Free The Mare by Mary Gaitskill

So I don’t do it on purpose, but if I need to know, I can’t help it, I look. I looked at Velvet’s mother in the diner. And she looked back. She looked in exactly the same way I was looking: like she wanted to know who I was and if she could trust me. It was like, for that moment, we were speaking the same language. I could not remember the last time I’d had that experience.

Paul
    Ginger was right: It bothered me more than I said that she wanted Velvet out for another two weeks, and it’s hard to say exactly why. I liked the girl. I could see how much she and Ginger liked each other, and I could see how much the horses meant to her; the kid was lazy like any kid—you had to push her to help with the dishes or make her bed—yet she was willing to spend hours shoveling shit just to be near those animals. It was adorable.
    But there was something unnerving about the way Ginger was toward Velvet, something fevered, with a whiff of addiction. I knew it had to do with Melinda, and with maternity, but in relation to the latter, it seemed distorted, mistaken, a version of reverse imprinting, like baby ducklings who will take the first creature they see to be their mother and follow the thing, no matter how hopelessly. In relation to the former, it was just sad and backward-looking. And there was that unmistakable whiff. I respected her for staying sober so long on her own. Sometimes I even grudgingly admired her independence. But in truth, she had not fully dealt with addiction. I could feel it.
    What effect could it have on Velvet, all that coming at her and not knowing what it was about? She was poor, she lived in a shit neighborhood, and when she talked about her mother, there was something in her voice that made me think of a shadow on the wall in a horror movie. The woman’s voice on the phone confirmed the feeling: She sounded abusive, half crazy. This girl had
need,
big need. I could feel it under her uncertainty and diffidence. And here was Ginger with
her
need, looking at Velvet with shining eyes, calling her “princess,” and tucking her in at night. It seemed an unstable mix of things, combustible, a promise that could not be kept.

Ginger
    The next week was made of tense, beautiful days, in my memory a blur of summer sights and smells: the thick flowers of the azalea bush crushed against the house, fresh-cut grass, Paul on his knees in the dark, fertilized dirt, the manure of the horse barn, barbecue sauce, the roller coaster at the Dutchess County Fair, her hair in my mouth, Paul’s arms around me, the pink and yellow shacks of the flimsy fairway, our drooping plates loaded with sugared food, the heaped odors of jammed wastebaskets, the tossing cars, the roaring sludge of songs and carnie calls, Velvet’s eyes on the rodeo girls her age and younger, parading on decorated show ponies, the feel of her mind going deep and intense.
    I worked to give her all of this, like I was handing her each piece and going, “See? See?” I devoured it all with her and still was hungry for more. And so was she; with all of this, she could still wander into the dining room, slump into a chair, and theatrically drawl “Ahhm bored.” At the grocery store, I once returned to the cart after looking for and finding a special sauce she had requested and she said to me, “I’m going to make you run around this store until you get everything I want.” And I went and put the sauce back on the shelf. “You won’t get anything with that attitude,” I said. Her face fell, and she said, “Sorry.”
    I saved that moment. I did the right thing. I was the adult. But I never knew from one moment to the next if I was or not. Being this kind of adult was like driving a car without brakes at night around hairpin turns. My body tensed and relaxed constantly. I was always nearly ruining dinner or forgetting to pick something up. I couldn’t sleep. I wanted to drink—really wanted to, for the first time in years. Was this what