Turning For Home (Alex and Alexander Book 4)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  Kerri, who had been in lockstep with me since we entered the barn, suddenly disappeared. I turned my head and saw her marching up to Jean, who had quit her bellowing as Kerri jutted her chin at her.

  “You’re a nasty piece of work, you know that?” Kerri said quietly. “You got a lot of nerve, acting like you’ve never had a horse drag a toe across a jump pole. The funny thing is,” I stopped Tiger so that I could hear what she was saying, utterly impressed with her nerve, “the funny thing is, I haven’t ever heard your name before. Even though I know half the jumper people in this town and my cousin is the secretary for the North Florida Show Jumping Alliance. So you want to tell me what you’ve done that makes you so important? You want to tell me about all the jumper shows you’ve been double-clear in? Maybe you’re showing under a different name? I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt on this one. I’m sure you have a good answer.”

  Jean actually leaned back a little from Kerri’s squared jaw, as if she was finally intimated by someone else’s bravado. I resisted the urge to applaud.

  Tiger nudged my arm, eager to get back to his stall and start ripping apart his flake of hay like a wild animal, but I tugged at the reins to straighten him out. I needed to see the rest of the show.

  “Your cousin is Tilda Howell?” Jean asked after a moment of fish-faced silence, her mouth seeming to have forgotten how to make sounds for a while.

  “Who’s Tilda Howell?” I whispered to Tiger, who had commenced chewing on the reins he’d somehow slurped into his mouth. “Never mind, you don’t know.”

  “That’s right,” Kerri said genially. “And when Alex told me that Elsie had a rider named Jean Martin who was as beautiful and nasty as an ice queen, I made sure I mentioned her the next time I had coffee with Tilda. And she said, Jean who? And so I’m saying it to you now: Jean Who? As in, Jean Who The Hell Do You Think You Are?”

  Jean took a step backwards. Kerri looked very frightening. I was ten kinds of proud of her right now. Tiger, gnawing blissfully on his cheap reins, was lost to the world, or I’m sure he would have approved as well.

  “I haven’t shown very much on the A-circuit,” Jean admitted, her southern twang still showing through the voice she usually controlled so carefully. “This is my first big season of HITS.”

  “And how many classes have you won?”

  Jean looked mutinous. She worked her jaw for a moment before she spat, “None.”

  “So you’ve pulled a few rails in your time?” Kerri nodded. “That’s what I thought. Now you better apologize to Alex for the nasty things you said, or we’re going to have to let Elsie know how bad you are at customer service, Miss Barn Manager.”

  Jean looked at me with hatred in her flinty blue eyes. I waved a hand at her. “Nah,” I said. “I’m good. Just don’t do it again, okay?”

  She gave me a little shake of her head and then stormed away, her elegant boots clicking on the concrete with every stride. There was a little bang when the office door closed, and then I allowed myself to look at Kerri.

  She was grinning at me like an idiot. I burst out laughing and covered my mouth with my free hand as quickly as I could, but I was afraid Jean had heard me. When Kerri started laughing uproariously, making no attempt to cover it up, I knew we’d be heard. I supposed it didn’t matter. Jean already hated me, and even if Kerri had just insured that it was a hate that would burn forever, outlasting the very fires of the sun, at least it probably wouldn’t make things any worse.

  It might even make life at Roundtree a little better. After all, I wasn’t looking for a friend. I was looking for some peace and quiet for six more weeks, to get Tiger ready to win the Thoroughbred Makeover.

  “So for classes,” I said, when we’d managed to stop laughing. “What if we just do Versatility?”

  “Which one’s Versatility?”

  “Two different riders in two different classes. Same horse. Kind of a cool idea. So I will do Dressage Suitability for the Versatility class, and you do Jumping. It’s just cross-rails. Then, we can score in the dressage, jumping, and get an overall score for Versatility. Three chances to win.”

  “Hedging your bets?” Kerri grinned.

  “Can you blame me? Look at this racetrack reject!” Tiger, who still had his reins in his mouth and was now dripping a mixture of green slobber and foamy saliva onto the barn aisle, ignored us as we laughed at him. Who could blame him? He was gorgeous and he knew it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  “Everything is really coming together,” I was telling Alexander. I flopped back on the couch and stuck my feet in the air, sitting upside-down the way I used to when I was a kid, the way that made my father so annoyed. “Sit right,” he’d tell me, and I’d argue “there’s no right way to sit,” and then my mother would overrule us both and say that I could sit on the floor however I liked, but not on the furniture.

  So now, ostensibly an adult, I had developed a weird habit of sitting upside-down on the couch, just to prove that I could do what I liked. It came in handy when life was just a bit over-the-top. Like right now, while I listened to Alexander enumerate all the ways in which things were not, in fact, coming together. With his dispatch from the races, life was suddenly feeling very over-the-top.

  “He’s been an absolute terror, that’s not too strong a word for it. Bolting with his rider, refusing to come off the track after a work, leaping about at the gap until the outriders have to get involved. It’s an embarrassment. I’m this close to sending him back to the farm and forgetting this whole Derby nonsense.”

  I sat up again, the blood rushing through my face and roaring through my ears. He wasn’t seriously going back on our plans for Personal Best—oh no sir, he better think again. “You can’t do that! We agreed, we had a plan—he has to run in the Bahia Honda, he has to or he won’t have the points to go to Kentucky.” The Bahia Honda Stakes was on the same day as the Thoroughbred Makeover, which meant that I wouldn’t be there to run him—something I didn’t like to think about—but it was the best placed race to get Personal Best the points he needed to go to Churchill Downs in May.

  Just the fact that we were already to March and Kentucky was still on the table was a fact I could barely take in. Even if it seemed like a million-to-one shot, I wasn’t about to throw in the towel yet. Look how close we had come! Crazy dreams are just as hard to give up as the regular kind.

  “Alex, he’s not ready for the Bahia Honda, so he’s clearly not going to be ready for Kentucky.” Alexander’s tone was grim. “He’s gotten sour and needs a break. He can’t do it all—take a break, run the Bahia, take a break, be fit for Kentucky. It’s all or nothing now. And he’d prefer nothing, I can assure you. You’ve never seen such a bastard. Gary won’t ride him anymore, so we had to find a new rider, and he’s been having them off one after another like some sort of circus horse. It’s been a shambles. I don’t want to take him out there with my name on him again until he’s been sorted out. This is my reputation on the line here.”

  And yours is already sullied enough, I silently added for him. He might not have said it, but you can bet he was thinking it. Cotswold Farm was looking a bit like Loserville these days. No stallions, no stakes horses, and two trainers who couldn’t seem to keep their names out of the gossip columns.

  Still, I had an awful time believing that Personal Best would be so suddenly soured on racing. He loved living at the track, he loved the hustle and bustle of the training center, the training track full of horses each morning, the brief interlude in his little paddock each afternoon, the other horses along the shed-row looking up and down as they worked through their hay-nets and listened to the radio left on by the grooms. He was a social horse, chatty and neighborly as they came; racetrack life suited him. And of course, he was a racehorse through and through. He loved to go to the track in the afternoon, his blood high and his head higher, waiting to be led out to the track like a child’s pony, kept in check by taut hands on the lead-shank, until he could burst
from the starting gate and show the others his heels.

  It was what he did. It was what he lived for. Why would that suddenly change now?

  It had changed for Tiger. But then, Tiger was a different horse, with a different personality, a different soul. Tiger lived to be in charge, to have his head, to make his own decisions about everything. That was what made the jump this afternoon such an unexpected head-turner for him. He had been making up his own mind, and Kerri had surprised him and shown him a good time. If I could keep surprising Tiger, he’d stay fresh and excited about work. It worked for him, but I didn’t think it was what P.B. needed.

  I just didn’t know what he needed. Still…

  “A few more days,” I pleaded. “I’m not ready to give this up. Just put him out in his paddock every day. He doesn’t need to go to the track. He’s fit enough. Find something for him and drop him in, let him race himself fit instead of working out.”

  “So let’s say we turn him out and then find a race for him in a week, ten days. Okay, fine, but what kind of prep do we give him for this race? We send him out two days before the race? I can’t blow him out if he isn’t in work. That’s hell on his legs.”

  “Just jog him,” I said resolutely, feeling more confident since Alexander was actually asking my opinion. Including me in the conversation again, instead of telling me—thank goodness for that. “A good long jog to loosen all his muscles. And a short one again the day before the race. If he doesn’t want to run, we’ll know then.” We’ll.

  Alexander considered this. “He is fit enough for a few days off. Bursting out of his skin, as a matter of fact.”

  “Dying for a race,” I said. I tipped myself over on the couch again, letting my ponytail hang behind me to pool on the floor. I rested my feet on the back of the couch and wiggled my toes against the cool wall. Upside-down could be a good way to think. “Give him a race and he’ll be ready for the Bahia without dealing with training track nonsense. He thinks the work-outs are boring. He wants a race, not a work-out.”

  “And you,” Alexander said gruffly.

  “What’s that?”

  “He’s used to you coming to see him. And you running him. I think he misses you.”

  My head slid down to the carpet with a thump, and I slowly rolled off the couch. “You really think that?”

  Alexander sighed. Emotional attachments were not his favorite thing, especially when it was something as sentimental as a horse and a human with a social bond. Gross, he’d be thinking, every time someone tried to sell him some story of their miraculous relationship with their soul-mate horse. Horses, he had declared more than once, do not care about human souls.

  Despite all that, though, he couldn’t say a word against deep friendships with horses. He’d had them as much as I had.

  “Let me come down,” I said urgently.

  “Not yet.”

  “But Alexander—”

  “Not. Yet.”

  I subsided. He was taking my training advice. That was really more than I could reasonably ask for, anyway. The invitation to return would come in time. Then, I could get back down to the business of training racehorses. I loved my Tiger, but bless him, he was going to have to stay a fun hobby. Nothing stirred my blood like a galloping racehorse.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Maybe it was the training chat with Alexander the night before, but when I went out to the training barn in the morning, I took a look at the white board and decided that I would ride a work this morning. I’d left before Alexander, so there was no one around to hem and haw, looking for a good reason to tell me no. It was now or never; he’d be down any minute. “Juan?” I called, and the rider ducked his head into the tack room.

  “Yeah boss!” He grinned. Apparently the kerfuffle in January was long forgiven and I was no longer considered to be on the verge of some sort of breakdown that was endangering the entire farm, because everyone had been very nice to me for the past few weeks. That, or they’d decided I was a ticking time bomb who should be humored and kept as cheerful as possible. Either way, the atmosphere around the training barn was much improved. I’d take it.

  “I want to do a fast work on the Miss Frosty colt. We have the Surfside colt marked for one, too. You want to go do this with me right now?” It was still pretty dark out, but the track would be ideal first thing in the morning, before the other horses went out and tore up the neat furrows that had been plowed into it yesterday afternoon.

  Juan had been a jockey in Puerto Rico and was always game for a fast gallop, so we shouted to the grooms to get the tack out for the two colts and set about zipping ourselves into our half-chaps (leggings, everyone called them but me, because old habits die hard) and safety vests. Once our hard hats were on and the harnesses snapped, we were ready to go. I tossed Juan a stick and he snatched it out of the air—a neat trick I just couldn’t master, no matter how many times I had tried.

  The morning was warm and damp, the air smelling of mildew and soil and the manure pile. I breathed it deep as we went walking down to the training track. The two-year-olds, free from the disapproving nanny-gaze of Parker and Betsy, felt frisky and naughty. My colt, a long-legged dark bay without a splash of white anywhere on him, squealed and kicked out at Juan’s, but he wasn’t actually trying to strike him—just childish high spirits. I straightened him out, chiding him with a motherly voice, and Juan laughed when his own colt humped his back and gave a warning hop.

  These were our two oldest colts, well past their actual second birthdays, which had come in late January, and they were the closest to the racetrack. Both had done two fast works already, learning the difference between a workmanlike gallop and a few furlongs at racing speed. I loved the way they discovered the rivalry inherent in a paired work, when you finally shook out the reins and told them to go.

  “You mean I can go faster, I can try to beat this guy?”

  “Yes, that’s the idea.”

  “Oh, awesome!”

  We jogged around the track the wrong way, listening to the wings of early-rising mourning doves as they fluttered up from the long grass along the rail. In the pine grove at the north end of the track, a whip-poor-will was still awake, whistling out into the dawn. “Time for bed, silly bird,” I called as we jogged past, and I heard his little chuckling chirp that followed every call of whip-poor-will, as if he was laughing at me for trying to tell him what to do.

  The track was clear, but there was fog settling along the pasture next door, where Mary’s makeshift training track was furrowed and ready for the day’s works. There were ridges in it, and bumps where harder ground was standing out from the settling sand. We still saw her horses out there from time to time, whenever our sets went out at the same time by coincidence, but there seemed to be fewer of them. I wasn’t surprised. There was no way they were staying sound, galloping over that uneven ground. She was ruining her own chances. “Self-destructive,” I murmured, and Juan looked at me questioningly, but I just shook my head. I had to forget about Mary once and for all, worry about my horses and nothing else.

  Luckily, a nice fast breeze was the very thing to knock every other care out of your head.

  We opted for a short work from the three-eighths pole, and turning our horses about at the center of the stretch, we galloped along easily the way we had just come. The gray sky was brightening, the whip-poor-will was silent at last, and all that I heard now was the rumble of our horses’ hooves on the good ground, the sound of their breathing as they exhaled every time their fore-hooves hit the ground, the jingle of buckles on the training yokes around their necks.

  And it was good, good, good.

  At the three-eighths pole we both shook out our reins and shouted. Juan showed his horse the stick when the colt hesitated, a little wave in the air to convince him that yes, this was really what we wanted, and I swear I could see the delight in the horse’s eyes as he comprehended it’s time to go fast! Their strides built and built, a slow roar like a growing wave rather than
a rocket launch of instant acceleration, and that was fine too—they would learn, they would get stronger, they would come to anticipate this and burst forward at the signal with a fierce intensity.

  By the time we sailed around the short turn and were thundering down the homestretch, the horses had discovered just how much they wanted to beat the other, and then it was a game of noses—first my colt shoved a nose in front, then Juan’s colt. We let them see-saw this way, each horse experiencing the thrill of winning and the challenge of falling behind, until we had swept past the final pole and it was time to stand up in the stirrups and bring them down to a slow gallop.

  Just as I did so, my colt shaking his head against my lifting hands, I saw a horse to my right. I looked—there was a rider there, wearing a cowboy hat and sitting a paint pony, reined up in the makeshift training track.

  Mary.

  I shouted to Juan and nodded in her direction, then as the horses slowed to a jog in the turn, I reined the colt around so that I could go back and talk to her. I wanted to know what she wanted from me, I wanted to know how we could end this bad blood. The only thing I knew for sure was that I was ready to move on. I didn’t need a nemesis, or an arch-rival. We weren’t children any more, or high school students telling tales on one another at the boarding stable. We were adults, and we were trainers, and we were committed to putting our horses and our sport first in all things. Racing had enough trouble without us tearing it down from within. We had to put up a united front, do the right things for our horses, build up our sport’s reputation and integrity. Our livelihood was at stake.