(This is Part 13 of Fortune Cookie: A Christmas Tale)
The money didn't work, the man didn't work. Rosalyn sat at the table and stared into her coffee cup as if it were a crystal ball. Maybe the horse would work.
Bundled up against the chill, Rosalyn crunched through a thin layer of snow on her way to the horse pens. Excalibur stood at the far end of the turnout, watching something on the bike trail. Rosalyn unhooked his halter from the gate and walked toward him.
“Excalibur,” she said. “Come on, let’s see what you can do, huh?”
The horse flicked an ear toward her.
Rosalyn moved closer and the golden gelding trotted off a few steps. She held out a piece of the large, pelleted horse candy she often kept in her pockets.
“Come on, big guy.” She stepped closer, and Excalibur took off. The horse galloped around his pen, dodging the other horses, which looked at him with disinterest, even pity for the idiot animal.
Rosalyn slung the halter over her shoulder and turned away. “You know, beast, there may have been a good reason you were in the auction yard.” She returned the horse’s halter to its spot on the turnout gate. Excalibur had stopped about 20 feet away along the fence line. His hindquarters faced her full on, an eloquent reply to the auction yard comment.
Rosalyn half expected to see Bodie materialize at yet another moment of failure. She looked around, but nobody was there. She shivered. It was as if she could feel his warm breath on the back of her neck. “I know,” she said. “Let’s go kill the vacuum.”
***
Rosayn’s house-cleaning plan worked until the vacuum, in fact, breathed its last, for the time being anyway. Apparently vacuums resented tangles of dog and human hair in their little spinny carpet-sucking thingies. Rosalyn kicked the plastic tank and hurt her toe.
From his perch on the couch, Buck the Dog wagged his tail, and whined.
“Come on, let’s go for a walk,” she said. At the W-word, the dog went into spasms of joy. He leaped off the couch, and raced to the mudroom where his leash lived.
***
In tow behind at least one kind-and-loving companion, Rosalyn wandered the streets of the downtown neighborhood to the south of her property. Rosalyn squinted her eyes, and used all her brain power to try and forget everything. It didn’t work. She walked faster. All she could think of was Bodie’s hand gripping her forearm, the electricity between them that set off the radio, the check she had stupidly torn up, the worthless horse. Because Excalibur clearly was an emotionally-damaged, worthless bronc.
She kicked a rock on the sidewalk. It bounced against a hand-hewn stone wall to her right, and boomeranged back against Rosalyn’s tennis shoe. “Ouch!” As luck would have it, this was the same foot hurt kicking the vacuum. Rosalyn hopped around one-legged, and held the injured foot in her hand. The pain eased, she stopped hopping, and looked up.
A church spire soared to the sky. Rosalyn studied the Gothic building, its stained-glass windows perennially lit from within. She vaguely remembered going to this church with her mother when she was young, dressed up in a green velvet jumper and patent-leather, Mary-Jane shoes. She had hated those shoes. They always pinched. Rosalyn wiggled her toes, and lowered her rock-bruised foot.
Something pulled at her, here at this church. Something behind those colorful windows. Then it hit her. Today was the day her mother had died, twenty five years ago. Rosalyn tied Buck’s leash to the nearby bike rack. He whined. “Don’t worry. I’ll be right back,” she said, stroking his ears. “I just have to see something.”
***
You never know who you’ll see in church. Hunched into a worn army coat, Rosalyn’s very own derelict, the man who shouted strange things on the streets, finished lighting a candle. He walked up the center aisle, nodded to Jesus hanging on the cross, and settled into a pew.
Rosalyn hesitantly followed. She picked a spot a few pews forward of him, genuflected, and pulled down the padded kneeler. Rosalyn knelt, not sure where to begin. Echoes of those gone before traveled back and forth in the light cast by the silent, stained glass windows. Candles flickered across poinsettias filling altar spots, and threw shadows behind pillars decorated with red-ribboned, evergreen wreathes. The bas relief wall scenes of Jesus in his various states of imminent disaster almost seemed to move on their own.
Rosalyn shivered and stood up to leave. As she turned, she ran into the derelict, who must have snuck up behind her.
"No excuses!" His blurted comment bit into her. The homeless man’s dark eyes fixed on hers, from under a hood pulled well over his head. He pushed something into her hand. “Choice City Bakery,” he said. “Succulent buns, they’re the best, outside of fortune cookies.”
Rosalyn looked at the tissue-wrapped package in her gloved hands, ducked left around the smelly creature, and fled.
(Next: Dam beavers at it again)
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