfather made.

Peg's little house stood across the alley.

Her curtain moved once, and then it was still.

Daisy filmed the whole thing, and when the last horse was gone she came and stood at the end of the aisle, bright and warm.

"It's just a joke, Della," she said. "You know that. You're so sensitive."

"Let's go," Cal said, from behind me.

I turned away from my sister and carried the last saddle to the truck.

On the drive out, the trailer rattled behind us and the snow came down in small dry flakes.

"You can have the loft over my tack barn," Cal said, eyes on the road. "Until the black is sound."

I opened my mouth.

"It isn't kindness," he said. "I need the horse right. And I'm not going to leave you at a motel with four stalls of animals and no place to put them."

"Thank you."

"There's one rule. No flame on my property. No matches, no candles, no lighter, not even a stove unless I say."

He said it flatly, like he had said it before.

I understood it.

"I won't light anything," I said.

We turned in at the Ockenden gate, and his father sat at the front window, wrapped in a blanket in a wheelchair, watching the trailer come up the drive.

Cal lifted a hand.

"Dad's going to see you," he said. "He doesn't say much."

Through the glass, his father's eyes moved from Cal to me, and rested there.

His lips shaped one word, and it came through the open window as we pulled up.

"Lighter."

Cal's jaw set.

"He's said that since spring," he said. "It's the only word he's got left."

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