My mom led me slowly across the room and out the front door, down the old loose and wobbly stone steps.

“Just let me lead you,” my mom said, guiding me down the driveway.

“Are you ready?” she called out to someone in the distance.

“Ready when you are!” my dad replied.

My mom stopped me and put her hands on my shoulders. The scarf was really starting to itch now, and the smell was making me feel funny.

“Here we go,” she said, untying the scarf.

I blinked a few times and looked around. We were at the foot of the driveway. At one corner was a horse trailer and next to it was my dad, standing with a tiny horse. It was black and white and had a bright-green halter.

“What’s that?” I asked.

The tiny horse stared at me suspiciously.

My dad was clutching the halter tightly, as if he knew the horse might bolt at any second.

“It’s your birthday present!” my mom said. Tears slipped down the side of her face. “Your very own pony. His name is Rainbow. Isn’t he just beautiful?”

He blinked at me as I stepped closer. Beautiful wasn’t the word I would have picked. He was cute, though. He nodded his head at me and I patted his nose. The hairs around his eyes were gray, and I wondered how old he was. Surely not a “new” pony like you might expect a kid might get for her birthday.

“He’s a rescue,” my mom said. “He’s going to need a lot of love and patience.” She hugged him then, and I could tell without a doubt that this was definitely a present for her and not me.

The favorite story my mom likes to tell about her childhood is the day she got her own pony, Buddy. The story goes that for three whole years she prayed every night for a horse. Finally, on her tenth birthday, her prayers were answered. My grandfather took her out to the front lawn on the morning of her birthday, a scarf wrapped over her eyes, and when he took it off, there was Buddy, a palomino pony with a big brown patch over one side of his face and all white on the other. There’s an old photo of my mom on the back of Buddy that she keeps on the mantel in the living room. She’s sitting backward and leaning forward, resting an open book on his rump. He’s tethered to a stake in the ground, eating grass on the front lawn of the house she grew up in. This is the way I picture my mom’s entire childhood: carefree summers sitting on Buddy, reading the days away. The problem is, it’s how she’s always envisioned mine, too.

Rainbow sniffed my hand, then licked it, leaving a trail of sticky saliva.