“From the very start. My baby girl didn’t bother waiting until her terrible twos to become terrible,” I joke. “She was colicky, cried all night, only wanted to be held by me. Teething was a nightmare.
“We didn’t move her out of our bed until she was three.”
“And that was a fight, wasn’t it?” he asks.
“You know it!”
We laugh together.
“Through it all, though, Shanice remained her quiet, reserved self. Never the one to make waves.” Sadness makes its way into my voice as I think about my oldest daughter.
Evidently, Joel hears it because he asks, “Is she still like that?”
I push out a heavy breath and nod.
“It’s my fault.” I meet his eyes before lowering mine to the blanket.
“Her whole life growing up she watched me accept the bare minimum, never wanting to make waves in my marriage or homelife. Whenever she saw me get frustrated with something her father said or did, I just brushed it off and told her, ‘Mommy’s making a mountain out of a molehill.’”
I shake my head and turn to face the mare that’s still pacing back and forth.
“She learned to just take it.”
“What about her husband? Do you like him?” Joel asks.
It’s a question I’ve avoided asking myself in the six years Shanice has been married.
“She’s too much like me,” I tell him as an answer. “I doubt she sees it.” I look at him.
A noise from Ol’ Girl captures Joel’s attention. He goes over to check on her, murmuring words of comfort to her that I can’t quite make out.
I watch as he enters the stall, getting closer to the horse, while speaking to her in a gentle tone. He runs his hand down her nose, which I swear seems to soothe her.
“Does that come natural to you?” I ask when he comes back over to sit down next to me.
On instinct, I curl into his body again and he slings an arm over my shoulders. It’s as if we’ve practiced and done this move a thousand times before.
“Natural?” he asks while looking straight ahead. “Nah. Took a while for me to even want to be around animals.”
“You didn’t grow up on a ranch?” The surprise is evident in my voice.
He snorts. “Hardly. I grew up not too far from Harlington, dirt poor. But at seventeen, I dropped out of school and headed over to Williamsport, a few states over. I wanted to be a city boy who never had any intentions of returning to the country or working on and owning a ranch.”
“What brought you back then?”
He shakes his head. “I met my wife. She was from this area but had moved to Williamsport for work. She was only eighteen when we met. I was twenty-one. Anyway, we got involved, she wanted things more serious than I could commit to.”
Joel looks down at me.
“I never was gonna be the committed type,” he says. “And for damned sure wasn’t about to start a family with anyone.”
I listen intently, not saying anything because the person he’s describing is so far from the man I’ve come to know.
“Hard to picture that kind of life when you’ve never had a family to begin with. Not really. But Gina, she got under my skin,” he says.
“We were off and on for a couple of years. Mostly because I’m a stubborn bastard who couldn’t commit. And she was just as stubborn when I kept telling her that she deserved better.
“‘Before I knew it, she wound up pregnant.”
