The Bourbon Thief(27)
“You know why he gave me riding lessons, right?”
“Enlighten me.”
“While I’m up here fucking you, he’s at his office fucking his secretary.”
“Nice system you two worked out.”
“Everybody’s happy.” She started down the ladder steps but stopped and turned toward the window.
“What?” Levi asked as he buckled his belt again. Somewhere around here he had a clean T-shirt. He found it under his copy of the Tao Te Ching and pulled it on.
“I think your five o’clock is here.”
“I don’t have a five o’clock lesson today.”
“Then who’s that?” She pointed out the dingy window that looked down on the gravel parking lot. He’d been too busy with Cher to hear anyone drive up.
Levi walked to the ladder and squatted down to see out the window. First he saw the car, a baby blue Triumph Spitfire, a little girl’s sort of sports car. Then he saw the little girl it belonged to.
“Fuck,” Levi breathed.
“What? Someone you know?”
“Someone I don’t want to know.” Levi shook his head. Goddamn. “Go on. I’ll see you next week.”
She rose up on her toes on the rung and kissed him quick on the mouth before heading down the ladder with ease. Levi didn’t follow at first. He kept staring out the window. What the hell was Tamara Maddox doing here? There was no way this was a coincidence. The girl didn’t need riding lessons. She could outride him, not that he’d ever told her that. Not that he planned on telling her that. He hadn’t planned on telling her anything ever again.
He had to tell her something, though. Out in the parking lot, Tamara leaned back against the hood of her little blue car and shoved her hands deep into her jeans pockets.
She was waiting. Well, she could wait a little longer. Levi took the first few rungs of the ladder, jumped down the rest of the way and landed easy on his feet. The stables had running water and a tiny closet of a bathroom for the little kids who couldn’t hold it long enough to make it to the main building, where the owner of Happy Trails sat in his air-conditioned office talking on the phone all day. Levi splashed cold water on his face, ran wet hands through his hair, made sure he didn’t have hay sticking out of his jeans. He didn’t care if he looked good for Tamara or not, but it gave him sweet satisfaction to keep her waiting.
Levi took his hat off a nail right outside the bathroom door and shoved it on his head before emerging into the bright June sunlight. The second Tamara saw him, she came to attention, standing up straight, no longer leaning on the hood of her car. She pushed her sunglasses up on top of her head and smiled.
“Hey, Levi,” she said.
Levi walked past her and kept walking.
He walked straight to the pile of straw bales stacked behind the woodshed, picked one up by the cords and carried it back to the stables.
Tamara didn’t speak to him again, but she followed him. She’d done that all the time back when he worked for her grandfather, trailed behind him like a duckling, quacking questions at him. Why do you work for Granddaddy? Do you want to go to college? Do you ever want to get married someday? Do you think my black boots or my brown boots are prettier? Can I ride your horse? He ignored half her questions, told her lies to the other half. He worked for her granddaddy because his career as a ballerina hadn’t worked out. He was already married—seven wives, one for each night of the week. All her boots were ugly and she could ride his horse the second she was as tall as he was and he would happily stretch her out on a rack if she wanted to speed up the growing process.
Today she didn’t ask a single question as she followed him into the stables. He dropped the hay bale in a stall, pulled out his pocketknife and cut the cords. When he stood up, Tamara had a pitchfork in her hand.
“I won’t turn you into a spaghetti strainer, I promise,” she said, wearing a halfhearted smile.
“Then what are you doing with that thing?” He nodded at the pitchfork.
“Helping.” She speared the straw with the fork and tossed a good quantity of it on the bare stall floor.
“I never thought I’d live to see the day Tamara Maddox did hard labor without someone holding a gun to her head.”
“Congratulations,” she said, spearing the hay bale again. “You lived longer than you thought you would.”
He didn’t help. No, this show was too good to interrupt. He stood outside the stall and watched her.
“Can you bring me another bale?” she asked. “Please?”
“That’s enough.”
“It’s too thin. Kermit got twice that much bedding.”
“Kermit’s owner is a rich girl, not the cheapskate who runs this place.”
“Ex-owner. I don’t have him anymore.”
Tamara used her feet to even out the hay on the floor.
“What happened to poor Kermit? Miss Piggy finally got to him?”
“Momma sold him. She sold all the horses after Granddaddy died.”
“Why? I’m not the only man in Kentucky who can muck a stall. She couldn’t find anyone else to take care of them?”
“She did it to punish me.”
“For what?”
Tamara met his eyes for a moment, then went back to work smoothing out the hay.