The Perfect Distance

by Kim Ablon Whitney

  “Don’t stay away too long,” Heather purred to Rob. With her blond hair, trim legs, and tight Lily Pulitzer polos, she was the best-looking of the bunch. She was also the most outwardly flirtatious. “We’ll miss you too much,” she cooed.

  The rest of the ladies giggled and Rob grinned. I got the feeling he kind of liked their drooling all over him.

  I followed Rob up the hill to the barn, lengthening my stride to keep up with him. I was usually so shy in front of Rob. We didn’t ever talk to each other, except for him to tell me something I needed to do in the barn or in a lesson. But the quiet between us was killing me. I knew if I was Tara, we’d be talking. So I said, “Susie better watch out for Heather.” I felt like I was stealing a line from Katie, but I didn’t care. I just hoped it would go over okay with Rob.

  In fact, he laughed. He actually laughed. “No kidding,” he said.

  I found myself smiling, too. When we walked into the barn, Rob took in Finch’s drooping head and glazed-over eyes. “How is he?” he asked Dad.

  “Weak gut sounds. And he hasn’t manured since the morning.”

  “Did you give him anything?”

  “Pepto and baking soda earlier, but I wanted to check with you before I gave him anything else.”

  “What are you thinking?” Rob asked.

  Dad and Rob had a great working relationship. Dad handled everything to do with the horses, and Rob trusted and respected him completely. I’d even heard him say once that West Hills wouldn’t be what it was today if Dad hadn’t come to work for him when Rob was just starting out. It was pretty amazing that Dad had become a barn manager. Most barn managers were white. And it was also amazing that Dad had been working for Rob for so many years, since most people—white or not—hopped from barn to barn. Most of the grooms that worked for West Hills stayed for long periods, too, but I think that was more because of what it was like working with Dad than anything.

  “Let’s give him ten cc’s of Banamine and see if it’ll pass,” Dad said. “If he hasn’t manured within another hour, I think we better get Doc Tanner here.”

  “Sounds good,” Rob said.

  Dad went to draw up a syringe of Banamine. When he came back, I held Finch’s head while Dad whispered, “Easy, boy,” and slid the needle into the vein in Finch’s neck. He pulled back the syringe to make sure he’d hit blood. As Dad led Finch out for a walk, I tacked up Tobey. Today was a flat lesson. We didn’t jump, but that didn’t mean we got off easy.

  “No stirrups today,” Rob said as he headed back to finish teaching the Horny Housewives. “Tell the others.”

  I was in the tack room zipping up my boots when Katie walked in. Besides Tobey’s stall, the tack room, with all its gleaming brass hooks and the smell of glycerin soap and well-used leather, was my favorite place at the barn. A big wooden saddle rack stood in the middle of the room and a four-pronged hook dangled from the ceiling. Wooden tack trunks, each engraved on top with WEST HILLS FARM, lined the walls. Above the trunks hung framed photos. There was Caroline Ryland winning the Medal on Stretch when he was still dapple gray and Griffin Lenox winning the Maclay. There was a grand prix horse Rob had owned, Alderic 87, winning at Devon.

  Katie was sipping a chocolate shake, one of her meal-replacement drinks. She was on Weight Watchers. Over the last year, she’d tried juice cleanses and meal delivery services and a bunch of crazy diets. But when none of them worked to his satisfaction, her father put her on good-old Weight Watchers. She wasn’t fat, just chubby. But in the riding world anything less than slim was a problem because all things being equal, the equitation was a beauty contest. Weight Watchers meant she had to keep track of everything she ate. She received a score for each item she ingested, like an apple was one point and a piece of chicken the size of a fist three. When she was at the farm, she mostly ate Weight Watcher meals for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. She could only eat twenty points a day, and when she was at home, she had to get weighed every week.

  “No stirrups,” I told her.

  “My poor VG,” she moaned, using her pet term for “down there.” An unfortunate but frequent side effect of riding without stirrups was that you could feel pretty sore. “I finally just recovered from last week.” Katie sank down on a tack trunk and sipped her shake. “Where’s Colby?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Haven’t seen him yet.”

  “How was the tour yesterday?”

  “Fine.”

  I knew Katie wouldn’t let me get away with that, and I was right.

  “That’s it?” she said. “You’ve gotta give me more than that. Did he figure out you weren’t Tara?”

  “Yeah, but it took him a while. He said he didn’t know what she looked like.”

  Katie furrowed her brow. “Interesting,” she said. “This boy is very interesting. Needs further exploration.”

  I grabbed my saddle off the rack and started pulling off my stirrups. Katie still seemed to be in a daze thinking about Colby. “No stirrups, remember?” I reminded her.

  “Do you think if I tell Rob I can’t because of my VG, he’d understand?” she joked.

  I just shook my head. “Come on,” I grumbled, starting for the door.

  Rob worked us for forty-five minutes straight. We even had to do ten minutes of half seat. Katie kept looking over at Colby throughout the lesson, and it was so obvious even Rob noticed.

  “Katie, what are you looking at?” he yelled at her at one point. “I know having a member of the male persuasion in our lesson is distracting for you girls, but keep your eyes straight ahead of you.”

  When the lesson was over, Katie told me to come by her place later. “I have a plan,” she said.

  “A plan for what?” I asked. I already knew it had to do with Colby. With Katie, everything was always about boys.

  “Just a plan. I’ve gotta go finish a math assignment that was due, like, a week ago and upload it, but come by, okay?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be involved in whatever plan Katie had in mind. I didn’t really want Katie getting all interested in Colby, although I was pretty sure it was too late for that.

  “Francie!” Katie practically screamed.

  “Okay, okay,” I said as I went off to do my barn work.

  I was emptying the last wheelbarrow from picking out stalls when Dad came back in with Finch. “Success,” he said, meaning Finch had finally manured.

  Finch already looked more upbeat—the sparkle in his eyes was back. Dad led him into his stall. I’d taken away his hay, since it wasn’t good to add anything more to his system for now except water.

  “I want to wait a little while to feed,” Dad said. “Make sure he’s really out of the woods.”

  “I was going to stop by Katie’s,” I said. “I could come back after and feed.”

  “Sounds good. Then I’ll check back in on him after dinner.”

  Knowing Dad, he’d also probably be setting his alarm clock for once or twice in the middle of the night to drive up to the farm and check on him. When a horse was really sick, Dad often slept in the barn so he could get up every hour if necessary. Rob had been talking about installing a camera system in the stalls for just this kind of situation.

  As Dad headed home, I went to the cottage where Katie stayed. I found her sitting at her desk. “Ugh, I detest math,” she groaned.

  Without her riding helmet, Katie was what most guys would consider cute, but not beautiful. Short brown hair she tucked behind her ears and a round face. She always wore a silver chain with a heart on it around her neck, and her nails were always gorgeous from her weekly mani-pedis. This week’s color was a deep purple.

  “How’s Finch?” she asked.

  “Better. He seems to have come out of it.”

  Katie’s phone rang. She located it under two pairs of jeans and a shirt on her bed. Clothes with designer labels covered every inch of Katie’s room. A bunch of ribbons from past horse shows lay in a heap in the corner, and above her
bed hung pages torn from fashion magazines of models mid-strut.

  Katie was a total clothes junkie. She dreamed of someday being a famous fashion designer like her idols Stella McCartney or Miuccia Prada the way I dreamed of turning pro.

  She showed me the screen of her phone, which read, “The Dick.” She rolled her eyes and answered, “Hello, Father dear.”

  I sat down at her desk and went to work on the math problem that had stumped her, which was really just simple algebra. I finished it in about two seconds and then opened the bottom drawer, where she kept her not-so-secret supply of energy bars—Pria, Luna, Kind, Larabar and a few especially expensive brands I’d never even heard of. She also had some Think Thin chocolate bars and some other special dark chocolate bars.

  “Yes, it was fine,” she told her father. “No, I haven’t cheated in a week.”

  Katie tapped me on the back and motioned to the food drawer, a defiant grin on her face. I handed her a Think Thin bar and pulled out a Green & Black’s chocolate bar for myself. The one good thing about mucking stalls every day was it meant I could eat pretty much whatever I wanted and still stay thin.

  “No, I swear,” Katie assured her father. “You can even ask Francie if you want. She’s right here.”

  I waited to see if Mr. Whitt would want to talk to me. It wouldn’t have been the first time he had me vouch for Katie’s eating habits. Supposedly Mr. Whitt had never lost a court case, and sometimes he was on CNN commenting about a high profile case. It was obvious it just about killed him that Katie had no talent when it came to riding. Since he couldn’t make her ride much better, even though he tried by sending her to West Hills and getting her the best horses, he focused on keeping her from eating.

  Katie held up the chocolate bar to the phone. “All right, Dad, I’ve gotta go.” When she finally hung up, thankfully without her father talking to me, she tore open the packaging and bit off a huge chunk.

  “This is probably like twenty points, but I don’t really care right now,” she said through a full mouth. “I swear I should just stick my finger down my throat like Tara does. It’d be a lot easier.”

  “You don’t know she does that,” I said.

  “Then how does she stay so freaking skinny? You’ve seen what she eats.”

  It was true. Tara was always ingesting inconceivable things like Big Macs and supersize sodas, yet if anything she only got skinnier.

  “Your dad didn’t want to talk to me?” I kidded. “I’m hurt.”

  “No, he had some function to go to—thank God.” Katie bit off another hunk of the chocolate bar. A devious look came over her face. “So, we’re going to visit Colby.”

  My stomach plummeted. She liked him—I knew it. Why Colby? I thought. Why did she have to like him?

  “I have to go back and feed and check on Finch,” I told her. “You go ahead—you don’t need me to go with you.” Even though I really wanted to see Colby again, I wasn’t exactly dying to have it slip out that I was a groom. I wished I’d told him before because now it just seemed weird that I hadn’t.

  “No way, I’m not going alone. I’ll help you feed and then we’ll both go.”

  “Okay,” I agreed, shoving the last of the chocolate in my mouth and standing up. “By the way, I did your math problem for you.”

  Katie looked at her notebook and chirped, “You’re the absolute best.”

  At the barn we looked in on Finch, who met our concerned gazes with a curious gaze of his own, which was a good sign. I quickly took his pulse just to make sure it was regular and listened to his stomach. Then Katie helped me mix up the grain in the feed room. Katie scooped out the pellets and I did the supplements and Chinese herbs. Dad had told me to mix up a small bran mash with extra water in it for Finch.

  The moment we came back out into the aisle, the horses started whinnying. Stretch, the most impatient of the bunch, stomped his hooves and paced his stall. I brought out flakes of hay in a wheelbarrow and threw each horse one of the chunks, then went stall to stall with the grain buckets.

  “All right, it’s coming!” I hollered to Stretch, whom I always fed first. We all gave him the superstar treatment and, given how much he had won, he deserved it.

  Out in the barn Katie didn’t help. Not because she wasn’t willing or didn’t want to get hay all over her Michael Kors sweater, but because if anyone saw her helping, especially Rob, even if she’d volunteered, they’d freak out. Katie’s parents didn’t pay thousands of dollars a month for her to throw hay—we all understood that.

  When I was done, Katie and I walked across the farm to the pool house, where Rob had put Colby. Nobody supervised what went on at night. Rob’s only attempt at propriety was making boys stay in the pool house and girls in the gardener’s cottage. But even that didn’t really mean anything. A few years ago when Bobby and Celia were riding at the farm, Celia practically lived in Bobby’s room in the pool house.

  Away from the stable it was easy to forget West Hills was a horse farm. That is, except for the signs that read: PLEASE KEEP HORSES OFF THE GRASS.

  We passed Tara sitting on the front steps of the camper she and her mother stayed in, her glitter-encrusted phone pressed to her ear.

  “Hello, Connor,” Katie cooed as we walked by.

  Tara shot us a dirty look. Connor had won the Medal Finals two years ago. Now he worked as an assistant trainer for a grand prix rider and was even getting to show in some small grand prix classes himself. He traveled all over the country to compete and had been in Europe a bunch in the summer.

  The pool house was much smaller than the gardener’s cottage, since it wasn’t intended for someone to live in but really just for people to change for swimming. Rob had converted it into two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a little kitchenette.

  We were still outside the door when we heard music playing. I recognized the band from hearing them on the radio in the barn. When Camillo and Pablo weren’t playing tapes of their Mexican music, we listened to this independent rock station that played newer, lesser-known bands.

  Katie knocked on the door. Colby opened it, dressed in a T-shirt, scrubs, and slides. Instead of saying “hello” or “hey” like a normal person, he said, “Do you know what ‘cop’ stands for?”

  “What do you mean?” Katie said.

  “Constable on patrol. How about ‘drag’?”

  Katie shook her head.

  “Dressed as girl.”

  “Huh,” she said. “Who knew?”

  Without really being invited, Katie walked in and sat down on a stool at the kitchen counter. I wasn’t as comfortable just walking in and plopping down, so I decided to stand. Colby’s MacBook Air—the source of the music—sat on the counter.

  “So,” she said. “We just came by to see if you survived your first Rob Renaud flat work extravaganza.”

  “Barely,” Colby said.

  “It must be even worse for guys . . . I mean, down there,” Katie said.

  “You mean the penis or the testicles?” Colby asked, deadpan and looking her right in the eye.

  Katie turned red and I stifled a laugh. It served Katie right. She was always trying to be so outrageous, and finally someone had matched her. I had thought I’d liked him before, but now he was really growing on me.

  “I guess both or either,” Katie said, trying to recover.

  “They’re not swearwords,” Colby said. “They’re just names for body parts, like elbow or arm.”

  “Not quite,” I said.

  “Okay, well, not quite,” Colby admitted. “And yes, it’s not all that comfortable riding without stirrups if you’re a guy, but I think I’ll still be able to have kids someday.”

  “What’s with the scrubs?” Katie said, trying to change the subject. She glanced down at Colby’s legs but then looked right back up again—I guess it was too soon after Colby’s comments to be looking anywhere below his waist.

  “My dad’s a doctor,” he said.

  “Oh, what kind?” Katie asked.
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br />   “Plastic surgeon. But not the good kind that helps victims of tragic accidents or anything like that. The tummy-tucks-and-boob-jobs kind.”

  “So, Francie said you hadn’t seen photos of Tara?” Katie asked. She was certainly giving him the third degree, but he seemed to take it all in stride.

  “No,” he said.

  “Don’t you go on The Chronicle website?”

  Colby shook his head. “Not really. I kind of try and stay away from all that and just do my own thing.”

  Katie looked intrigued. “Kind of like a Zen approach?”

  “I guess so,” Colby offered.

  “That’s cool,” Katie said. “I should try that.”

  She nodded to Colby’s laptop. “What are you listening to? It sounds familiar.”

  Colby and I said at exactly the same time: “Low Flying Planes.”

  Then he turned to me. “You know LFP?”

  I shrugged, trying to act like it was no big deal, but really I was so happy I knew the band he liked, especially since Katie, who went to secret concerts in New York City, didn’t. For once I seemed like the cool one. “Yeah.”

  “Can you Facebook it to me?” Katie asked.

  “Sure,” Colby said.

  She asked how Colby got to do our regionals if he was from L.A. He explained that he just had to register and then earn the number of points required for our regionals. The whole time he was talking to Katie he seemed to be looking at me as much as possible. I wondered if Katie noticed it, too.

  “If I don’t make it this year, my dad is going to freak,” Katie said.

  “Yeah, my dad wanted me to go last year, but I’d just gotten Ginger and it was such a long trip,” Colby replied.

  Katie’s eyes were wide. “You mean you qualified for the Maclay Finals and you didn’t go?”

  “My dad wanted me to, but I said no.” Colby shrugged, like it was nothing. “The power of no.”

  “What?” Katie said.

  “The power of no. It’s just this saying from these weird self-help podcasts my older sister listens to. Two little letters: big impact.”

  “Hmmm, the power of no,” Katie said. “We should try that with Rob.”