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  Gretchen described each horse as they walked over to his or her stall.

  “I think we’ll look at Butternut first.”

  Butternut was yellow, short, and almost fuzzy. She was a pony, Gretchen explained, and she loved to be scratched right behind the ears, like a dog.

  The next horse, who snorted and stamped with delight when they approached, was Ajax, a piebald gelding.

  “It’s kind of an ironic name,” Gretchen said, smiling. “He’s really old and slow, but that’s perfect. Slow and steady wins the race, eh boy?”

  She flourished a handful of baby carrots with their greens still attached, a bouquet, and the horse mouthed Gretchen’s palm and took them in delicately, first the small orange roots and then the flossy greens.

  Collum was speechless.

  This was a place, he further understood, where pain was healed, and riding was called “therapy.” It was a place where there was no hitting or hurting, no contests, no winners and no losers.

  Collum had never even known a place like this existed. For a while, as a boy, he had felt something like this, when his heart had been soft with love for his girl. But then it had been ripped away from him, and he had grown hard and calloused inside.

  From stall to stall and stable to stable, the animals stood, quiet and almost kindly. These horses, all of them, were almost preter-naturally tame. They stood there, eyes shiny with love as their flanks were brushed and their hooves lifted and cleaned of mud and stones. They stood in the middle of the stables, tethered on each side, as they were hosed down, curried, picked.

  “Do you want to give Clemmy a sugar cube?”

  “I don’t have a sugar cube,” Collum muttered, feeling put down again.

  Gretchen simply handed him a couple of hers. She was plump, short-legged in her jeans, and cheerful. For a minute, Collum stared at the crystalline squares that were transferred from her hand to his. It was as though the young girl had offered him the first sweetness he had known in decades. These were not props, and there were no tricks—his hand held real cubes, composed entirely of sugar. He almost felt like asking for one for himself.

  Clemmy stood quietly. At the rattling of the sugar box, his ears twitched. He turned his massive head, first to Gretchen, and then to Collum.

  “Here you go,” said Collum, extending his hand.

  “Let your palm really open up,” suggested Gretchen.

  Collum realized that he had been gripping his fingers. It was a habit he had had all his life, this gripping and tightness, this making of fists. His hand did not have to be a weapon, he realized. A grasping, hurting, grabbing thing that took and smacked. He loosened his hand and put it in front of the horse’s nose. His heart expanded, and he felt the kindness of the sun and the breeze’s caress. Life could actually be good.

  That thought held a sigh in it, a longing so deep in Collum that he almost started weeping. If the world could be like this, he thought, we’d need nothing and no one else.

  Clemmy sniffed. His nose was warm and velvety. He took the sugar cube from Collum’s hand with flapping lips and a fondling tongue. Collum enjoyed this like a boy enjoying his mother feeling his forehead when he is sick, each movement a caress as well as a question.

  How are you, my darling?

  Oh, Mummy. I feel so hot.

  There, let’s brush that hair off. You’ll be better soon, right?

  Yes. I’m better already.

  Collum took off his hat. His eyes were now truly wet. If he were alone, he would have knelt and prayed here, as he once did as a child, when he’d prayed with all his heart to be delivered from his loneliness.

  Each of the horses was as sweet as Clemmy. They smelled Gretchen’s nostrils with their own, enormous nostrils. They said, very quietly, huffff . . . , as though to say, “I exhale with you because I can relax with you. I relax with you because I trust you. There is love in the warm air between us.”

  Yes, all that with a huffff . . .

  Collum wanted that for himself. He wanted to feel a world in which warm air is exchanged between souls. He had always wanted that, more than anything or anyone. Even more than he wanted the girl he was looking for. After all, she had hurt him once, and could always do it again. Treachery was in her very bloodlines, the bloodlines of Judas himself, whose name was so similar to hers. And what was worse than Judas? A female Judas, that’s what.

  A Missing Ingredient

  With all the ingenuity Heidi had—the ability to find the best sources for the best ingredients, clever whirring hands that could make things functional, tasty, or beautiful—something was indeed missing for this proud and capable woman. It was missing for everyone, almost without exception; it was the bane of existence for many on this hunger-panged planet. Heidi did not even know the name for it.

  Perhaps, as the developmental psychologists had termed it, Heidi longed most for “object constancy.” Babies needed to know that their mother was there even when she was not in sight, that she was there even when they closed their eyes or turned away. They needed to know that the loved one remained, even when she herself turned away, or was not there at all, for a time. Terror had to change to trust.

  Unfortunately, there was little of this in adult life, where, instead, there was a preponderance of change, disloyalty, boredom, betrayal, and death—that ultimate evidence of inconstancy. Even the common midlife crisis, such as the one Heidi’s husband was enjoying, could threaten the psyche of so staunch a soul as Heidi Dorcas Kunst.

  Who was she? Who really knew her? Who really loved her? Who even cared if she lived or died? Heidi, like Jude, Collum, or any one of us, was lonely for a reliable friend in life, a companion who would, periodically, make the pain ebb away for one long minute. Make the bout stop. Like the trainers that led boxers to their corners, wiped them down, sprayed water into their mouths. One needed encouragement in life, between the rounds of pummeling. Heidi was longing for such sweet haven.

  The catering business didn’t fully help. Housewives envied her career, and career women envied the ease with which Heidi seemed to blend her work with her home life. She had updated her kitchen with a six-range stove, added a few freezers to the garage, and there she was. But she wasn’t, really. All the food she cooked and all the clients she fed never nourished Heidi herself. The hole was always there, but most of the time she managed to ignore it. With her husband’s instability—the name change, the piercings, the pewter-colored plait—the wound was tearing open again.

  Heidi’s unfillable void might have been caused by her past. Her parents had died in a catastrophic car crash when she was fifteen years old. That sudden horror, which made her life gape like the torn-up sedan the newspaper clipping had shown, seemed to be the key to her sorrow. But she had been in pain even before this blatant tragedy.

  Heidi remembered how even when her father and mother were alive, she had longed for them constantly. They had never noticed Heidi more than in the perfunctory sense, and were always traveling somewhere else. She and her older brother, Mason, had been sent to boarding schools, and the family home was often empty, sheets on the furniture and dust on the kitchen range.

  Once her parents were gone, Heidi couldn’t remember a life that was different, closer, and warmer. They had evaded her with finality. Even the childhood home, with its gorgeous flower-filled vases and its carpeted walk-in closets, in which Heidi could smell her mother’s scent of Bal à Versailles (clinging to the folds of her chiffon party dresses), was gone. Sold to a different family, one whose sense of the solidity of life had not been shredded and smashed.

  Heidi and Mason had stumbled out of this mess together, left with the proceeds of the home sale and a sizable estate as well. They were given to the guardianship of the will’s executor, a bachelor uncle who, while no villain, was no more caring than her parents had been. When Heidi graduated from Madeira School, her brother graduated from Wharton and started working in a local commercial bank. Mason offered to take care of his sister during her col
lege breaks from the University of Michigan. Their uncle, relieved, had readily agreed to let her brother be her primary guardian.

  But then Mason had ignored Heidi as well. When he was not working, he spent hours in an aspirational bar, proud to stand like a colossus in his suit and acquire knowledge of wine and women.

  The University of Michigan was vast and loud, a horror after the niceties of Madeira, but in this place Heidi’s heart laser-pointed on a junior called Daniel, whom she had met in business administration class. Business, because Heidi was determined to pin down the pinnable details of the world. She would be practical and careful, one foot in front of the other, numbers lining up into logical and predicable columns.

  The class met from 10:30 to 11:45, and it was only natural that both of them would have lunch shortly afterward, meet on the sandwich line, and start talking. Daniel had noticed Heidi’s dandelion of hair (the one thing she had trouble taming), and she liked the kind way he carried her tray for her, even though his own was heavy with a hearty, manly lunch. After the meal, he would take both trays and stack them in the right place. He seemed like a take-charge kind of guy.

  Months later, after taking charge of her virginity, Daniel gallantly promised to take care of Heidi forever. His own hurry was perhaps prompted by his parents’ divorce, which had occurred right after his leaving for college, and which had shaken him. Heidi and Dan agreed that life was full of awful surprises, and that a modest plan was the best way to live (it could then be embellished with optional, comforting fripperies). Dan would make the money, and Heidi would be his lover and wife, the mother of their future children. Both thought that they would have several, a passel of happiness, and that these children would have dogs and kittens and rabbits and a swing set.

  As it was, they had barely produced Delaney—with a donor egg at that—who suffered from vertigo and hated all animals. Delaney actually seemed to hate everyone, her mother in particular. So even in the good days of early family-making, nothing had made Heidi whole. Because nothing out there could make you whole. Nothing on this tangible earth. Toys broke, books shredded, seasons passed, children grew, and passion ebbed and flowed. Husbands you met in business class might one day grow their hair beyond the collarbone, and change their names to Dante. Leaving you to have to expand your catering career so that life could go on resembling something normal and sufficient.

  Drumming up business shifts sad thoughts away, so she dials her stalwart Jude.

  “Hi, Heidi, how are you?” Jude says brightly. She’s also been moping.

  “Any orders for this week?”

  “Hmm?”

  “You usually call me by Tuesday, latest,” Heidi explains. “It’s Thursday morning! I wondered if you were OK.”

  “Oh, I’m fine! You?”

  “Yeah, I’m great, been keeping busy. I’ve just finished my crewelwork. Orders slowed down for a bit, so I thought I’d make a little hanging for Delaney’s locker at school.”

  “You’re so lucky to have a daughter to make crewelwork for,” Jude says, sighing as she thinks about her strapping boys, and forgetting Delaney’s troubling stories for a moment.

  “My boys are halfway out the door,” she adds, “and they’re only fourteen.” Actually, only Joey was halfway out the door.

  “Well, not my Delaney, I’m happy to say. Fifteen or not, she’s not even going to that party the school is having next weekend. She’s far too young for that sort of thing.”

  Delaney and Jude’s son Davey were students at the same high school. They were invited to parties all the time, not only school-sponsored, but at people’s houses, which was another order of party altogether.

  From reading Delaney’s stories, Jude knew not only that she wanted her mother dead, but that she had long gone to parties at the school and parties outside the school; that she had created a fake ID and loved to play beer pong and “hook up” whenever she could. Not, of course, that everything (or anything) she wrote had to be true.

  “Won’t this party be supervised or chaperoned or something?”

  “Not to my satisfaction,” says Heidi primly. “I mean, what’s going to stop someone from cornering my Delaney somewhere, or spiking her drink with alcohol, or worse? Anything could happen when you add horny young boys into the equation.”

  “Mmm,” agrees Jude, wondering if Heidi is referring to her sons, and if so, if she is being mean. Heidi always had a brilliant way with the hit-and-run.

  “But back to the food order. You need some fruit soup? Or that mac-cheese the boys go for, the one with the Dijon-seeded Gruyère?”

  “Yeah, sure, and Slam might—well, he’s going out of town this weekend, so I don’t know. Maybe just one of your artisanal hoagies? For tomorrow night?”

  “Friday night? That’s what you’re giving him for his last supper?”

  They both laugh at that phrase, Heidi thinking of death row, and Jude of the death of Jesus. Collum had been raised as a devout Catholic. He occupied her mind more and more lately, especially since he had stopped writing to her (her tempting note about her red kisses notwithstanding). Was he feeling guilty about writing to a married woman? Jude was glad she had not given him her address, but on the other hand her online profile and that little map with the arrow did say Putnam County . . .

  Even more frightening, was Collum getting a divorce, as she’d seen in the tabloids? Could Catholics get divorced? If she brought it up, would he want to marry her now? The way things were going, would Slam perhaps not even mind losing her?

  “Jude? I just asked you something.”

  “Wha—what? Organic, free-range beets!” Jude rattles automatically. That could have been the right answer, given the context, but it wasn’t.

  “What are you talking about? I’ve got you down for the Gruyère mac-cheese. Now, do you really want to give Slam a hoagie? I mean, not that my hoagies aren’t extraordinary, but if he’s going away . . .”

  “No, don’t worry; you know he loves the twelve-inch ones,” says Jude, hurriedly catching up with the food agenda, “especially when you make him that side salad with the quinoa and the jicama.”

  For a moment, Jude feels that she herself is speaking in tongues. One often did when ordering from Heidi.

  “And a tiny poblano on the side,” she adds. “He loves that heat.”

  “He does?”

  This time there is a long and miserable pause, perhaps brought on, on Jude’s side, by that ambiguous word, “heat.”

  “What’s wrong, Jude?” Heidi asks hopefully.

  The only thing that reliably cheers her up is other people’s woe. There seems to be some promise here, Heidi thinks. Jude always has problems of one sort or another, which is especially delightful. It would have been too obnoxious for her friend to have a handsome, athletic husband and naturally conceived twin boys, and not have any problems.

  “Nothing’s wrong.”

  “You know you can tell me.”

  In the past, Jude has confided in Heidi about parenting matters. Not the serious ones, which mothers had to be cautious about (Joey’s mild ADHD, Davey’s increasing withdrawal). To the limited extent needed, Heidi has given her good advice. For example, when Jude’s sons had had alarming acne, Heidi knew just the right concoction to get rid of it. True, it was time-consuming to mix vats of red wine vinegar over the stove, and then add to it real oil of wintergreen and a dollop of Vicks Vapo-Rub, liquefied slowly in a confectioner’s double boiler, but the results had been impressive.

  “Let me help you,” says Heidi eagerly. “I can be over there in half an hour. I’ll bring my own chai latte, slow-brewed in a crock I made. You’ll taste the difference, especially if I add a drizzle of agave.”

  “What?” says Jude, finding the last series of words to be utterly defeating to her sense of the meaning of life.

  “I’m coming over.”

  Oh, crud, Jude thinks. She’d have to get out of her yoga pants and tie-dyed T-shirt. She does have that much pride—the amount need
ed to dress up for Heidi Dorcas Kunst.

  Looking into her closet, Jude finds a pair of khaki Capri shorts, which would look passable with sandals. The weather is warm; sandals would be fine. But nothing made of rubber or other nubby, vulcanized substances. No, the situation would call for delicate footwear that would be difficult to walk in, ideally with thin heels and tenuous straps. Digging into the back of her closet, she dredges up a pair of sandals from a few summers ago, when she had attended a wedding. The straps are woven of gold, silver, and bronze. She puts them on, then notices that her toenails are not painted. And she’ll still need a “lovely blouse,” to match the Capris and the sandals.

  Now I see why I rarely have people over, she thinks, searching through her jumbled closet. I really need to get it together and socialize; less pressure on poor Slam.

  Deep within, Jude finds a serviceable white shirt, part of that basic outfit that all women must have, as advised by helpful magazines. Now she would have to decide whether to tuck in or not, and if so, whether she needed a belt, and if so, whether brown, gold, or black.

  The ringing doorbell ends her torment.

  “Heidi?”

  “Yeah, I took the shortcut,” she says, stepping out of a champagne-beige ragtop convertible and closing the door behind her.

  Jude drives a maroon van (the color had been optimistically termed “beaujolais” when they’d bought it five years ago). It is often full of wrappers from the various quick-dining establishments frequented by her sons. Still, she knows she looks pretty good right now. The shorts, the shirt, the sandals! Why didn’t she dress in ensembles like this everyday? It gave the morale such a boost!

  “You know, we should get mani-pedis together,” says Heidi slowly, staring at Jude’s plain dun toenails. She is a flaw-fixator, one of those people whose eyes love to lock on the one thing wrong in another person’s exterior—the wrinkle, the old stain, the bald spot or eyeliner smudge.

  “It’s a lot of fun.” Heidi continues. “They give you a nice hot cream massage with it.”