I watch, listening to the slow breathing in the room, until the moon has sunk below the bluffs. To put myself to sleep I try to remember every object in my father’s examining room when I was a kid. The stethoscope, the small sink, the high white bed, the jars of cotton. The framed certificates he didn’t notice any more than he noticed the doors or the windows, but that made him seem able to help people. I used to read the embossed words, the important signatures, my father’s name, thinking what he did was good, and I would try to do the same.

KITE WHISTLER AQUAMARINE

WINTER WAS BAD when it was just ordinary cold and dark and a smoky haze hung over town because everyone had woodstoves blazing in spite of the burning restrictions. Then the temperature dropped overnight to twenty below, and a Thoroughbred filly was born at our house, early, before we expected her.

I was still in bed when my husband found her because I had been awake until four, thinking about why I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t hear Cort go out to feed the horses, but I heard him struggling with the screen door, and when I came downstairs he had set the foal down on a tarp laid out on the carpet. She was chestnut like her mother, and had thin white arcs of frostbite on the tips of her ears. Cort had wrapped her in a blanket and sat with her on the floor.

“She’s so early,” I said.

“I didn’t have the mare in the foaling shed.” His glasses were fogged and he ran a hand under his nose. I gave him a tissue from the box in the kitchen.

“Can you keep her on the tarp? Off the carpet?” I asked.

He looked at me.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He pulled the shivering foal closer to his body. He’d been banking on this horse. The stud belonged to a client, and had Derby bloodlines. Cort had traded attorney’s fees for stud fees because he didn’t have the stud fees in the bank, which drove me a little crazy. He’d won a case that winter for more money than either of us had ever made, and every penny went to pay off his horse debts. Breeding the mare had meant committing to the horse business, which wasn’t a real business at all.

“Have you called the vet?” I asked. The foal wasn’t struggling or trying to stand up. She curled into Cort’s lap like a long-legged cat.

“I can’t reach him,” Cort said. “I can’t tell how long she’s been out there.” The foal’s hair was damp and fine. “I have to get milk for her,” he said. “Will you hold her a minute?”