The name on the gate says The Easterbrooks. I lean forward and look through the windshield wipers: horses with canvas blankets in fields around a big wooden house shielded by oaks and chestnut trees. I take the address out of my pocket. I know it by heart: c/o Easterbrook, Monkton, Maryland. I’ve read it fifteen times.
Callie’s old plastic rain scarf lies on the driveway. I pick it up and tie it to the side mirror of her white Studebaker. I hear talking inside the house, the kitchen window is open. A man’s voice that isn’t Hoofers’s; it doesn’t have the drawl of the Eastern Shore. It’s Buddy Black. He looks short without his riding boots on. He takes a can of Fanta from the fridge and goes into another room. I move along the windows.
They sit on the bed and leaf through Callie’s scrapbook. On the wall above them there’s a painting of an old woman in a long dress, leading a peacock in a harness. Buddy sits close to Callie as she turns the pages and talks. I stand in a ficus not ten feet from them, but I can’t hear what they say.
She points at pictures—I know most of them even though I can’t see. I remember how each of them sits on the page. Callie at horse shows and local gymkhanas when she was younger, cuttings of point-to-points and cross-country races. Some I took myself with her Box Brownie: Hoofers jumping the car, Callie on a horse on the Delaware beach. One of me on Untouchable over a sunken road.
Callie looks young on the bed, even with her face full of shadows. Buddy is older, he must be twenty-seven or -eight. He closes the book and leans back, pulls her down beside him. She looks straight up at the ceiling as if she can see right through the roof.
I move from the window, not afraid of the noise I make, the swing of a branch that slaps the glass, the sound of my feet on the gravel. I hear them get up from the bed but I don’t look around. I get in the car and slam the door, drive fast along the narrow roads, follow the signs to Baltimore.