Free 1503951200 by Camille Griep Page A

You and me and Len smoking these out on the ridge?”
    She shakes her head.
    So much for the poignancy of childhood antics. “Well, Cas, to what do I owe the pleasure of your company?”
    “I’m here to help you. You know, clean the stalls. See if you need a dress for tonight. Remember?”
    “Are the horses even up yet?”
    “The horse. Singular. Unless Pi is home. And yes. It’s three in the afternoon. Even horses are up.” Cas starts with condemnation and ends with disappointment. I don’t know what I expected of our friendship, after all these years. I didn’t expect whatever this is, this strange transfer of power. “But I guess you must be pretty tired.” She does not sound convinced.
    “Wait, you can grow tobacco here?” I ask, rewinding. Last night’s trot through cool, green grass comes back to me. Out the window are the same dusty streets of old, but the hills beyond are dark green with sage instead of sandstone. Another hank of memory barges through my mind—my mother cursing the rocky soil, her latest gardening experiments limp, spindly, brown, or all three. “Since when?”
    “Since the Blessing.” She looks away from me when she says it, the condemnation all at once conspicuously absent.
    “Humph.” I want to say many things, but Pi’s warning stops me. For the moment.
    She carefully closes the photo album and sets it on top of the bed. “Where do you want to start?” she asks, rising from her cross-legged position.
    “Well, I’m going to finish this cigarette, and then I was hoping to try out some of this hot water I’ve heard so much about.”
    The look on her face is the one I’ve wanted since she met me at the car, so I’m not sure why it infuriates me further. “Are you being funny?” she murmurs. “I can’t tell if you’re being funny.”
    I turn my back on her and head down the stairs. I’m relatively sure I saw a can of Folgers on the counter last night and I’ll be damned if I’m not going to drink a whole pot of it single-handedly.
    “Look, I know I’m doing this wrong, Syd.” Cas is at the head of the stairs and I stop at the bottom. “I’m not, you know, like you. I’m not cool. I’m not citified.”
    I take one last drag of the cigarette before I stub it out in the pot of what might have once been a fern. “I think what I can’t get my head around is that you don’t know there is no cool anymore. There’s no citified. There’s nothing. No celebrities, no national tabloids, no papers, no trends. There’s no fashion, no cars, no travel, no art, no singing, no painting . . .”
    “Fine. Don’t yell. I get it, okay?”
    “Okay.”
    “So I guess that means no dancing, either?”
    If only I’d allowed myself to choke her earlier.
    Cas drop steps her way down the stairs, deep in thought. When she gets to the bottom she sits. “Will you tell me?”

    I end up talking while Cas takes over the coffee and makes a grocery list. I sit on the same stool Pi sat on, and I tell her about going to the City and starting at the Company.
    We make an effort to go out and look at the barns. Cas heads right to the rail, offering something from her pocket, a browned apple slice in the palm of her hand. “They left you the gray to ride.”
    “Thoughtful,” I croak.
    My dad’s gray gelding stands in the shade of the barn sleeping, head down, looking—appropriately—as if he’s lost his best friend. I will my feet forward, but I meet with a wall of denial. Somehow walking into the paddock will make this all real, instead of theoretical.
    “I’m sorry, Cas. I just don’t think I can do this part right now.”
    And so we go back inside and drink more of the stale Folgers. Polite yet firm, Cas shoves me toward the shower, and sits on the closed toilet while I talk above the running water about my mother and the flu and how they quarantined us in place, and I’m glad I’m in there so it doesn’t look like I’m crying, even though I am, and not just about my