Jenny looked at her feet, hiding a smile of her own. Lana’s life was so alien to her, but watching the endless round of credit cards slapped down on counters without remorse was oddly satisfying, like watching a movie she had acted a bit role in. If Lana was the star actress with all of the good boyfriends, at least Jenny got some good meals and the occasional pair of nice shoes out of it.
“Well, I should go,” Lana sighed, pushing herself up from the warm rocks. “If I want to catch Dad before he goes home for the night, I’ll have to get down to the Financial District before rush hour.” She looked down at Jenny, who was in no hurry to give up her sunny perch. “You’re alright, then?”
“I’m fine,” Jenny said, because she always did.
“Okay,” Lana said, believing her, because she always did. “Let me know about that horse.”
And she was gone, quickly disappearing into the crowds on the park paths.
Jenny was about to pick up herself and head downtown—she’d have to start packing right away if she wanted to get into the new place this weekend—then paused at a familiar sound. The ring of hooves on pavement was coming from the right, near the cafe, and it was easy to spot the horses: they were gleaming in the sun, the brass buckles on their bridles and breastplates blindingly bright. Parents and nannies were scattering from their path, dragging small children and dogs out of the way as if the horses were ravenous dragons, ready to devour all in their path. Then, once at a safe distance, they took out their phones to take photos.
Jenny watched them draw near, the horses walking contentedly close together, the riders engaged in their own private conversation. The horses were black Percheron crosses, big-boned and tall, with long, lusciously waving forelocks tucked under their brow bands and sweeping off to either side of their dark eyes. They were inexpressibly feminine with their silky feathered heels and hip-swaying walk, like society ladies from another century, but in every step, Jenny could see their waiting power. They were magnificent in every way.
The riders’ eyes shifted side to side—looking for trouble, Jenny supposed—though their conversation never abated. She made eye contact with the rider closest to her as they passed, and blushed instantly, but the officer, a middle-aged woman with an equestrian’s sun-worn skin, flicked her a smile before slanting her gaze off to the next group of people along the sidewalk. Her horse swished his tail, catching the vines of lavender entwined around the Sheep Meadow’s chain-link fence, and a few purple blossoms were flung through the air, to land softly at Jenny’s feet. She looked at the broken flowers for a moment, running her fingers over their silken shreds, and when she looked up again, the city horses were turning a corner, and disappeared from view.
Chapter Seven
Amelia was bent over the tiny stove in the corner of the studio that passed for a kitchen when Jenny came in, vigorously stirring something which appeared to be fighting back. “Jenny!” she announced. “You’re home in time for dinner!”
Jenny stopped in the doorway. “You’re supposed to be in Michigan,” she said, hard-pressed to keep the dismay out of her voice. “You… you startled me,” she added, when Amelia turned to her with an expression suggesting she had failed. “I didn’t expect to see you there.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” Amelia turned back to her rebellious cookery. The wooden spoon struggled with the contents of the saucepan. There was a smell emanating from the dish which threatened to peel the paint off the walls, something vinegary and bitter at the same time. This had been a constant hazard of rooming with Amelia, which Jenny had been doing for three very long school years: the girl’s love of cooking in no way matched her skill at reading recipes.
“What is it?” Jenny asked carefully, going over potential dissents in her mind.
“It’s a special Korean dish I found online,” Amelia said happily. “I can’t pronounce it. There’s kimchee, and garlic, and beef, and a whole lot of other things. I bought special spices at one of those little groceries in Chinatown. You know, the ones where everything is in Chinese? So fun.” She sprinkled something chunky from a hand-labeled bottle. “I mean, I assume it’s the right stuff.”
“Oh, damn, but I’m back on the vegetarian thing, didn’t I tell you?” Jenny eased towards the partitioned bedrooms, where a slab of dry-wall divided one small room into two spaces just large enough for twin beds and dressers. “Sorry.”
“Oh, no. You didn’t.” Amelia sighed. She looked over her simmering pot. “Who is going to help me eat all this?”
Jenny had already shut the bedroom door and sunk down onto her bed, looking around at her tiny corner of the big city.
There wasn’t much in there—not much would fit. But that was a mercy; it would make moving to a new apartment in a new borough more like packing for a trip. Most of her possessions—the detritus of childhood, like piles of paperbacks and whole herds of horse figurines—were still in her bedroom in Ocala. The dresser and bed belonged to the landlord. She would have to find her way to IKEA and get a futon or a fold-out couch delivered, or she’d be sleeping on the floor.
Her new apartment would just be a very lengthy work-in-progress. She would start with the handful of things she’d acquired on her lean student years: a poster from last year’s Belmont Stakes, a vintage Breyer horse she’d found at a Brooklyn flea market, a framed picture of her sitting atop Mister—taken his two-year-old summer when she’d been riding him every morning—and her little wooden jewelry box, a chipped and painted affair with carousel horses cavorting across its lid, which she’d gotten as a birthday present when she was ten, and carted north with her to hold her small collection of earrings and tiny souvenirs: Metrocards with interesting pictures on them, ticket stubs from concerts and big races, some matchbooks and old playing cards she’d found in bars.
The only other things she owned in New York would not take much more than a large suitcase: a small pile of secondhand books, her clothes, and her laptop.
At least moving would be easy.
Amelia tapped on the door. Jenny leaned over and opened it, without getting up from the bed.
“I’m sorry about dinner,” she said.
“I’m going out with someone anyway,” Jenny lied. “Don’t worry about it.”
Amelia leaned against the temporary wall, which creaked alarmingly. “So, our lease ends at the end of July,” she said. “Do you want to find another place? I decided to stay. Michigan was boring, my mom was annoying. I’ll find a job here eventually. Or work at the deli forever.”
Jenny gazed at her roommate of three years, a round-faced girl swathed in a striped apron; a food-stained clairvoyant. She had stopped trying to like Amelia about a month into their pre-arranged cohabitation, but trusted the college matchmakers who had put them together over her own ability to find a non-murderer roommate on Craigslist. The past three years had often been boring, and occasionally frustrating, but Jenny had never worried about being the subject of a true crime podcast. And while Amelia did not know she could not cook, she was incredibly level-headed, and had never paid a bill late in her life. These qualities, coupled with being reassuringly un-sociopathic in a city filled with questionable personalities, made her failures in the kitchen seem endearing instead of off-putting. Jenny felt bad that she’d signed the lease without even telling Amelia she was apartment-hunting. “I always thought you were moving back to Michigan after school,” she said. “I just got my own place. I’m moving out this weekend.”
Amelia took the news gracefully, shrugging it off with a roll of her sloping shoulders. “That’s cool. I’ll ask my friend McKenna,” she said. “You know her, the theater major. She got a job at one of those ticket places in Times Square, so she’s staying, too.”
“Oh, that’s perfect,” Jenny said, too relieved to mind that Amelia could replace her so easily. After all, she was replacing the girl with an empty room, and was thrilled at the prospect.
Jenny’s phone rang while she was bringing some scavenged boxes upstairs. The nearby liq
uor store was the neighborhood’s primary source for cardboard boxes. Every recycling pick-up day, the sidewalk was filled with vodka and gin boxes stuffed with newspapers, magazines, and more vodka and gin boxes. Tonight, her haul was all Jose Cuervo. She let them slide against the wall next to the apartment door. “Mom? What’s wrong?”
“Why would you assume something’s wrong?”
“You’re calling me before seven o’clock at night,” Jenny pointed out. She rummaged for her key, which she’d dropped into a box after she’d gotten the lobby door open. “You never call during working hours unless there’s a problem.”
“I’m inside. It’s raining,” Andrea said matter-of-factly. “Cats and dogs. Did you forget the weather in Florida? It’s June, my daughter. Rainy season.”
“Oh, of course it is. It’s so sunny here right now, I guess I just picture it that way everywhere.” The Floridian weather was so different from New York’s, Jenny felt like she and her mother were on distant planets. New York’s climate paid relentless attention to the calendar, marching through winter, spring, summer and fall with military precision; Florida’s seasons were simply stormy and dry, summer and winter lite, and as a child she’d often forgotten whether it was supposed to be autumn or spring, if Christmas was nine months away or just around the corner.
“I think we’ve gotten an inch of rain in the past half hour alone. Anyway, I’m calling to ask when you’re coming home, because there’s a race in south Florida and I think your father could use your help with Mister and—”
“Mom, I told you I’m not coming home.” Jenny’s key was in the door, but she didn’t turn it. She leaned against the battered wall of the landing, feeling a pit of anxiety form in her stomach. The boxes had settled into a pile on her feet. “We talked about this last month, I’m starting the website with Lana and Aidan. I signed a lease this morning. My work is here.” With every word, her voice became more pleading. She heard the desperation and she hated it, but she didn’t know how to change it. All of the New York tough drained right out of her when she was dealing with her mother.
There was silence, and a rumble Jenny took to be thunder, rolling around the eaves of the Florida house. The phone crackled with lightning. “I see,” Andrea said after a moment. “So you’re really staying.”
“I’m really staying,” Jenny said desperately, pouncing on the half-chance her mother might understand her, just this once. “This is important. I’m going to write articles about the good stories in horse racing, I’m going to put a face on all the grooms and hot walkers and riders that no one ever sees. I’m going to write for equestrians, and not bettors. It’s going to help personalize the sport and bring in more fans, boost racing’s profile.” It was a rushed, tumbling version of her elevator pitch, which, she now realized, she’d failed to give to her parents before.
“I see,” Andrea sighed. “You’re going to save racing. And just who are you going to write about, Jenny? You say there’s so much good to share, but there’s plenty of bad. Are you going to do a feature on the Lawsons? You know they’re shipping to New York this summer. Maybe go visit their shed-row and they can give you a few stories about running cheap claimers into the ground. Show all the love in that barn.” Her mother’s voice grew fierce. They’d lost horses to the Lawsons before, seen them chewed up by the couple’s savage production line, disappearing to wherever discarded horses went.
Jenny slid down the wall and put her forehead against her knees. “This isn’t about people like the Lawsons, Mother,” she said softly. “This is about people like us.”
“I don’t think there are as many people like us as you think, Jenny.”
Jenny didn’t say anything to that. Far away, the storm rumbled and crackled around the farm where she’d grown up and the woman who’d raised her to defend her horses against all enemies, most of all against pride—because too much pride could get a good horse killed. Stay humble, she’d say, and remember they’re just horses, not machines, and their strength is their own, something you showed them—not something you gave them. But they weren’t strong enough to protect themselves. That was their job, as the owners and trainers and riders. They had to stand up and say what was right.
That was all Jenny had ever been told to do, and she wished Andrea could see that that was all she was doing now: defending her horses.
“Well,” Andrea finally said, her voice brisk, seemingly recovered from her shock. “If you’ve signed a lease I guess you’re staying. But you’re not off the hook from helping out when we need you. There are airplanes. We’ve got Mister lined up for a few stakes races before Saratoga and we’ll certainly expect to see you there then, if not beforehand.”
“Saratoga?” Jenny lifted her head from her knees. Saratoga’s golden season waved in front of her like a mirage in the desert. She’d never gone to the prestigious meet in upstate New York; she’d always gone home to Florida and hadn’t come back to the city until autumn had reached the Adirondacks and the summer holiday-makers had deserted the Spa, everyone gone home to resume real life. “You’re going to send him to Saratoga?”
“It’s a possibility,” Andrea allowed. “If Gulfstream goes well and it seems right.”
Jenny imagined her parents in Saratoga while she was trying to cover the track’s backside culture with a press pass in her pocket. As much as she wanted Mister running there, she didn’t see a crossover episode going well. Her parents would want all of her time, not caring that she had a job, and it wasn’t hers to give. “Let me know,” she said weakly.
“You’ll know,” Andrea said with a low chuckle. “You’re going to be a turf writer, remember? It will be your job to know.”
Eventually, Jenny managed to climb back to her feet, prop the door open, and shove her boxes inside the apartment. Amelia had gone out to find McKenna and court herself a new roommate, and only the fumes remained from her Korean masterpiece. Jenny dropped the boxes onto her bed and looked at them without enthusiasm. Packing was the worst, she thought. This apartment in Brooklyn needed to be her dream home, so that she didn’t have to pack up again. Sure, it was just a little studio. But how much space could she need in life? When would she ever need more than a room to herself?
Two hours later, Jenny looked at the boxes she’d wedged between the foot of the bed and the wall. She had more things than she’d realized, and clothes took up a lot of space. The thought of carrying these boxes down four flights of stairs, shoving them into a town car’s back seat, then hauling them out and and dragging up another flight of stairs, was inexpressibly depressing. She felt a sudden nostalgia for Florida, and sprawling stucco houses set beneath palm trees, without a staircase in sight. Her own bedroom was waiting for her there, almost as big as the studio she’d just rented, and with twice as much furniture as she’d have when she got to Brooklyn. A full bed, two bookshelves, a cushioned chair under one window, so that the watery afternoon light could fall onto the pages of the story you were reading, a desk where her laptop had perched alongside a small herd of Breyer horses she’d had since she was a small girl. An Appaloosa, a bright red chestnut, and, her favorite, a small honey bay—plain bay, to tell the truth—with a star and a snip.
The memory—and her mother’s flip words about the Lawsons—tripped something in Jenny’s brain. That bay horse she’d seen at Tampa. She’d forgotten all about him, and if she wanted to find him for Ryan, she needed to stay on top of his progress. Racehorses who stopped racing disappeared from public view with the snap of a finger. Jenny had learned to anticipate a retirement decision, rather than waiting for one, when she wanted a horse. A string of bad finishes, constant dropping in class, and the impending end of a meet—like the one at Tampa just a few weeks ago—these were all prime triggers to cull slow horses from a stable.
“I hope I didn’t miss him,” she muttered, grabbing her laptop.
There were databases upon databases to find information on racehorses once they’d made their first start, and Jenny spent more th
an an hour rummaging through them, laptop perched on her crossed legs, her back against the solid wall of her room, the sun slowly disappearing from her window and sinking beneath the water towers of the West Village as she clicked and typed and frowned and clicked again.
She tried every source she knew, but the Internet would not yield up her horse. Maybe, if she’d remembered his name, she might have had more luck. But she couldn’t recall what she’d done with that torn-out sheet from the racing program. And there were simply too many crazy racehorse names floating around in her brain. She had no idea who he was. Just a slow bay racehorse in Florida—one of thousands.
“Ugh! Why didn’t I look him up that day?” Jenny closed her laptop in frustration. Maybe she had looked him up, but that weekend had been long and busy and filled with the kind of life-changing moments most people only saw once every few years, and that entire forty-eight hour block was just a blur to her now.
All she could do now was hope the Lawsons would be kind to that cute bay horse, and hang on to him long enough for Jenny to see him again. It wasn’t a likely scenario, but it was the only one she had right now.
Jenny pulled on a pair of flats and trundled down the stairs, her mind still on the lost racehorse. If she could find him and get him to Lana’s barn, he’d make a good story for the website—not the part about the Lawsons using up their horses, of course, those were the kind of stories she was tired of seeing—but about how you could find a nice horse on the backside and turn him into a show horse when his racing career was over. Retirement wasn’t the point of her work, obviously, and plenty of other writers were working on the retirement angle, but showing the good side of racing would inevitably mean taking on some retirement stories…
She was so lost in thought that she walked right into Aidan at the corner of her block and nearly fell into the street.
“Whoa!” Aidan caught her by the arm and tugged her upright again before she toppled into the crosswalk. The space where she had nearly ended up was quickly occupied by a yellow cab. “Not for us,” Aidan shouted, waving the driver away, and he gunned it, tires spinning on the damp street.
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