Chapter 3: I Will Remember You

Charlotte was much more than a welding partner, of course. For one thing, she was a very appreciative eater. One night I cooked chicken piccata for her – the pan sizzling as I placed the breaded cutlets into the hot oil. “What’s in this?” she asked, watching my hands as I flipped one of the browning cutlets. It was one of my favorite things to make. “Lemon. Capers. White wine. Butter,” I said.  “It’s really good,” she said, after her first bite. I didn’t think it was all that good, so I said simply, “Thanks.”

“No, I mean it,” she said. “You’re a good cook, Thomas. You pay attention to what you are cooking. That’s rarer than you think.” I listened to her say that, then realized this was one of the first time I really noticed her cheekbones. They were not prominent, but very finely cut.

I decided I would cook more often.

When we weren’t eating or welding, we liked to go for drives in my F-150. Once we were motoring past Dripping Springs, windows down, on a warm late afternoon. I have a Pandora station dedicated to Emmylou Harris. When “My Antonia” came on, Charlotte started singing along. Emmylou’s part. Mezzo-soprano. Lovely. I joined in for Dave Matthews’s lines. Not so well. At the chorus, we sang together:

“You are my sorrow; you are my splendor...”

When the song ended, we were both quiet. “That was nice,” she said.

“Yeah,” I replied, at a loss for words. It was more than nice.

It was around this time that Charlotte began to put into motion something she had mentioned when we first met: She wanted to open an equine therapy center. When I first heard this, I thought the idea was kind of out there. But then one day I picked up a book she had left on the coffee table – “The Clinical Practice of Equine-Assisted Therapy.” I started to read it and soon realized that my dismissiveness was both wrong-headed and short-sighted.

Horses, I read, had been employed therapeutically since the 1950s. And now they were used to address everything from mental health problems to occupational therapy – even to speech therapy. And as I read this, it all made sense. Humans and horses had been working together for six thousand years. They knew us. We knew them. What better match?

It also seemed clear to me that Charlotte was a natural for this kind of work. For one thing, she was as comfortable around horses as I had been with the several dogs that had filled parts of my life. Maybe more so. That made perfect sense – she told me about her upbringing on a ranch, and her first memories of herself sitting in a saddle, her dad leading a horse around the paddock.

She even remembered the horse’s color. Chestnut brown.

Charlotte also told me about a niece up in Nebraska who had been born with a learning disability. Words on a page just never made sense to her. Charlotte’s experience of being around that niece – whom she adored – had led her to study mental and occupational therapy in school. Opening an equine therapy center required a certification and a license, of course, but that seemed to present next to no impediment for Charlotte.

There was one hurdle, however. And it was a big one: Money. Isn’t that always the case? Charlotte needed start-up financing to earn her license, purchase tack, buy a horse or two, maybe even hire an assistant. How much money she needed wasn’t entirely clear to me but based on some back-of-the-envelope calculations it seemed to be on the order of $25,000. Plus or minus.

Well. As it so happened, after I left journalism in Oregon, I sort of fell backwards into that state’s thriving tech industry – the “silicon forest,” it had been dubbed. I did speechwriting, some business planning (my major at Oregon State), managed a small marketing team, things like that. I somehow made enough in stock options and bonuses to buy the place in Austin – at the time it was becoming a happening place, and I guess I just wanted a change of scenery.

And there was one small outfit for which I had worked largely on a pro bono basis, although they did give me some stock. At the time I thought nothing of it. Yet now that stock was worth $26,547.49 – depending on the day of the week. It felt to me like money I had not earned, so parting with it would not be difficult. And I knew where it could go.

It didn’t take much sleuthing on my part to come across the Hill Country Community Fund, a local non-profit that helped support a number of local initiatives – including mental health ones. And they were perfectly amenable to letting me transfer that stock to them, then having me tell them when to sell. It had a little bump that upped it to $27,949.26, and I struck. I had already told them where the money went. And then I just stepped back into the shadows.

I threw the whole thing in, somehow thinking that seemingly random number would make it harder to trace back to me. Anyway, the next day the stock was down nine percent. The day after that, ten. Then I quit watching.

Maybe I shouldn’t have done it that way, but I did. I suppose I thought I would seem overbearing to her – we still didn’t really know each other all that well. Or she would think there was something that I wanted from her and this was my payment for it. Then again, maybe I just wanted to throw something out into the universe to see what happened.

And as it turned out, plenty happened.

Another thing that Charlotte did at about this time was to say aloud how she expected people around her and the therapy center to behave. And she wasn’t coy about it. “Men can be so overbearing,” she said (Oops). “I won’t have it – I know more about horses than any ten men laid end to end.”

I was trying to picture that implausible spectacle – Ten? Why ten? – when Charlotte gave me a look I would come to know well. And treat with respect. “I don’t worry about that with you,” she said. “You don’t know horses and you don’t pretend that you do. But you do know a ton of useful things – like how to hang a gate, and how to weld a broken stall bar. I know you’re busy, but will you be able to help?”

I looked around, then realized she was talking to me. “Of course,” I said quickly. “Whenever I can, I will. You just tell me what you want done. When this business opens, you’ll be the boss.”

For a moment Charlotte gave me a hard look. Then a wide smile. “That sounds about right,” she said. “I think you’ll do fine.”

“Uh – thanks?” I said. She ignored that.

Not long after that she learned about the money. For a few days she seemed to float rather than walk, and I was careful not to catch her eye. “This is amazing,” she said. “How did they even learn about me? I hadn’t even really told that many people.”

Then Charlotte caught me glancing at her. “Did you…?” she asked.

I shook my head. Maybe it was more of a wobble – not indicative of anything at all.

“And it was the oddest thing,” she added. “It wasn’t even a round number. It ended in something like fifty-seven dollars and forty-nine cents. Isn’t that weird?”

“Weird,” I agreed, repeating the wobble.

“But, oh my God,” she added. “What a gift. What an unbelievable gift.”

After that, things happened fast. One hurdle that seemed even higher than the money – and that I had no power to fix – was to find a home for the center. But then she spoke to the couple who had purchased her grandfather’s ranch. They loved the site, they told her, but didn’t need the barn and paddock – would Charlotte like to lease it?

And that was done.

Then Charlotte found Molly Carlson. Molly was maybe 23, with short brown hair and freckled cheeks, and like Charlotte a horsewoman to the bone. I liked Molly immediately – she seemed allergic to dramatics and had a wickedly subtle sense of humor. So, Molly came on board as Charlotte’s No. 2 – she would manage the barn and the animals while Charlotte ran the client side of things. It seemed like a perfect match, and in fact that proved to be the case.

The barn was on Burton Road, so the name seemed natural, although I was the one who suggested it. “Burton Road Equine Therapy.”

“I like it,” Charlotte said. “It tells people where we are and what we do all in one title.”

I tipped my head a fraction in her direction.

It was around this time that I realized Charlotte was doing more than business planning. She was studying me. She found me reading mail behind a closed door and asked why. I told her I wasn’t sleeping well and she bought chamomile tea. She watched me cook, then added commentary. “You always taste things twice while you’re cooking,” she said. “Once to see if it needs salt. Then because you like it.”

Which, in fact, was perfectly correct. I had just never thought of it like that.

There was one evening – after we’d eaten some spaghetti (with enough salt), and had a glass of wine or two, when I realized I was becoming talkative. Charlotte knew just how to manage this. She did absolutely nothing and let me rattle on. She figured in time I might say something incriminating. Or at least interesting.

And I did. That was when I told her about Brianna.

This was a long time ago – we’d gone to high school in Portland together. Brianna was tall and slender, with chestnut brown hair and cheeks that had a rosy shade, and her voice tended to crack even as she talked. I took her to our prom. Brianna wore a white blouse with a long black dress. I rented an electric blue tuxedo that made me look like a tropical fish with a bowtie. After the dance we went out for Italian food, then managed to kill the night – innocently – until we showed up at our friend Marcia’s place for a dawn breakfast planned for ten. No one else made it.

That was in May. Just a few weeks later, I moved to Seattle with my parents. My dad was a traveling salesman, basically. But he had been promoted to regional management. I had a car by then – a creaky Toyota Camry. I drove down to Oregon to see Brianna three or four times over the summer. In June, she invited me down to attend her sister’s wedding. As a clueless seventeen-year-old, I had no idea of the significance of that.

One warm evening when I was visiting – I would stay in the basement at Marcia’s house and at breakfast swap semi-ribald jokes with her mother Pat – Brianna and I drove thirty miles east of Portland to Multnomah Falls: a long ribbon of water dropping off a three-hundred-foot basalt cliff. We found a picnic table in the state park. She sat on the tabletop, guitar in hand, and sang Moonshadow in a quavering but lovely alto. No one had ever sung to me before. To me, I thought. To this day, when I hear that song, it hits.

In time we went our separate ways. We each got married, drifted into journalism, and on occasion swapped letters. One or two letters each year. In one of those letters, she wrote something small – the kind of line you would skim past on a normal day. But it hit a bruise I had. On my ego. Brianna suggested that, like herself at the time, I maybe hadn’t really grown up or found my footing. She probably didn’t even mean it the way I took it. And I took it very badly.

So instead of dealing with it, I did what I had learned to do growing up in a house where shouting was the default form of communication. I shut down. I stopped writing to her.

More years passed. For some reason I started to think about Brianna again. I had the sense there were some loose ends to tie up. What was odd was that when I looked, Brianna had no digital footprint. None. Not even Facebook. For a journalist and photographer, that seemed impossible.

It was a silence that pulled at me. I turned to paid online services to look for her, and eventually I found a likely candidate in North Carolina. I was almost certain it was her because it listed one of her past names as that of her ex-husband’s – he had proven to be abusive. I even found a phone number and texted it; identifying myself and asking if this was Brianna. No, the reply came.

I wasn’t entirely sure I believed that, but I didn’t follow up.

I told Charlotte all of this. And I immediately saw that she was not happy with me. She didn’t raise her voice, but when she spoke her tone was cool to the point of arctic. “What were you thinking?” she asked.

I didn’t care for that. “About what?” I asked her.

“What were you thinking – tracking her down like that?” she said. “That’s about what.” We were at the kitchen table, and I had just made myself some coffee. I took a sip to avoid parroting back, That’s about what.

“I was thinking – I was thinking that it would be a good thing to contact her, to close the loop,” I said. “I wasn’t stalking her, Charlotte. Maybe it was impolite. But I didn’t do anything illegal.” That didn’t deter her. “Maybe not,” she said. “But it was still incredibly intrusive. Would you want someone doing something like that to you?” I opened my mouth to say that I wouldn’t mind all that much and that I might even be flattered. But then I stopped.

Charlotte sat back and regarded me for a moment.

“Okay – maybe not illegal,” she said. “But impolite? You used the word yourself.” She leaned forward. “Have you even tried to reach out to her in a mature way?” she asked. I said no. Then she put her hands together on the table. “So write her a letter. You said you found her address. Put it to good use – to make amends.”

I thought of the sorry state of my penmanship and winced. “Will that make you happy?” I asked. Her eyes narrowed at the sarcasm. “Not happy – no,” she said. “But maybe a little less indignant.”

We watched each other for a moment, assessing who had the upper hand. I cashed out first.

“Well okay then,” I said. “I’ll write a letter.”

So that night I did just that – sitting at the kitchen table, my pen making a scratching sound on the paper as I struggled to make the words legible. It went, in part, like this:          

 “Brianna, I’ve thought a lot about the time when we first met. What I remember most of all isn’t anything dramatic. It’s just that you were the first young woman who was easy for me to be around – as myself.”

I showed it to Charlotte. We were standing in the kitchen, and as she read, I could see her eyes moving along each line. When she finished, she handed it back to me. When I gave it to her the sheets were not folded. Now they were, and I hadn’t seen her do it.

 “Thomas,” she said finally. “This is a real letter.”

I looked at the crease. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean, I don’t think you wrote this to try and impress her, or make her miss you,” Charlotte said. “You wrote it because not writing it has been hurting you for years.”

I folded my hands across my chest. “Maybe,” I said.

“Well – it has been hurting you, and you know it,” she said. “And to think how sweet she was to you. Singing to you. That was a very intimate thing for her to do.”

She brushed her hair back. A stubborn strand still fell over her forehead. “And you didn’t ask anything of her. You didn’t demand forgiveness. You didn’t ask for a reunion. You didn’t even ask for a response. You just told her something that was true.”

Another pause. Then, “I’m proud of you.”

I kept my arms folded. “I don’t need you to be proud of me,” I said. “I’m not a third grader who you pat on the head. Just tell me I’m doing the right thing. That’s good enough for me.” Charlotte blew the strand of hair away. “Well, okay,” she said. “Okay – Mr. High Dudgeon. I think you are doing the right thing.”

I put the letter in an envelope I had already addressed and stamped. Then I told her I wasn’t sure I would send it. Charlotte looked at me and nodded. “You do what is right,” she said. “And you and I both know what that is.” The next day I walked to the mailbox, put the letter inside, and lifted the flag. That night, I sat until late at the kitchen table, a glass of Merlot next to me. I thought, and remembered, then thought some more. The tuxedo. The song. Her voice.

I took another drink of wine. The Texas wind rattled a window.

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