The Horsewoman(86)

“So for now it’s his word against that asshat Gorton’s,” Dad said.

“Daniel’s not going to get deported because of this, is he?” I asked.

“Oh, hell, no,” he said. “The assault charge is bullshit. If it had been Gorton who popped Daniel and not the other way around the closest he would have come to jail is if he’d taken a wrong turn on the way back to Palm Beach.”

He got up now.

“Nice to see all of you,” he said.

Grinned at Gus.

“You’re even braver than I heard,” Dad said.

Mom made a sound that was half-sigh, half-groan.

I walked Dad to the door. He gave me another hug, and whispered “I got this” in my ear.

“Gorton’s a bad guy,” I said.

“Kind of my thing,” he said.

I walked him to the car, then hugged him again, just because it made me feel better about things every time I did. He said he was dropping his bag at the Hampton Inn and then heading over to the jail. Then I watched him gun the rental car out of the driveway, spraying rocks everywhere, mostly for Grandmother’s benefit, I was certain.

He called me two hours later, after I’d ridden Sky.

“There’s a problem,” he said.





ONE HUNDRED EIGHT



MOM AND I WERE WALKING the course early Sunday afternoon, Gus alongside us. As we counted our distances, he was talking to us, nonstop. Just not about distances.

“I’m gonna say this for the last time,” he said.

“I wish,” I said.

“Very funny,” he said. “But this isn’t about Daniel today. It’s about the two of you. You help yourselves today. Not him. There. Now I’m done.”

“It’s not going to be easy,” Mom said.

“Well, you need to figure it out fast,” Gus said. “If you don’t, you’re both going to get knocked out of this ring with all those points sitting there for the taking. And an awful lot of money.”

We finished the walk. Seamus and Emilio still hadn’t brought our horses up from their stalls. Mom was going twelfth in the order. I was going twenty spots later. Still plenty of time for both of us to start getting our minds as right as Gus wanted them to be.

Mom and Gus and I stopped to take one last look at the Grand Prix show grounds, starting to fill up with spectators, and also fill up with the electricity that always crackled inside and outside the ring this close to a big event. I looked up at the flags flying, heard the music from the live band, even saw Grandmother waving at me from the grassy area between the ring fence and the tent. This was supposed to be a great day for all of us.

But Daniel wasn’t here.

Somehow in that moment it was as if Gus were reading my mind.

“Focus,” he said. “Good’s not good enough today, for either one of you. You both need to be great. And you can’t do that worrying about what’s going down with Daniel tomorrow.”

I knew he was only talking to me in that moment.

Then he went over the course one more time, for both of us. Distances and combinations and opportunities to slash some time and rollbacks and how the water jump, where it was positioned, might be the greatest challenge of all. We could make mistakes, but not there. A bad landing, he said, and good-bye.

“Fourteen jumps,” he said. “Go clean. Get to the jump-off. Go clean there and go fast. Both of you get pretty ribbons. Go home.”

Now I grinned at him.

“You’re going too fast for me,” I joked.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Gus said.

“Anything else?” Maggie Atwood said to him.

“As a matter of fact, there is,” he said. “Think how good I’ll look if the two of you look good.” Then he spun his chair around and headed for the schooling ring. I watched him and wondered what was really going through his head today, training the woman he was involved with and probably in love with, and training me. With the stakes the same for both of us.

Mom went to get her horse, saying she’d decided to walk him up to the ring today. Gus watched her go. Smiling. I saw him do that sometimes when he didn’t know I was watching him, looking at her as if it were the first time he’d ever seen her here, when they were both in their twenties.

Then he turned to me.

“You want to know the truth about all the shit that’s going on?” he said. “That ring behind us will be the best possible place in the world for you to be today. Maybe the easiest.”

“And why is that?”

“Because it’s the only place where you’re in charge of things,” he said.

I went up to the pedestrian bridge to watch Mom’s round, her first in weeks without Daniel, thinking that maybe what was happening this weekend, and then tomorrow with Daniel’s arraignment, had brought Mom and me even closer together. The Atwood women against the world.

But once she was in the ring, she didn’t need me, or Daniel, or Gus. She rode Coronado like a dream. There was one close call, almost not putting enough air underneath him on the water jump, clearing the water by less than a foot. No hesitation today on the rollback. She took the inside turn, even with that big horse, like a champ. Finished strong. Still early in the class, of course. But for now, she had the best time. More important, she was in the jump-off.