Page 6 of Touch the Sky

The heat surges up my neck and into my cheeks.

I just got my ass handed to me.

Chapter 2

Tess

“How did your first day go, sweetie?”

The familiar warmth of my mom’s voice drifts through my phone. I close my eyes for a moment, imagining we’re having this conversation over our usual mugs of mint hot chocolate instead of hundreds of miles apart.

“Pretty good,” I answer. “Well, as good as it could have, considering I was a literal stranger showing up at people’s doors.”

She tuts. “I bet they all loved you.”

“I think they’d love me more if I spoke better French.”

I lean my hip against the kitchen counter and stare through the glass doors out onto the tiny balcony of the short-term rental unit. Shel is plucking at her acoustic guitar, a frustrated pout on her face as she tries to follow along with a YouTube video.

I feel a twinge deep in my chest, the trusty old Mom Guilt digging its claws in yet again.

She deserves proper lessons. There was no sense getting her a guitar for her birthday if I couldn’t afford a teacher to go along with it, but she’d been asking all year, and I thought we could find some kind of community program at the library back home.

I couldn’t have foreseen moving us deep into the mountains of rural Québec. I haven’t even checked if theyhavea library out here, never mind one big enough to host accessibly priced guitar lessons for ten year-olds.

“You’ll pick it up,” Mom assures me. “You were always good at French in school.”

“That was in a classroom,” I remind her, “in Ontario. It’s like a whole other language out here.”

“Well, French aside, how were the clients?”

I turn away from the window before Shel can look up and catch me staring at her. I’d probably earn myself a glare. She’s already sprouting with the first thorns of teenage sass now that she’s hit double digits.

Ten years old.

From the moment she was born, every parent I knew told me the years would go by fast, that if I even blinked, the baby in my arms would be heading off to school.

I didn’t see how that was possible when it felt like every tiny breath she took contained the whole expanse of the universe, but they were right. I blinked, and here we are.

I wander deeper into the two-bedroom condo, with its bland grey furniture and generic, mass-produced art on the walls. I got a good deal considering its neither ski season nor the height of summer, but the vacation rental in Saint-Jovite is still way more expensive than I can afford.

I try to be grateful we at least have a roof over our heads after the original long-term apartment I had lined up for us fell through just days before we showed up in Québec with all our stuff.

“The clients are…eclectic,” I answer.

That’s one way to describe the range of farms I visited yesterday. Back home in Guelph, I was mostly working at riding schools and big boarder barns. My clients were pretty muchall well-off middle-aged women who owned horses as a hobby, either for themselves or their kids.

I had a few of those yesterday too, but I also put a set of shoes on a draft horse owned by an ninety year-old man named Philippe who invited me to the upcoming funeral of his recently deceased barn cat, trimmed the hooves of four alpacas for a woman who asked if I’d accept a blueberry pie as partial payment, and nearly missed an appointment for a sweet family and their equally sweet Shetland pony when the GPS on my phone seemed to think their farm was on the edge of a cliff.

Turned out it was at the bottom of the cliff and the road to get there just doesn’t exist on any known map.

Then, of course, there was the donkey fiasco at La Grange Rouge.

I grin at the memory as my mom titters away with some more assurances that everyone loved me and I’m doing a great job.

The Other Butch, as I’ve been referring to her in my head, definitely did not love me, but for some reason, I can’t bring myself to be anything but amused. She is a client—an important one, at that; they have about ten horses on that farm—and yet, I still find myself snorting when I picture the look on her face when I handed the donkey to her.

Maybe I’m just so relieved there’s another visibly queer person around that I can’t be bothered by a bad first impression. When I researched the Mont-Tremblant area before the move, I learned there’s plenty of tourism and a thriving local arts scene, especially within a little picturesque town called La Cloche, so it’s not like I expected to be the first gender non-conforming woman anyone here has ever seen, but every ping on my gaydar still feels like a reassurance that maybe, just maybe, we can find a place for us out here.