Twister Darling

Mid-morning light splashed across the black speckled white tiles. A slash of yellow brightness cut between the almost, but not quite, drawn curtains. A nurse named Redheart clip-clopped in, her lips curled in her perpetual pleasant but professional smile as she came to check that I hadn’t tried to leave the wheelchair again. The doctor had been quite clear that I’d be able to walk on my cast only for a few minutes at a time before it would start to pain me again, long enough to get in and out of the wheelchair basically. Once it started to hurt, I’d have to get off it again if I didn’t want to risk making the injury worse. But I wasn’t the kind of mare to just sit around, so I’d been up, pacing around, far more than was probably good for me. This hadn’t exactly gained me any favorable feelings from Redheart, though she seemed more resigned to my inability to sit still than frustrated by it.

She gave a satisfied look at seeing me still confined to the chair. That made me want to frown a little, but I forced myself not to. She really was just concerned about my wellbeing, after all. “Twister Darling; are you just about ready to get back home?” She asked, giving me a slightly brighter smile than her usual one. “Your son is here to pick you up, so make sure you’ve got everything you came in with. We wouldn’t want you leaving-”

“Stormfeather? Is here?” I asked, my breath catching and my voice quivering with surprise and excitement. I knew how Stormy felt about being sent away for school. He’d always felt that I’d abandoned him. In hindsight? Maybe I had. I’d thought that sending him to a good school with people smarter and better than me would make him rise like the star on his flank, but that had never happened. Instead, he’d sputtered and guttered rather than burning bright. I knew that it was my fault. But why was he here? How had he found out that I’d been injured and would need help?

“Hi, mom,” Stormy said, sticking his head around the open door and looking in. His expression wasn’t one of happy greeting, which set the feeling of soaring gladness I’d just been feeling fluttering away in a wrenching of grief and regret from my heart that settled like tension into the muscles of my shoulders. “I hear you’ve gotten yourself into a bit of trouble?” He asked as he stepped into the doorway but remained just outside the room. His heavy wings were folded neatly along his sides, but he still had that farm horses stature like his mother, with the thickly corded muscles meant to pull a plow, pull up stumps from the fields, and spend hours trotting along after the sheep in the meadow.

“Stormy. I’m so glad you came.” I said, forcing myself not to let any tears leave my eyes. I knew, from the last time we’d seen each other, just after his graduation from Wonderbolt Academy, that crying openly might send Stormy into a rage again. It wasn’t my crying that had really been the issue, though I had no way to understand any of that at the time. It had been about a filly. A filly I believe that he really loved, who’d been his long-term fillyfriend for most of the four years at the Academy. But I hadn’t known about her flighty, cheating, manipulations, her crying, and pouting. I’d discovered those things only later after I’d made the mistake of weeping and apologizing almost the moment that he’d sat down across from me, which he’d seen as only another attempt at emotional manipulation.

Storm turned to nurse Redheart and spoke in a low voice, “Thanks for calling me. Do I need to sign anything or talk to the doctor?”

Redheart shook her head. “No. The doctor already cleared her. But I hope you’re prepared to stick around and look after her for at least the next sixteen weeks.”

Storm glanced in my direction for a second, his gaze darting away as he avoided meeting my eyes, yet he looked back at Redheart and nodded. “Yeah. It seems I am.”

“I hope it’s okay that we contacted your son. He was listed by your insurance as your only medical contact, but we had no contact information. I had to have Doctor Horse use his unicorn magic to send him a letter, and he just showed up about half an hour ago.” Redheart explained.

“I was already close. Just over Appleloosa way.” Stormy said, interrupting to explain. “I’d just finished helping a rancher out that way with his herd of sheep and was just about to ramble on when I got the message.” He went on. “So, don’t worry about how long it’ll take to recover. I’ve got nowhere to be anytime soon.”

I couldn’t help but feel the rekindling of happiness in my chest at this revelation. My boy was back, and maybe this time I’d even be able to apologize properly for all the mistakes that I’d made. He didn’t even seem angry or upset. It was more as if he were embarrassed, or worried that I’d start scolding him or something of the sort.

“Are you ready?” Stormy asked, to which I simply nodded as Redheart wheeled me into the hall and he stepped in behind to take over as she passed me into his care. We rolled down the long white hall into the light of a summer noontime which spilled in through the tall glass front of the hospital’s entryway and received a friendly smile and wave of goodbye from the pony candy striper who was sitting behind the reception desk.

A few minutes later I was leaning my shoulder against the passenger window of one of the oldest rattle-trap trucks I’d ever seen. It wasn’t exactly easy to get my cast into the truck, but we’d managed in the end, leaving me leaning sort of sideways with both rear legs extended at a strange angle.

The truck itself must have passed from farmhoof to farmhoof, being bought and sold, breaking down repeatedly until it had reached Stormy, who, despite his lack of impressive flying abilities, was quite talented with his hooves, or so he said, rambling as he helped me into the cab and loaded the wheelchair into the bed of the pickup. He’d fixed the vehicle up himself and was proud that now, it would start up on the first crank despite its ancient appearance. It was a testament to his abilities that the truck did just that when he turned the key. The long bench seat that I found myself sitting on was more tape than fabric at this point, but most of the padding remained intact and no springs were poking into my rump. My own truck, left back at the house, wasn’t in much better condition, though I’d been able to maintain the interior in a bit better condition than this. Its engine didn’t purr like this one though.

“Would you mind if we stopped for lunch?” Stormy asked suddenly breaking a silence that had gone on for several minutes as we approached the main part of Ponyville, not turning to look at me, his voice tight with some emotion that I couldn’t quite place. “It's been a… while… since I’ve gotten the chance to eat, and it’s a fair way back to Mustang yet.”

I glanced around at the clean but threadbare and sparse interior. What caught my eye though was the level of fuel in the truck's tank. It was almost three-quarters full. I smiled to myself, understanding that he wasn’t asking if I could spare the time. He was broke. Likely all his bits had been put into the fuel tank to get him here from Appleloosa.

“Sure. I’m hungry too. I’ll even treat since you came all this way.” I said, smiling and not caring in the least. Even if he was a penniless beggar, I’d welcome my boy with open hooves. “Burgers and Shakes sound good. Anything would be better than that hospital food though.” I said, “No taste at all. I swear I don’t know how they get all the flavor out of everything, but they manage somehow.”

He couldn’t help himself. He laughed, and I almost melted. It wasn’t even a good laugh, but it was a genuine one, perhaps the first genuine laugh I’d heard from him since I’d put him on the bus for Cloudsdale.

The diner in Ponyville was bustling as we pulled into a space along one side of the diner, which had old fashioned carhops in roller skates zooming across the parking lot from car to car, taking orders, delivering trays of food, and smiling as they basked in increasingly warm sun that had already cleared the parking lot of ice and snow from the same storm that had collapsed my poor old porch. This was mostly because the storm hadn’t dropped nearly as much ice and snow on Ponyville or the nearby Canterlot because of their weather pegasus, the same ones that my Storm Break had once worked with all those years back. They’d made sure that the storms greatest fury was diverted from the town. The country though? Where the farm was located? Well, out there we just had to live with whatever bad weather came our way.

A red-maned pink bodied young unicorn filly wearing thigh-high leggings and roller skates that laced up to her knees came up to the driver’s window with a roar of skate wheels on pavement. Her cutie mark, predictably, was a pair of roller skates and some musical notes in bright red, for some reason, flying around them.

“My names Derby Dash! What can I get you?” She said, winking at Stormy, who seemed entirely uncomfortable with the interaction as she didn’t wait for a response to her question but continued with her speech. “Remember that tonight, and every night this week, any profit from dessert purchases will go to helping the Ponyville Filly’s and Colt’s roller derby league.” She said, producing a pad and pen with a little flick of her magic horn. “So, what will you folks have?”

“Two double bale meals with sweet tea and apple pie,” Stormy asked, looking to me for confirmation of the order. It wasn’t what I’d have ordered for myself, but I nodded anyway, not interested in waiting for a second server to come back after I’d looked at a menu.

“Straight or curly?” she asked as the pen dashed across the pad, propelled by the magic of her horn.

“Pardon?” Stormy asked, not understanding the question.

She giggled, “Sorry. Your fries. Do you want them curly or straight cut?”

“Oh,” he said, his ears twitching in the way I knew meant he was embarrassed. “Curly, I guess.” He replied after a moment. The carhop rolled away and the silence between us drew out long, lasting through the meal until we were back on the road out of town. It lasted until just beyond the last of the buildings on Ponyville’s main street drew to no more than a speck in the rear-view mirror. Then Stormy finally broke the silence.

“I hope it's okay if I stay with you for a while.” He said, suddenly, fast, as if he’d been turning this statement over and over in his head and looking at it from every angle for some flaw in its presentation. He’d finally forced it out, and the sentence was laden with meanings that went far beyond the simplicity of its words. I could see from the look in his eyes that he knew all of them.

He was out of work again, with the job in Appleloosa behind and nothing ahead but more uncertainty. I remembered that sort of life. The one I’d led living in an old RV that only started half the time when father tried to crank it. Stormy had fallen on a difficult time and found himself, for maybe the first time in his life, happy to have remembered that home was the place you could always come back to where someone had to take you in. For him, that was the farm where his father had grown up, where his mother lived, and from which he’d banished himself for the past ten years. But now he saw a chance to maybe earn back a place in this old life.

Not that I’d have asked him to earn it even if he’d just shown up on my rickety old porch before it had collapsed on me. I’d have taken him in gladly. But I sensed how he felt. That he needed this excuse to let himself return to me and to his past.

If that’s what it took; then so be it.

“There’s a lot of chores that need doing around the farm.” I said, “I’ve tried to stay ahead of everything, but keeping up the garden, and with The Hayloft to manage, it doesn’t leave much time left over for things like replacing the porch before it collapses.” I said, first smiling but then grimacing as I recalled how long I was going to be dealing with my new wheeled circumstances, and all because I hadn’t taken care of that problem sooner. Of course, I didn’t know much about porches, so blaming myself for the collapse was pretty much twenty-twenty hindsight since the only warning I’d had was that the porch had been a little more creaky than usual for the past few months.

“I’ll earn my keep.” Stormy promised, giving me a look that said “thank you” as clearly as he was likely to be able to, at least for now.

I shook my head and looked out the passenger’s window. “I’m really sorry.” I risked saying, keeping my eyes averted so he couldn’t see if I cried but looking at him through the slightly distorted reflection in the window glass. “I wish I’d never sent you to that place.”

Stormy sighed and I could hear his hooves creaking as he gripped the steering wheel just a little tighter. “You don’t need to apologize.” He said, after taking some time to collect his thoughts. “It's me…” He continued, swallowing hard enough that I could hear an audible click in his throat as he did. “I’m the one who should be ashamed.” He gave a bark of laugh without humor. “I was ashamed. Too ashamed of how I’d failed you.” He began to shake and tremble, the bright, glistening line of wet tears beginning to stream down his face.

The truck rocked, the struts creaked, and loose pebbles that bordered the road popped under the trucks slowing tires as Stormy brought the vehicle to a stop. He slammed the truck into park and turned to face me, one hoof on the steering wheel while the other brushed uselessly at the trails of tears cascading down his face, trying to clear his vision.

I turned to face him as he continued to speak. “I spent years being angry at you for sending me away,” he said, “but as I got older and saw the lives of the other Wonderbolts…” He sniffed and sobbed, shaking his head. “The ones who went on from flight school to do important jobs like dads. They were happy. Seeing their lives and accomplishments made me realize that I’d squandered that same opportunity. Opportunities you gave me.” He told me, taking my hoof in his as my own tears started to flow, entirely outside of my control now.

I wanted to reassure him, to just tell him that everything was going to be okay, but I could feel that he was on an emotional knife’s edge. I was afraid that anything I did or said, taken the wrong way, could destroy our fragile newly budding relationship before it even had a chance to take root, so I refrained from speaking and only allowed myself that single clasped hoof for the moment.

“I didn’t understand then that I didn’t have to follow in dad’s hoofprints.” He admitted. “Until it was too late. Even at flying, I wasn’t the worst student, so I’ve been able to make my way, doing this and that, but I never really fit in the way I should with other pegasi. It took me years to realize that it was because I just wasn’t where I really belong. I wasn’t at home, on the farm with my hooves in good black soil.” He said. “All the best times that I can remember were those spent in our little garden tending the crops that we’d grown and nurtured with our own hooves.” He finished, sighing with a long-held longing that I’d have never guessed at.

I sniffled back my tears and gave him a smile. “So, you want to be a farmer, like your grandpa?” I asked, thinking of the gone-to-seed fields around the farm where I’d lived alone for the past ten years, unable to do much more than maintain my simple back yard garden. It was always enough to feed both of us when he was a colt though and to provide some much-needed extra income from selling at the farmer’s market in Mustang. If he wanted to farm, there was plenty of land there for it, but it was almost as raw as land could get. Entirely reclaimed by Equestria as wilderness. There would be years of work just turning most of it back into anything vaguely resembling working farmland.

Though the air coming from the trucks vents was warm, it felt chill on the tracks of the tears I just hadn’t been able to hold back; hard as I’d tried. “Your dad would’ve loved that,” I told him, but he gave me a skeptical look that hurt my feelings a little; as if he’d just outright called me a liar.

“You don’t have to do that,” he said his tone on the verge of being really upset. “Dad was a flier. I know that. I’ve met a lot of his old Academy friends and their children. He’d never have wanted to be a farmer.”

I couldn’t help but give a small laugh in response as I nod enthusiastically, in complete agreement with that. “All quite true; for himself. But your dad wasn’t the snob some of his fellow pegasi were. How else do you think he ended up with a simple earth filly like me?” I asked, continuing to chuckle at his look of surprise.

“He respected your grandfather.” I went on, explaining after I’d stopped chuckling. “He might not have wanted to work the land, but he always respected it, and his dad. He loved this farm and he might even have settled down here one day if it hadn’t been for…” I began, then butted up against the thing that had happened; the reason that my son had not only never met his father but had missed out on knowing his grandparents as well, a thing that I’d always had difficulty talking about to anyone.

It was my own namesake that did it. A twister came down one dreary afternoon and cut a line across the farm like the hoof of some giant. Storm Break had been visiting his parents, helping his father with some chores. I wasn’t even sure what they really did. It was something that the pair of them shared together that wasn’t for either me or Stormy’s mom to know about. But I had no qualms about that since mares often had our own special secrets and activities that we didn’t share with our stallions.

The storm was one of those freak things that just sometimes happens. One moment the sky was just a little gray and threatening maybe a light rain, and in the next moment, the barn they’d been working in was being torn apart around them and pulled up into the sky.

I quickly shook off those thoughts. I’d never seen any of that. I’d dreamed about it. For years I’d dreamed about it in my nightmares. The wind and the flying debris battering my Storm Break down again and again even as he attempted to lift into the sky and battle the storm. His mother rushing from the safety of her kitchen and being struck by a flying bit of farm equipment, and his father simply falling beneath a collapsing wall of the barn. I’d seen them all die in a dozen different ways more brutal even than what probably happened. But eventually, the nightmares had passed, and I was left with only the memories of what I’d really seen. That six-inch-deep trench. The splintered debris of red painted wood from the barn littering the fields for miles in all directions, and the three still forms that lay covered with blankets that had been brought out of the house, which had been almost entirely untouched by the storm. The only three people I’d ever really been able to call family.

I felt the words catch and clench in my throat, my heart ached in that way it did sometimes these days when I came across his old pictures in the attic or some little thing that lay around the house, sparking memories of his smile, his touch, his laugh. Aching still, but not burning the way it had back then. That was all long in the past now, and nothing could change what had happened. But the same wasn’t true for Stormy. With him, I still had a chance. We both did.

I forced myself to continue, knowing that I’d paused for far too long for the silence to be comfortable anymore. “If your dad hadn’t died so young,” I went on, my voice raspy with the lump that seemed to have taken up residence in my throat, “he’d be proud to see you following in his father’s hoofsteps,” I assured him.

He’d gotten himself back under control during my long pause to work through my own emotional baggage, and the tears from his admission were mostly gone, his eyes cleared, as he turned back to the wheel and put the truck into gear once more. He pulled back on to the old, cracked, cobble-paved road with an audible whine from the mostly bald old tires.

We passed the rest of the drive silently. He was watching the road and seemed to brood, but maybe he was just planning, there was no way for me to know. But to me, at that moment, he seemed far away and unreachable, a distinct contrast from his earlier tearful admission that had seemed to bring us together for the first time in so long. I, on the other hoof, found myself too open and raw, torn by those old memories I’d uncovered. Even more than I’d been since the last time I’d talked to Stormy. A meeting that hadn’t gone quite as well as this one had done.

Early summer had been a beautiful time in Cloudsdale. Puffy white clouds were everywhere, and the town was abloom with the small rainbow of colorful flowers that pegasus usually preferred for their gardens, Light, flowery plants that scented the air. I’d saved up enough money to go see my Stormy graduate from the Academy. Even if he wanted nothing to do with me; I’d still decided to go. I loved him; even if he’d grown to hate me for trying to do what I thought was best for him. Or at least that’s what I’d told myself. When I’d arrived at his dormitory, he’d even seemed happy to see me, though he’d been distracted and busy with a dozen other things trying to get ready for the graduation ceremony.

He’d been a bit dismissive but generally kind with his words as he excused himself and asked if I’d have time to sit down and talk after graduation day. But that was better than the open hostility I’d almost expected. It gave me hope that we might reach some equilibrium in our relationship after that day and maybe he’d even find a way to forgive me for my failings as a mother one day. So, I’d agreed, told him that I was proud, and invited him to meet me the next day, for lunch, after he’d celebrated with his friends.

I didn’t know that he wouldn't be spending that night with friends since he had few in the Academy, with him having been one of the worst performing graduates who’d only made it through, most said, on the strength of his father’s name. This hadn’t done him any favors in making friends, I later discovered. So, it wasn’t friends that he spent that night with but instead his fillyfriend of four years named Rain Dancer, a rainbow tailed Pegasus with the lithe figure and light agile body of a true weather flier. Unlike Stormy, she’d received dozens of offers to take jobs in places as far away as Manehatten and Los Pegasus, while Stormy had only one opportunity. Or at least he’d thought it was one. He thought he’d follow his heart and go wherever Rain Dancer decided to go. He was sure that he’d be able to find work wherever they ended up together.

But Rain Dancer had other ideas. I didn’t know most of this until many years later, even long after the events of this story, and it was even longer before Stormy revealed to me just what it was that she’d said to him that night, but when I eventually did find out’ I was furious. It wasn’t even that she was mean or hateful. That might have made things easier. It was that she did it only because she could. Because he’d been there and vulnerable, easy to manipulate. That was all.

Rain was good at manipulating those around her, as it turned out. She thought of ponies being just as changeable as the weather, under her guiding hoof, and she enjoyed manipulating the ponies in her life almost as much as she enjoyed pushing clouds around Equestria’s skies. Stormy didn’t understand any of that, at least not then. I’d spoiled him. I admit it. All my attention had been for him, and he’d done almost everything with me from the time he could walk. So, when he met Rain, he just couldn’t understand that it might be any other way between them.

“Come on Feather head; we’re not right for each other. You see that don’t you?” She’d told him when she’d showed up at his dorm just long enough to say goodbye. Which I suppose, in her own strange way, meant that she did care about Stormy. Enough not to just ghost him entirely.

This had been her response to his question at seeing her luggage packed into the back of another pony’s hatchback waiting with the engine running at the curb. “What’s all that? Are we leaving already? I’m not even packed.” He’d said, confused, or just not quite believing that what his brain was telling him, that this was really the way she was going to announce that she was leaving him.

“It was fun though.” She went on, leaning in to nuzzle his throat just that special way he’d always liked the best. She was even crying, again, as if she were really hurting at their pending separation even though he’d had nothing at all to do with it.

It made him begin to look back through their long relationship with new eyes. He recalled all the long evenings she'd spent studying with other ponies that never seemed to be other fillies. He thought of all those times he’d been trying to save his meager bits; what little he could spare from his part-time job flying packages overnight from Cloudsdale to Ponyville and she’d always seemed to know just when he’d saved up enough to do something because she’d start asking for something. Dinner, dancing, tickets to a concert or play. There was always something. And he realized how often he’d bought those tickets or given her bits only for them to get used by Rain and her friends while he had to be at work.

“You were the best one of all my boyfriends.” She told him, giving his lower lip a warm moist little lick from her delicate little pink tongue.

“What do you mean; of all your boyfriends?” He asked; his nose paling and his chest tightening with anger and fear. He’d already guessed, but it was different hearing an open admission and just thinking it in your mind. As hard as he’d ignored the truth, unwilling to see what was going on, it was now staring him in the face. “How many were there?” He asked, horrified that he’d even asked, both wanting the answer and wanting to run from it.

“Ten, eleven. Does it really matter.” Rain said, sighing and rolling her eyes. She was growing exasperated enough that she even dropped the pretense of her teary emotional goodbye. “You were fun, okay, with all those earthy muscles.” She told him. “But that’s over. We’re all grown up, and it’s time for you to find a place with your own kind.”

That hadn’t been the end of the conversation. Many more hurtful things were said, but none covered any new ground. It was all rehashing earlier pain and humiliation and eventually, Rain Dancer had just walked away, something that Stormy had found himself unable to do. He’d been left despondent, angry, brooding, and with no target for the rising loathing except himself as his emotions battered at him from the inside, his memories assaulting him with his own stupidity and blindness while he spent that night with no plans except to relive every manipulation, every lie, every intimate moment that had turned out to be only a play being acted out by others with him cast in the role of the buffoon, the jester of Rain Dancer’s court. Oh, how they must have laughed behind his wings.

It was that Stormfeather who walked into the restaurant the next day. He’d looked rough, but I’d put that down to a night of carousing and celebration. He hadn’t said a word. Just stood there and stared at the table, as if waiting for me to say something. I’d thought that he wanted me to start by at least admitting the mistakes that I’d made, so I finally broke and began to talk, and cry.

We hadn’t even ordered when I’d attempted to make my apologies. I admitted that I felt like I’d abandoned him, that I knew I had but that I hadn’t seen any other way, that I’d only done it because I wasn’t smart enough, good enough, to help him towards the future that he deserved. The future he’d have now that he’d graduated. I told him how proud I was that he’d made it through.

But my apologies, my tears, and a night of letting bad feelings and rejection fill his every thought had stirred up his emotions into a storm that was as devastating as any twister. His feelings over being sent away were just too close, in his mind, to what Rain had just done to him. Abandonment. It was all just an act; a farce that meant less than nothing to me, and other fillies and mares like me. He’d let it all inside, where it was tearing him into strips of bloody emotional upheaval. In the end, he walked away; so angry that he’d given not even a single word of explanation, leaving behind only a broken chair that he’d kicked aside in his wake and me, sobbing with the certainty that I’d broken things between us for good and didn’t even know how.

Somehow, I pulled myself back out of my memories and managed to stop dwelling on the past just about the time we pulled into the gravel lot in front of The Hayloft, the place where I’d worked for over twenty years now. It’d been maybe the fifth job I’d gotten after moving to the farm and realizing that crops didn’t just magically grow themselves out of the ground and that I had no idea what I was doing. I’d started by going to neighboring farms and asking for any sort of work they had. I’d spent days tilling, planting, picking, mending fences, and I’d picked up just enough knowledge to make a go at our little backyard garden. It might have turned out differently had I not gotten the job at The Hayloft before spring planting came around. I might have ended up a real farmer myself. But I had, and so I hadn’t.

“It’s not mine you know,” I told Stormy as he reached down and opened the driver’s side door with a tug on the old silver handle. The door creaked and sagged back until It had almost closed as Stormy turned to look at me with understandable confusion at the sudden remark.

“The Farm.” I went on, “I don’t own it. I never have.” I told him, wringing my hooves, worried that I might be writing my own eviction notice. “Your father and I… never married; you see,” I explained. “So, I couldn’t legally inherit anything. You were his next of kin though. So, it all went to you. The farm. The House. Everything your grandparents built there. It’s yours.”

Storm let go of the door handle and leaned back hard against the seat, his eyes stunned. “Why… why would you tell me that now?” He asked, looking at me with disbelief.

I lowered my muzzle and shook my head. “Why wouldn’t I?” I said, sighing. “It's not something I’d try to keep from you. It was just a subject that never came up before.” I pointed out.

Stormy took a long few seconds to think, then right himself, school his expression, and finally nod as he climbed out of the truck and made his way around to my side to pull the wheelchair out of the bed, in silence as he considered the revelation. He was gentle as he helped me into the wheelchair, offering me one hoof for support while the other held the chair steady, and I could feel that we’d broken through some unseen barrier that had been standing between us for some long time. There was still rubble there, a stone or two to stumble on maybe, but one day we might just clean that rubble away and have a beautiful thing left in the place of the ruins.

“Thank you for trusting me.” He whispered into my ear as he pushed me along towards the doors to The Hayloft. “You should talk to your boss while I head over and price some things from the hardware store so I can fix up that porch.” He said, smiling, even if it was only a small smile.

I shook my head and took the banking card I’d set up in the Friendship Trust Bank that had a branch office in the Piggly-wiggly. It was in my little vinyl pouch where I kept a few bits in cash and an identification card which had all been placed into a small canvas tote bag on the side of the wheelchair by Nurse Redheart when I was getting ready to leave the hospital. I passed him the little card. “There should be enough in my account to buy whatever it is you need. I’ve been living spare for years now; so, I’ve got a few bits saved.” I assured him as he gave me a worried look that I waved away. “You’re right though. I should get something arranged at the diner while you see about supplies.” I agreed, patting his hoof and pointing to the hardware store just a little way down the block as we reached the doorway into the diner and stopped. “I’ll wheel myself on over after I get done inside. Okay?” I told him, caressing his hoof gently.

Stormy gave me another questioning look, this time glancing at my broken and cast covered leg, but I swatted his shoulder playfully and frowned. “I’m not an invalid, even without the chair,” I told him. “I’ll manage,” I promised, answering his un-voiced concern.

“Okay. But if you need me...” He began again, but I smiled and waved him off again as I wheeled myself through the doors and into The Hayloft.

My entrance drew the attention of the young round-bellied farm filly who was standing behind the register dressed in one of the little, gingham, aprons I had everyone wear as a sort of uniform for the staff. Her name was Penny Horseshoe and she was an even more thickly built earth pony than I was. She was also hugely pregnant with her second foal despite her tender sixteen years. Farm-girl earth ponies out here in the country rarely made it much longer than their first couple of heat cycles before they managed to attract one of the local stallions. If they wanted to make sure it wasn’t their fathers or brothers who knocked them up the first time, or second, they’d leave home as soon as the first signs of their heat came and find themselves a neighbor boy to do the deed and settle down with him.

That sort of thing was getting less common as civilization edged its way slowly across Equestria’s backcountry little by little, with modern medicine replacing the old ways and a pill beginning to change everything. That almost magical little pill that a filly, or mare, could take each week, then once a day for the six days leading up to the beginning of her cycle, to stop the cycle in its tracks. It was cheap and effective, and yet some of these old farm families, who were used to relying mostly on their own home remedies and treatments rather than modern medicine, were still stuck in the days when their daughter’s had to run off and hide in the woods every few weeks, or just go ahead, give in, and get pregnant the way Penny had done.

“Hey, Boss lady,” Penny said, frowning when she saw the wheelchair. “I’d heard it wasn’t that bad.” She fretted, looking me over. “That looks pretty bad though.”

There were no customers in the diner, just Penny and the cook Sizzle who was somewhere in the back where I could hear him clopping around but didn’t see him. The lunch rush had already ended, and the dinner rush was still yet to come. Not that our regular crowd of perhaps fifteen locals could really be considered a rush. Such a small town couldn’t support the businesses in Mustang, it was the racers that made the difference and kept Mustang and The Hayloft going. Ponies from all over came west to the flat country, especially in the summer. They’d rent out some farmers fallow field for the season and set up a track to practice racing away from the prying eyes of their competition. It was almost like a summer tradition, and what brought the city folks out to infuse much-needed life into Mustang year after year.

“Hey, Penny. How long is it before you pop,” I asked, grinning. “Because the doctor says I’m going to be off my hooves for the next sixteen weeks. That means we’re going to end up shorthanded if that foal is going to drop in the next couple of weeks.”

Penny nodded. “That’s about right. Field Sprout’s Grammy says she’ll be comin along in about seventeen days,” She confirmed. “But I shouldn’t be out for more than a week after. I can’t afford to miss more work than that.”

“You don’t have to worry about coming back too soon. You should take at least two weeks. Even if you feel fine. It's important to spend that time with your baby. You need to bond properly with her,” I said, waving away the concern. “I’ll make sure your checks don’t change. But I need you to find someone we can trust to run The Hayloft for us in the meantime.” The reason I asked Penny instead of doing interviews and calling applicants myself was because, unlike me, she’d been to a lot of the barn socials and events held by the farmers of the community. Which meant that she’d know all the most likely fillies and colts coming of age who’d benefit from earning a few bits for themselves away from the farm. That was where we’d be more likely to find reliable help. Tourists were well known, by the locals, to be flaky and apt to move on unexpectedly, sometimes in the middle of a busy shift.

Penny didn’t even have to consider for very long before giving me a smile and a nod. “I think I’ve got just the filly. She’s still a little young, but Jelly Bean, my younger sister is perfect for the job. And she could get on the pill before she starts her first cycle. I’ve taught her numbers and letters and she’s at least as good at both as I am,” Penny assured me. This was indeed an important consideration given the lack of proper education for ponies outside the big cities. “At the very least, she wouldn’t have to take up with the first farm-pony she ran across in the woods,” Penny added.

The fact that her arguments were not that the filly would be good at the job but that she needed it to get away from the life that Penny feared was coming for her, made my mind up for me. Even if she’d been completely illiterate and ignorant of anything beyond pulling a wagon or a plow across a field, I’d have given her the chance to better her lot if that’s what she wanted.

I gave Penny a nod. “Get her in here tomorrow. You’ll have to train her and make sure she’s paired up with the right cook. We don’t want her ending up trying to ride herd on Misty or Sizzle by herself until you’re sure she can handle it,” I instructed. Misty was a flibbertigibbet and her brother Sizzle was just as enthusiastic about racing as most of the racers who passed through. To the point that he’d sometimes forget that he was supposed to be working instead of reading the latest racing magazines.

Penny pursed her lips. “She’ll be a better cook than a waitress, and It’ll be better to break up the twins anyway. You can’t trust either of them to keep the other on task. Misty will just sit down and talk to her friends while Sizzle sits back there and reads one of those racing magazines while they both ignore any customers completely. Jelly Bean might be a bit younger than Misty, but she’s a hard worker and she knows how to ride herd on the farmhooves we hire for the harvest season. I think she’ll do just fine, and with both of us gone, I’ll need her to be able to handle at least one of those hellions.”

I nodded, my approval more for Penny’s good sense than because I knew whether her choice would turn out good or bad in the end. She’d been a rather timid filly when I’d met her the first time, riding into Mustang in the back of her daddy’s pickup with her belly almost as swollen with foal as it was now. She’d only been off the farm a few times in her whole life save a few visits to neighboring farms, but I could see how intelligent she was, all that wasted potential, and so I offered her a job waitressing if she’d come in a few extra hours a week an let me teach her how to read, write, add, and subtract. She’d accepted, excitedly, and had started work not long after she’d given birth to her son Field Sprout, and she’d turned out just as smart and capable as I’d thought.

“Call me with reports every day, alright?” I told Penny, smiling. “Once the filly comes, I want to hear from you all the time. It’ll be important that you don’t feel cut off and trapped by the new responsibility. Remember that you’re not alone. I’ll always be there if you need me.”

I left The Hayloft feeling good that I was leaving it in capable hands, but any good feelings I might have harbored were already beginning to eek away as I watched Stormy loading supplies into the bed of his truck and began wondering why I hadn’t just gone ahead and told him that I’d bought the diner almost five years ago. It had happened when the previous owners, a couple who’d lived in Mustang for most of their lives, had retired and moved to Vanhoover to be with their grandkids. I missed Old Miss Berrygal and her husband Clopper, but they’d made me a fair deal when they’d decided to sell. I’d sent them half the diner’s profits the first year, a quarter the second year, an eighth the third, and by the beginning of last year, I’d owned the diner free and clear. It was never going to make me wealthy exactly, but I didn’t have to wait tables or run the grill for myself anymore, unless I wanted too, which I usually did four nights a week. Or at least I had before my broken leg.

As I rolled up in my wheelchair, feeling more tired than I would’ve expected from the days events so far, and looked over the collected supplies, I reached the decision that I’d tell him the truth as soon as we were on the way to the house, which was still another few minutes outside town along Route 69, which ran all the way to Baltimare, though only if you followed it for about three hundred miles across big, flat, open farm country first.