Free Riding Barranca by Laura Chester Page B

extra four days in the hospital.
    I could visibly see my father’s spirits drop. He was upset by her outburst. He was not strong enough to take it. He told her she should not come to the hospital if she was going to bring so much tension with her. She stayed fifteen minutes, then left. “This is all too much for me.”
    I suggested that it might be fun to share Chinese takeout with Popi at the hospital that evening, but she wanted to treat me to some new, fancy restaurant, and I felt obliged to go. Once we had settled into our leather booth, she recounted how my niece, Daphne, had gotten so upset about Popi that she started crying at school, unable to finish her exam. Hearing this, I started to cry as well. Mom was horrified. “For heaven’s sake, don’t cry here in the restaurant!”
    I wanted to discuss what the doctors had said and her only response was, “I don’t want to talk about him. I’m sick of talking about him.”
    Everything she said rubbed me wrong—how he could have NO visitors. No phone calls either. Even though the doctors wanted him up, leading a normal life, moving, exercising, getting his metabolism going, but she insisted, “I need some time to rest.” As far as she was concerned, he shouldn’t have gotten cancer. He shouldn’t have done this to her!
    On my last day, I brought my father a St. Christopher’s medal on a silver stirrup key chain and told him that he would have to take good care of himself. Perhaps, I had been too present, too over-organized, too much in her way, but I felt terrible about the situation as I got ready for departure. I could not see how this transition to home would work for him. I only wished that my sister was there, but she and her family were still in Africa.
    When I talked to Mom on the phone from Massachusetts, her anger was palpable. “I wash my hands of him, the whole thing! He’s just impossible. I’m not even speaking to him.”
    One day, I tried for hours to get through, and it was obvious that she had taken the phone off the hook. I wanted to get a release for my father’s pathology reports, to have them sent to another doctor who had had success with alternative medicine. When I finally got through around dinnertime, I said to Mom, “You can’t just take the phone off the hook for six straight hours. The doctors couldn’t even get through.”
    â€œDo you have anything more you want to say?” she snarled. “Do you want to speak to your father?” Then, I could hear her yell in the background. “She thinks you are her husband!”
    A half-hour later, my mother called Mason crying hysterically and saying that I was such a troublemaker I had ruined their evening, and that I should never call their house again.

    Breeze
Back on the San Rafael
    Daphne longs to see the valley, so we decide on a short morning ride, before heading down to Nogales for lunch at
La Roca.
She tries out Tonka this morning, and I take Peanut, who has had several days of rest since coming back from Melinda’s. I am eager to see how he will do on the trail now, and he goes beautifully.
    It is pleasing to see Daphne’s dark silhouette on the top of a rise with all that space surrounding her. She is having a bit of trouble keeping Tonka in his gaited walk as he continually breaks into a canter. She is probably sitting too far forward, and I tell her to let her feet drop from the stirrups as if she were bareback—“That’s how you’re supposed to sit.” At some point, after riding a gaited horse, it just clicks in. One hasto listen for the sound of the hooves on the hard-packed road, sounding like “a
piece of meat a shucked potato, a piece of meat a shucked potato…”
    When we do want to go faster, Peanut shows me a lovely little lope that is extremely comfortable. I keep giving him lots of praise as we ride out over the open valley. Leaving the