Sunday… he’s planning to come back.
Not because I asked. Not because Earl guilted him. Because he decided to.
I nod and walk past him toward the porch because if I stand here looking at him any longer I’m going to cry and I have a reputation to maintain.
Earl watches me sit down in the other rocker.
His eyes are bright, amused.
The eyes of a man who is dying slowly but has just been given something worth staying alive for.
“How long has he been here?” I ask.
“Couple hours. Showed up around two. Didn’t say much. Just started working.” Earl sips his sweet tea. “He’s coming back to us, Bexley.”
“Give him time,” I say.
The words taste like someone else’s.
Like the kind of patient, measured thing a person says when they’re being wise instead of honest.
Earl looks at me sideways. “That’s my line.”
“I’ve given him five years, Earl.”
“I know you have.” His hand finds mine on the armrest. Bony. Warm. Steady in a way that the rest of him isn’t anymore. “Give him a little more. He’s almost there.”
We sit on the porch and watch Lee fix the fence in the late afternoon light.
The hammer rings across the flat land.
The posts go in straight and sure.
Behind us, the house settles and creaks—an old structure holding itself together the way old structures do, through stubbornness and habit and the refusal to fall down just because falling down would be easier.
When Lee finishes, he walks up to the porch and sits on the steps.
Earl hands him a glass of sweet tea without a word.
The three of us sit in the cooling evening and watch the sun go down over land that has belonged to this family for three generations, and for the first time since I came back to Sharp, it feels like the family is still here.
Incomplete. Scarred. Missing the person who held it all together. But here.
It’s Saturday morning, and we’re going to accomplish something heavy today, or at least that’s how my mind is going.
The bay’s hooves are due, or rather overdue.
We’ve been building to this—weeks of incremental progress, Lee working on trust while I worked on every other horse in the barn, both of us circling the inevitable moment when the bay would be ready for corrective farrier work and we’d have to do it together.
Lee has him in the cross-ties.
The bay is calm—ears relaxed, weight even, no tension in the poll.
He’s come so far from the horse pressed against the stall wall that first week.
Still careful. Still watchful. But the fear has been replaced by something more like discernment—the intelligence of an animal that has learned to evaluate rather than react.
I approach with my tools.
