The Horsewoman(65)

“Your mom beat me to Gus’s today,” he said. “There was something wrong with the strap on her helmet. She asked me to come over here and pick up her old one.”

“I don’t need to go to the hospital,” I said. “I’m just sore and a little stiff.”

“Daniel will take you,” Gus said, as if that settled that.

Daniel started to take my hand again. I told him I could stand up on my own. And did. Wobbly at first. But upright. Telling myself I wasn’t going down again. Screw that.

I asked where Sky was, and Gus told me Emilio had already taken her back inside the barn. We began to slow-walk out of the ring in that direction. Daniel was on one side of me. Gus rode alongside me on the other.

“It was the sun,” I said, even though neither of them had asked what happened. “Got me and got my horse.”

“Like I said,” Gus said. “Shit happens.”

He gave me a long look and said, “Happened to me that way once.”

By the time Daniel and I got to the gate, after what felt like an hour and a half, I realized Gus wasn’t with us. I turned and saw that he was back in the ring, near the jump where I’d crash-landed.

Staring back up into the sun.





EIGHTY



NO CONCUSSION, I FOUND out at Wellington Regional, first thing. No broken bones. No cracked ribs. Just some bruising, mostly where I’d landed on my hip. I hadn’t been injured nearly as badly as Mom had been, even if I did feel as if Sky hadn’t just tossed me but run me over.

Mom and Grandmother were in the waiting room when Dr. Garry was finished poking and prodding and X-raying and shining lights and asking questions.

“You were lucky, young lady,” Grandmother said.

I grinned.

“I must get that from Dad’s side of the family,” I said.

“Not funny,” she said.

“Kind of funny?” I said.

“You kind of need to take a couple of days off,” Mom said.

“You wouldn’t,” I said.

“What did Dr. Garry say?” she said.

“That my body would tell me when it was okay to ride again,” I said. “But for now I should go home and take a hot bath, then a shot of tequila before bedtime, and call him in the morning.”

“Again with the jokes,” Grandmother said.

“Well,” I said, “I may have made up the part about the hot bath.”

Most of the pain I was still feeling was in my upper back and neck area, almost like whiplash, which I knew happened to riders who’d gotten thrown the way I had.

I did take a hot bath when I got home, got into bed, alternated heat and ice to the back of my neck for the rest of the afternoon. I decided to wait until after dinner to medicate with a glass of the Patrón that Dad had bought me for Christmas. I was about to call him to tell him what had happened, then changed my mind. As cool as he was, he was going to tell me to take some time off, same as Mom had.

Or just retire.

We were finishing dinner when I told Mom and Grandmother I was heading down the hill.

“To check on Sky?” Mom said.

“To ride her,” I said.





EIGHTY-ONE



“ARE YOU SURE the horse didn’t drop you on your head?” Grandmother said. “You need to go to bed.”

“I need to ride.”

“No.”

“Not your call,” I said. “I’m not letting what happened be the last thing I see after I close my eyes.”

I looked over at Mom.

“You got back up the first chance you got,” I said.

“After a month!” Grandmother said.

“After surgery,” I said to both of them.

Mom looked at me, then reached across the table and put a hand on Grandmother’s arm.

“Let her go,” she said.

I went upstairs to change into my breeches, then pull on my boots. It took longer than I thought it would. Bending over to put on the boots hurt way more than I thought it would. But I wasn’t going to call downstairs and ask for a little help here. Emilio, I knew, had left my helmet in the tack room.

Mom and Grandmother waited for me in the kitchen. Grandmother reluctantly walked down the hill with us. She and Mom got Sky’s girth on her, saddle pads, saddle, bridle.

“You guys really don’t need to hang around,” I said.

“Good one,” Grandmother said.

We were walking Sky toward the ring when Gus’s van showed up.

“You called him,” I said to Mom, making no attempt to turn it into a question.

“I was too frightened to consider the consequences of not calling him,” she said.

I stopped to watch his door open, the platform extend, then lower him to the ground. Wondering again what it must be like for him to go through what he had to go through daily. Glad in that moment that Mom had called him. Wanting him, more than anybody else, to see that I could play hurt.

Daniel’s Kia showed up in the driveway a couple of minutes later.

Gang’s all here.

Team Becky.

I hacked Sky slowly around the ring. The up-and-down, just the simple posting, caused me the most pain. Mom had told me the same thing had happened to her when she was back in the saddle. It was just something else my face wasn’t going to show my audience. Every time I passed them, I smiled and gave them a thumbs-up.