The Heart Is Not a Size by Beth Kephart Read Free Book Online Page B

worn-out gray T-shirt; and behind her, now beside her, was Dad, blocking the light from the hallway. He pushed himself through the door frame, and they both walked to my bed. Mom sat down, then he did, and then I slid slightly north. I tossed the old SAT book to the floor, where it fell with a thud.
    “I didn’t bother to wrap it,” Dad said, handing me a box. “It’s a digital. Small but mighty.”
    “You got me a camera?” I raised my voice though I hadn’t meant to, took the box in my hand, pulledthe camera from the wrapping. I’d always envied my ultra-megapixeled-camera-endowed friends. I’d always thought that taking pictures—real pictures—was another way of writing poems. Or reading the poems back later. Or something. Whatever it was, the two were tangled in my mind, and now I heard Kev down the hall, jumping off his bed and opening his door. Kev, a flash of lightning through the dark hall of the house.
    “Extra batteries and memory sticks,” Dad was saying, and Kev was still running. Down the hall, through my door, a slam against my bed.
    “What’d you get her?” he demanded.
    “A camera,” Mom said.
    “How come she gets a camera?” He reached, but I held my camera high. Mom caught Kev’s hand gently, tried to nest it inside hers.
    “Because she’s going to Mexico,” Mom said. “Going to see it for the rest of us.”
    “Mexico is hot,” Kev declared.
    “Thanks for the info,” I said. I lowered the camera, stared through its eye. Turned it on and let it focus. Snapped a picture of my dad.

    “So you’re taking pictures for prosperity?” Kev said.
    “For posterity,” I said. Dad laughed. Now I turned the camera on Mom and Kev. She’s smiling in that photo graph. Kev’s looking half surprised.

nine
    T he next day I woke to the quadruple clopping of hooves, the slamming and latching of a pickup truck. Boots on asphalt. I grabbed my glasses, sat up. From my bedroom window I could see them best—the long line of trailers that had arrived overnight: from California, Connecticut, New Jersey, from every state that claimed a horse with the heart or brawn to win. The trailers were nose to rear up and down my street—some of them posh as limousines, some with room to spare for the polished carriages and sulkies that would be paraded later that week atthe fairgrounds two blocks north.
    The horses were like kindergartners being let out of school—shuddering and tossing their tails as they reverse-walked down the grated ramps. Their eyes were as big as purple summer plums, and all I wanted to do right then was breathe in the horses, press my cheek against their cheeks. It was early, a Sunday; I called Riley nonetheless. The horse show came to town only once each year, in May; and the show was a Georgia-Riley tradition.
    “Riley,” I whispered, so that my brothers couldn’t hear. “They’ve come.”
    “Who has?” Riley had sleep all over her voice, cobwebs thrown over her vowels. The only thing she knew right then was that I was the one who had called. I’d have felt guilty, except that I didn’t. I knew how mad she would have been if I’d let her sleep through any segment of the news.
    “The horses.”
    “Oh my God,” she said, her God cracking. “Isn’t it…early?”
    “They came in overnight.”
    “The big ones?”

    “Yeah.”
    “The Falabella, too?”
    “I’m looking at it right now, Riley. Still as small as last year, maybe smaller.” As I talked, I watched the scene beyond my bedroom window—the little horses mixed up with the big ones, the trainer in the dirty jodhpurs whose chestnut mare was trimming the edge of the lawn across the street. There was some kind of commotion involving a trailer that paralleled my lawn. Two men, maybe three, trying to coax a big horse out from the trailer it had come in so that it could walk down the street and take its place inside a fairgrounds stall. They were calling its name. They were getting nowhere. All the horse would do