Horse Heaven Read Online Free PDF Page B

thief had stolen the clothes as well as the money, since now she had to cart all those wet things back to her apartment and try to corral Iona, too, but he hadn’t. Tiffany could not say that she was having a good day. She certainly could not say that.
    But Tiffany didn’t really require good days anymore. She was always willing to settle for a good morning, or even a good hour. And she and Iona had had a good hour just that evening, before coming out to the Laundromat. What happened was, Tiffany picked Iona up at her mother’s on her way home from work because she had agreed to take Iona for the night while her mother went to choir practice and then out with some of the other choir members, and her mother had been making pork stew, and when she got there, tired and hungry, her mother had been in a good mood, and had sat her down at the table and given her a big plateful. Iona had been a good girl, so there had been no ill-tempered references to Iona’s father, Tiffany’s brother, Roland, who was up to no good in Ohio somewhere, or maybe Texas. The stew had lots of potatoes and carrots in it, and nice chunks of pork. In the larger war that was Tiffany’s relationship with her mother, they had made a truce. The next thingthat happened was that, when Tiffany got home, she saw that the Christmas cactus in her window was starting to bloom. Between them, the stew and the flowers made her feel good enough to endure the Spankee Yankee, but now, in retrospect, she saw that they had been bad, or at least false omens, because if she hadn’t had that good hour she would have stayed home watching TV, and would not have lost her money and had to hang all her wet clothes around the apartment. By the time she did that, and got Iona to bed on the couch (never an easy task), she was exhausted and even more blue than she’d been when she first discovered the money missing.
    It was more than the money, it was what the theft meant—that you couldn’t afford to be happy, because being happy made you do things that then ended in greater unhappiness than you had been feeling before you got happy. Everyone knew that that’s the way it was with love and sex and men—the happier you were when you fell in love, the more crushed you would be when it didn’t work out—but what was even more depressing was that that was the way it was with simple things like pork stew and flowers. The whole depressing idea made your life pretty impossible, especially since all the time you were telling your mom that (1) things were fine and (2) everything was going to be all right. Tiffany had always told herself and her mother that she wasn’t going to end up where her mother had—always saying things like “Don’t count on that,” and “There’s many a slip ’tween the cup and the lip” (an assertion that everyday experience showed to be patently untrue) and “If wishes were horses,” a phrase of her mother’s that made no sense at all.
    Another thing her mom always said was “Good-looking ain’t necessarily good-acting.” She usually said this in reference to guys Tiffany had turned up here and there, and in reference to Iona’s father and Tiffany’s brother, Roland. But often Tiffany expected that she was saying it in reference to her, because everyone said, and Tiffany herself knew, that she was a knockout, a fox, a babe, you name it. She was so used to being a drop-dead gorgeous black woman no matter what she wore or how she did her makeup that she didn’t even care anymore. Where had it gotten her, now that she was twenty-one with very little to show for it? Iona was drop-dead gorgeous, too, the way tiny things are especially gorgeous because you can’t believe they are so small and perfect, but Tiffany never complimented her. Drop-dead gorgeous was just a thing, like sleet or snow or flowers, that happened. And you had to be drop-dead gorgeous to know what a trivial thing it was. Tiffany often wondered what she would exchange her