The Horsewoman(7)

“Isn’t sarcasm supposed to be a weapon of the weak?” he asked.

“Trust me, Steve,” she said. “If I ever pull a weapon on you, it won’t be that.”

He picked up his drink and toasted her with it.

“You want to know an inconvenient truth, Caroline?” he said. “We’re more alike than you’ll ever admit. Because you want to win just as badly as I do.”

“Do you ever listen?” she said. “This isn’t about me. This is about my daughter.”

“Until she couldn’t manage to stay on our million-dollar horse,” he said.

Caroline felt the sudden urge to cross the room and slap him. But she didn’t. It didn’t matter what language was in the contract. They both knew that the architect of one of the largest hedge funds in the country, maybe the world, could make the owner of a small family barn in Florida go away if he wanted to, with another dismissive wave of his hand. Bottom line, Coronado was his horse.

He stood now.

“Thanks for the drink,” he said.

“Good talk,” Caroline said.

He either missed the sarcasm this time or simply ignored it.

“You know the other top riders better than I do,” he said. “Either you figure it out, or I will. Something else you don’t want to admit? This is what’s best for the horse. And what’s best for the horse is best for the two of us.”

He turned then and walked out the front door.

“Bastard,” Caroline Atwood said after he’d shut the door behind him.

Only because she knew the bastard was right.





SEVEN



I LOOKED OUT the barn window and saw Mr. Gorton, Grandmother’s latest ATM, blow past me and down the driveway, driving his Porsche like a getaway car.

We’d needed more money, and more horses, around Atwood Farm for as long as I could remember. The barn needed renovating, the fencing in the schooling ring needed replacing. Every season, Grandmother would say she planned to spend money on improvements, but every time I’d walk into her bedroom and find her seated at the desk, she’d only say that she was “trying to pay bills.”

As far as I was concerned, Steve Gorton and my grandmother deserved each other.

She didn’t want to blame the horse. She certainly wasn’t going to blame Mom.

Be sorry you weren’t there, she’d said.

The words had stung like a slap. She was putting it on me, for letting her down. Letting everybody down. Again.

Grandmother had offered to drive me home from the hospital. I told her I’d take an Uber and request no conversation with the driver.

“You’re saying you don’t want to talk to me?” she’d said.

“I don’t want to listen to you,” I’d said.

When I got to the barn, I’d stopped at Coronado’s stall first. Coronado could have been injured, and badly. But our vet, Doc Howser, had checked him out as thoroughly as he would have vetted him for a sale, and pronounced him completely fine.

Dr. Richard Howser wasn’t just a great vet and trusted family friend, he was a really good guy who cared about horses the way everybody in the family did, even though Maggie would occasionally call him Dr. Doom when he delivered bad news.

Coronado was on his side, asleep. Most horses slept standing up, but, according to studies, some horses preferred to sleep lying down, that they got a deeper sleep that way.

I liked watching horses sleep. You don’t love it enough, Grandmother would say when we argued about my riding. I’d tell her that I loved being around horses just fine, but humans kept getting in the way.

I moved quietly through the row of stalls, past the bridles hung on the wall, and the saddle racks, past the tack room.

“Hey, girl,” I said when I got to Sky’s stall near the end.

She leaned her head out and gave me a pointed look.

“I can’t believe you’re even asking if I brought treats,” I said, then reached into the front pocket of my jeans and palmed a red-and-white mint. With a minimum of slobber, she quickly made it disappear from my outstretched hand.

Then she snorted.

“You’re welcome,” I said.

She was ten now, but still my baby girl. I retrieved a folding chair from the tack room and placed it so that with Sky’s head extending from the stall, it felt as if she were resting it on my shoulder, or maybe looking out for me.

I looked up at her.

“What are we going to do, girlfriend?” I said. “This is so not fair.”

I sat near Sky for a few minutes. And then I was up and out of the chair and into the tack room, grabbing my helmet, finding Sky’s CWD-brand saddle that Mom bought me when I graduated high school.

Saddles were heavy as hell. With no grooms around, I managed to put two saddle pads on her, then the saddle itself, the girth that held it in place, the bridle last. I opened the double doors, threw the switch for the floodlights, and the two of us walked toward the schooling ring.

I wanted to ride. To move. I leaned down and said to Sky, “You get extra treats later.”

Then we were circling the ring, past where the jumps were lined up and stacked, slowly picking up speed. I wouldn’t have jumped Sky, not at night, even with the ring lighting enhanced tonight by a full moon.

Just me, alone in the ring with Sky and her horse sounds, Sky’s breathing and her hooves. Not going against the clock. Not trying to calculate distances and clear jumps and beat the other horses.