The Horsewoman(9)

I walked Sky back inside her stall, gave her the treat I’d promised her, and wished I could spend the rest of the night with her.





EIGHT



GRANDMOTHER’S LIMP LOOKED more pronounced than usual as she paced the living room, back arched, head high, fists clenched, as if she were challenging the world to a fistfight.

“Why the hell did I ever go into business with that hideous man?” she said.

“You know why,” I said. “To get Coronado.”

“If there was a better way,” Daniel said, “you would have found it, jefa.”

She liked it when he called her that.

“I should have looked harder,” she said.

She sat down in the antique rocking chair positioned in that exact spot for as long as I could remember. Like Grandmother, it was rickety, but built to last. She grimaced slightly, then stretched her left leg out in front of her.

Next to her was one of her favorite photographs, Mom and me in our riding clothes, looking more like sisters than mother and daughter. She was taller. Even though my blond hair had darkened considerably since I was a little girl, hers was still darker. I thought she was prettier, and when I’d tell her so, she’d laugh and say, “Tell me another one.”

“He wants to find another rider for Coronado,” she said. “Any rider will do, as long as he—or she—rides him all the way to Paris.”

“He can’t give up on Mom this quickly,” I said.

“Oh, really?” she said. “Because his heart suddenly grew a few sizes? That’s if he’s actually got a goddamn heart.”

“What if the doctors are wrong about Mom,” I said. “What if she gets better?”

In the soft light of the standing brass reading lamp, I took a closer look at the woman who kept herself around horses. Since I’d found Mom near the canal, she appeared to have aged ten years.

“This was our dream, Maggie and me,” she said, as if talking to herself, as if Daniel and I had disappeared.

Not Mom’s dream. Theirs.

“Any other rider on Coronado,” she said, “will make him Gorton’s horse and not ours.”

“Does he know which rider he wants?” Daniel said.

“Knowing that bastard? He started calling around before Maggie was out of surgery and has already made his selection, like some fantasy football draft.”

“Grandmother,” I said, choosing my next words carefully, “wouldn’t having an Olympic horse help the barn, even if Mom doesn’t get better in time to ride him?”

“Oh, now you get practical?” she said.

She rocked slowly back and forth in her chair.

“Horses are more than a business for Atwood Farm,” she said. “You know that.”

“People in outer space know that,” I said.

“That man is nothing like us,” she said.

Daniel smiled at her now.

“Except you both care for the winning,” he said.

Her head whipped in his direction and she snapped her eyes like a whip.

“That’s exactly what he said,” Grandmother said. “The sonofabitch.”

“Let me help you with this, jefa,” he said. “I have a rider in mind.”

“Who?” Grandmother asked. Her voice may have stopped horses, but not Daniel.

“Becky,” he said.





NINE

Daniel



AS SOON AS he’d heard about the accident, Daniel had decided that Becky had to be the one to ride Coronado.

A trainer, he knew, dealt with what he had, not what he did not. He had learned that from old Buck Starr, a trainer in North Carolina. When the barn’s star rider, Wiley, had broken a leg before a big show at the Tryon International Equestrian Center, Starr had looked at Daniel and said, “Who’s Wiley?”

If they were going to get Becky up on Coronado, they couldn’t afford to wait. So he told them.

Mrs. Atwood was staring at him with that look she expected to scare not only the staff but the horses. Daniel was convinced that if you took away her bluster, she would merely be old.

“You’re serious,” she said.

“Always,” he said, “when the subject is your horses.”

Always her horses, never his.

Horses were so much more than just Daniel Ortega’s job, no matter who owned them. One day horses would give him the good lives they’d already given the Atwood women—if it wasn’t too late for people with stories like his own.

“My granddaughter rides Coronado over my dead body,” Caroline Atwood said.

“Took the words right out of my mouth,” Becky said.

Daniel couldn’t repress the smile from his face. Never mind the wrath of the old lady of the house. “The two of you hardly ever agree about anything,” he said. “Until now.”

Mrs. Atwood stood from her rocking chair then, nearly knocking it over as she took her first straight-backed, stiff-legged steps over to the trophy case. Maggie Atwood had won enough trophies to fill two cases, one here in the living room and a second in the den, along with two walls covered with ribbons. Becky’s awards were in a television room on the second floor. Mrs. Atwood studied Maggie’s trophies for a moment.