The Horsewoman(51)

FIFTY-EIGHT



I STOPPED CLAPPING when I saw them both turn. Mom looked like a kid who’d been caught doing something wrong.

“Lucky I came back early,” I said. “Or by tomorrow I might have no horse to ride.”

I watched Daniel quickly help Mom down. She came walking over to where I was standing.

“Daniel asked me to ride her,” she said, turning her back to him.

Daniel started walking Sky back to the barn, dropping the reins, palms down toward me in a calming gesture.

“Slight change of plans,” I said. “Turns out I didn’t miss college as much as I thought I did. I had to find out the hard way that you can only watch so many seasons of Grey’s Anatomy.”

“That seemed like pretty sarcastic applause right there,” Mom said.

“What did you expect?” I said. “I sit in traffic on the turnpike for two hours then find you on my horse. I thought this was all about you being on your horse?”

Just Mom and me in the ring now. How many rounds had we gone like this? Hundreds? A thousand? But today’s conflict was a totally different vibe.

All I wanted to do right now was walk away from her and all the weirdness between us and change into my riding clothes and ride my own damn horse.

Except that today Mom didn’t just have her own horse. She had my horse, too.

“We really need to talk,” she said.

“Mom,” I said, “you might need to. I don’t. Maybe it’s a mom thing to believe that heart-to-heart chats fix everything except a broken leg. That’s not me.”

“Five minutes,” she said. “To clear the air.”

“The air’s fine, Mom,” I said. “It’s the situation that kind of sucks.”

“Five minutes, then,” she said. “Up on the porch. We always did our best talking there.”

That actually made me smile.

“Well, yeah,” I said. “But as I recall, what I mostly did was listen.”

I followed her up the hill to where the two of us had sat for so many talks. About Dad sometimes. Or about her and Dad, long after they’d gotten divorced. Or her wanting to know about a boy I’d just broken up with. Or was dating. Or a class I was failing. Or how I wasn’t working hard enough at my riding.

I thought: Now I’m working my ass off on my riding and it’s doing me a hell of a lot of good.

“Seriously, Mom?” I said. “You’ve made your decision. I accept it. Why are we here?”

“Because we need to handle being competitors going forward, that’s why,” she said, “even being from the same family and the same damn barn and being bossed all over the place by Caroline Atwood.”

“We’re only competing against each other if we enter the same events,” I said. “This shit is difficult enough already and I’m not even up on my horse yet.”

“But we’ve competed against each other in the past,” she said.

“Things were a little different then,” I said.

I noticed her absently rubbing her right knee. She was still in a lot of pain.

“You should ride in all the big events coming up, same as me,” she said now. “You’re ready for them.”

“Not your call, Mom,” I said.

“You’re right,” she said. “I’ve put everybody in a tough spot, but not by choice.”

“There’re always choices,” I said.

“There was a lot of avoidance the other night,” she said. “And that just ain’t gonna cut it, not around here.”

“Okay then,” I said. “Okay. I heard what you had to say. You heard what I had to say. Now I really am gonna go change and ride my horse.”

“Your horse is what I most wanted to talk to you about,” she said.

“Now you’re an expert on Sky?” I said.

“No,” Mom said. “But I’m still enough of a horsewoman to know you should try to ride her to the Olympics.”





FIFTY-NINE



WELL, I THOUGHT, she’s got my attention now.

“You got that after one session in the ring?” I said. “Pro tip, Mom? You’re the one with the Olympic horse, not me.”

“Maybe not now,” Maggie said. “But in a few months, I’m convinced Sky can be, too.”

“You’re wrong,” I said.

“No, I’m not.”

“Mom,” I said. “I love you. I love Sky to death. But you really are talking some major shit here.”

“No, I’m not,” she said again, with more force this time. “You’re the rider who’s going to scare me the most once I’m back out there. You.”

“It’s nice that you think so,” I said.

“Tell you what,” she said. “Why don’t we go down the hill and ask Daniel?”

Maggie got out of her chair, looking the way Grandmother did sometimes when she’d been sitting awhile, flexed her right knee a couple of times, walked stiffly down the porch steps.

And she’s going to ride in a five-star Grand Prix in two weeks?

But I followed her through the double doors of the barn.