At Risk

by Kit Ehrman

  * * *

  Around five-thirty, I went into the lounge, snagged three sodas from the caterer, and walked over to the main dressage arena. Most of the auditors were clustered around the clinician who, according to Rachel, was short-listed for the Olympics.

  Michael Burke was his name, and he was younger than I'd expected, somewhere in his late-twenties, early-thirties, and soft-spoken. He was slouched in his chair with his feet propped on an arena marker, his fingers laced together over his stomach. He'd tipped his cowboy hat low on his forehead and looked half asleep as he watched a rider guide her big chestnut across the diagonal in a leg yield.

  When I scooted an empty chair up close behind Rachel's and sat down, she smiled slightly, and I knew she'd seen me. I passed the Coke over to Michael, then handed her a root beer.

  "Keep the front of the horse straight," Michael called to the rider. "Point his nose at F and push his haunches to the outside."

  I settled back into my seat. The girl on the chestnut straightened her horse at F, then guided him through the corner.

  "Better," Michael said.

  I popped the tab on my Coke and waited for the fizz to dissipate. Rachel had a yellow legal pad balanced on her thigh, and she'd been taking notes with a pink ink pen. Her handwriting was neat and precise and loopy and reminded me of love letters furtively passed in an afternoon geometry class.

  As I looked up from the page, Elsa walked around the row of chairs and stopped in front of Michael. I glanced at Rachel's profile, then studied the Coke can in my hand. I took a gulp and glanced sideways at them.

  Mrs. Timbrook was wearing a man's dress shirt. The sleeves were rolled up, and she'd twisted the shirttails together and knotted them above her navel. She hadn't bothered with the buttons.

  Or a bra.

  She leaned forward to offer Michael a food tray from the caterer, and I almost choked. I shifted in my seat and looked across the front field toward the old Ritter farm.

  The scrapers had finished cutting and reshaping the land, and earlier that morning, the graders had begun smoothing gravel along the cul-de-sacs.

  Elsa squeezed a chair into the space next to Michael and sat down.

  I risked another glance. Michael was pretty much ignoring her, but Rachel's eyebrows were bunched together, and her lips were pursed as if she'd eaten something sour.

  The close proximity was suddenly too much.

  I got up and left.

  In barn B, halfway down the aisle near the cut-through to the arena, I slouched onto a hay bale and leaned against a stall front. The barn was cool and dark, and as I sat there, listening to the slow, measured breaths of the horse dozing in the stall behind me, I was fairly certain I was the only one in the barn except, of course, for the horses. I finished the Coke, crumpled the can, and tossed it at the trash can positioned just inside the boarders' tack room. It bounced hollowly off the rim and rolled across the asphalt.

  In the square of bright light at the end of the long aisle, Michael crossed the expanse of asphalt that shimmered under the late afternoon sun.

  I pushed myself off the hay bale and picked up the can as Elsa passed the doorway. And she wasn't heading to her barn.