Up close his face didn’t have the jolly dimples that I remembered so well. I could still see the faint lines where they once were but now his face was weathered and sad and I was glad.
“Why would you say that?” he asked. “Why would you say that I never sent you anything?”
“Because you didn’t,” I said.
“But I did.”
We stood there in silence, glaring at one another.
“Well you must have accidently sent it to another one of your daughters then because I never got anything. Nine years, I haven’t heard from you in nine years and then you just show up here? Well this is my town and my home and I think you should leave. Go back to England or wherever it was that you’ve been all this time. I don’t need you now.”
Then I got on my bike and rode away and this time he didn’t run after me. He just stood there watching me go.
I rode my bike to Sand Hill. I didn’t know where else to go. I couldn’t go home. My mother would want to know why I was so upset and I couldn’t talk to her about it. Not now. Not while Missy was pregnant with my father’s child, a stepsibling that was going to be born whether I wanted it or not. And I didn’t. Even though I’d tried to pretend that my father was dead, a small secret part inside me had harbored this rosy dream where he would come back into my life and we would have this perfect father, daughter relationship. Just the two of us, unlike at home where I now had to share my mother with Cat. Now I was going to have to share my father with a new baby. A baby that was going to be all needy and far cuter than I could ever be. It wasn’t fair. I wondered what it would take to become legally emancipated.
When I finally got to Sand Hill, I ran straight to Bluebird. He was in his field but came trotting to the gate when he saw me, his ears pricked. He let out a soft nicker as I climbed over the gate and buried my face in his sweet smelling mane.
“Oh Bluebird,” I sobbed. “What am I going to do?”
The tears came freely now and my pony didn’t seem to mind. I stood there sobbing into his neck for ages, until there were no more tears left and snot was running down my face. I wiped it on my sleeve.
“I hate him even more now,” I told Bluebird as I slipped his halter on. “And he’s teaching Jess. Can you believe it? He’s teaching my rival. Well it won’t work. I’m going to find out where that show is and we’re going to enter and then we’re going to beat Jess and everyone else there and my stupid father will wish that he had me as his student instead of Jess. But it won’t matter because I’m never going to talk to him again.”
Bluebird nodded his head like he thought it was a good idea. Or he could have just been shaking off a fly. But I liked to think that he agreed with me because if we were going to beat Jess at the next show we were going to have to do it together. We were going to have to jump higher and gallop faster. To pull out all the stops and show that we really could beat all the bigger horses. There wouldn’t be any more pony jumping classes. From now on we were only going to go up against horses. We had to.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I tacked Bluebird up with just a cursory wave to Esther. She was busy mucking stalls and didn’t have time to talk anyway, which was fine by me since I had a feeling that if I tried to talk, I would burst into tears again.
I took Bluebird into the ring and set up the jumps into a gymnastic with one stride between them. We hadn’t been doing enough real work lately. We’d been riding on the trail and jumping in the field and every now and then Esther had given us a lesson in the ring but it wasn’t enough. The girls at Fox Run had lessons every day. Of course they were going to be better than we were. I’d been slacking off. Resting on my laurels all summer and I knew it. Relying on the fact that Bluebird and I had natural talent and we didn’t need to practice but I was wrong. Horribly wrong.
“No more goofing off,” I told Bluebird. “We have to get better if we’re ever going to beat Jess and Hashtag.”
But at least Jess seemed to be having her own problems and even though I knew it wasn’t nice to be happy about it, I couldn’t help the fact that I was. She was messing up her horse, just like she always did and it didn’t seem as though my father or Missy were able to help her. But the thought of Missy made me all mad again. I’d idolized her. Imagined being her. But I’d never imagined her being with my father.
I warmed Bluebird up on the flat, making sure he was loose and supple and getting his flying changes right before I took him down the line. It had been a while since we’d done any gymnastic work and his muscles tightened as he realized that he was going to have to bounce down the line with only one stride between the jumps. He got a little excited and I had to steady him, making sure he didn’t take the last two jumps as one big one.
“Good boy,” I patted his neck as he came to a halt at the end of the ring.
I took him down the line a few more times and then raised the jumps up. He cleared them again and after a few more turns I raised them up some more. By the time we were done he was jumping down the line at well over three feet. He hadn’t knocked any of them down. Hadn’t even touched a rail. I patted his neck and reached down to hug him. His sides were heaving in and out despite the fact that he was really fit.
“We’re going on the trail,” I called out to Esther as we walked out of the ring.
She was standing at the end of the barn with a broom in her hand and waved us off. I wondered if she’d seen us working in the ring and couldn’t help thinking that it would have been nice if she would have come out to help. Given us some pointers or something like she used to. But Sand Hill was winding down. It was in its twilight hours. The benefit money had come in along with whatever payout Esther got from the insurance company after the hurricane. Things were slowly and surely getting repaired but there was a for sale sign out by the road. The realtor lady had come back and taken pictures of everything and put them online. It was official. Sand Hill was for sale and soon it would be sold.
“I don’t know what I am going to do with you,” I told Bluebird as we walked under the trees, the smell of damp and decay filling my nostrils. “Where are you going to live?”
For one brief, delusional moment I had imagined keeping him in our back yard. But it was only really the size of his stall with no room to run and no grass to eat. The manure would build up with nowhere to put it and besides, the city had stupid laws about not keeping agricultural animals in your back yard. That meant no cows or chickens or goats and most definitely no horses, which I guessed was okay because Bluebird wouldn’t have been very happy there anyway. But it didn’t help the fact that I had nowhere to keep him.
“You wouldn’t want to live at Fox Run anyway, would you?”
I thought about the money I had saved up from our winnings. I had enough to pay for Bluebird’s board at Fox Run for a few months if I had to. I could scrimp and save on other things. Make sure that I stretched out the money as long as I could. But that had been my back up plan before I found out about my father and Missy, back when training with Missy would have been a dream come true. Now it would be a nightmare.
We got to the top of the ridge but I didn’t go through the fence. Instead I looked off into the distance, the construction workers tiny ants with their orange hats and reflective vests. They were building my father and Missy a farm and any hopes and dreams I’d had about looking out my bedroom window and seeing my own pony evaporated into thin air. We didn’t need him. We didn’t need anybody. We’d go it alone and prove that we could do it in spite of all the obstacles that were in our way.
I watched as dump trucks crawled across Jess’s property. Giant tractors with buckets and teeth that were scraping up the remnants of her old barn. Soon she would have a new one with more stalls than she probably needed and I wondered if maybe she would let Bluebird stay with her because after all, boarding with my bitter enemy suddenly seemed more appealing than boarding with my father.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The horse show was at the local horse park. It was a
rundown place with a shed row of stalls and two rings that people could rent to host local pony club shows or western barrel racing events. We’d shown there a few times and it was always a bit of a mess with most of the riders local people who didn’t have trainers and thought they knew what they were doing, even though they didn’t. They were usually the sort of shows where the ambulance was on standby because someone always needed to be transported to the hospital.
“How are you going to get there?” Mickey asked when I told her about the show.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I could ask Esther to take me but I’d rather just figure out how to get there on my own.”
“You could always ride there,” Mickey said. “It’s not that far if you cut through on the trail.”
A long time ago, the community had a horse trail that you could ride all the way to the beach and back and it looped through the woods to the horse park. But now it was in disrepair and mostly used by teenage boys with their four wheelers. They churned up the dirt and left beer bottles and broken glass in the shrub which pretty much made it unsafe for horses. We’d used parts of the trail when we held the hunter pace but the parts that led to the horse park were the worst. I wasn’t sure it was worth Bluebird getting hurt to ride there.
“I wish I was old enough to drive.” I sighed.
“But you’d still need a truck and a trailer,” Mickey said. “Look, why don’t you just ask your dad to take you?”
“No,” I snapped.
I hadn’t told Mickey what had happened at Fox Run. She didn’t know that he was teaching Jess or that Missy was pregnant with his child but I was sure that it wouldn’t be long before the news was all over town. That wasn’t the sort of gossip that you could keep quiet for long, especially in the horse community.
“Well, if you really want to go, you’re going to have to figure something out,” Mickey said.
“I know.”
The bell rang and we went to class where I was supposed to be learning all about fractions and other stupid math things but all I could think about was getting Bluebird to that show and proving to my dad and everyone else that we were a force to be reckoned with. After school I went straight to the barn. I figured asking Esther was better than asking my father, which I would never do in a million years. Only Esther wasn’t in a very good mood. She had pulled everything out of the office and was trying to vacuum the carpet that had so much dust and dirt ground into it that you couldn’t even tell what color it originally was. In fact I didn’t even know that Esther owned a vacuum cleaner. It was spluttering and making a grinding noise and clouds of smoke and dirt billowed up into the air.
“What are you doing?” I asked her.
She turned off the belching machine and wiped a hand across her sweaty forehead, leaving a black mark.
“I’m cleaning,” she said.
“I see that,” I said. “But why?”
“Do I need a reason to clean?” she asked.
“Yes.” I nodded.
“Okay, fine. Some people are coming to look at the barn on Saturday.”
“Boarders or buyers?”
“Potential buyers,” she said. “My realtor said that they are really keen and told me I should spruce the place up a bit.”
“Don’t you think it’s a bit late for that?” I looked at the faded wallpaper and the cobwebs in the corners.
“Well I have to try, don’t I?” she said.
She looked so upset that I pitched in to help and by the time we had finished the place looked clean but still decidedly shabby. It was also getting dark.
“Is it okay if I turn the lights on in the ring?” I asked. “I need to work Bluebird.”
“I guess,” she said and I knew she was thinking about how much electricity the ring lights burned through.
“I won’t be long,” I said. “It’s just there is this show on Saturday at the horse park and I was thinking about entering.” I paused. “You don’t think you could take us, do you?”
“This Saturday?” she said.
I nodded.
“I can’t. Those people are coming to look at the place, remember? I have to clean all the stalls and make sure everything is neat and tidy if I ever have a hope in heck of selling this place.”
She looked so flustered and upset, wringing her bandana around in her hands, that I didn’t dare push the issue.
“You could always ride over there,” she said, trying to sound helpful. “It’s not that far. We used to do it back in the day.”
“Maybe,” I said, not adding that back in the day the trail wasn’t quite the death trap that it was now.
“What do you think?” I asked Bluebird as I tacked him up. “Should we try and ride to the show? Do you think it would be worth it to stick it to my stupid dad or would we just be making a huge mistake?”
His ears flicked back and forth as I ran the soft brush over his copper coat. I knew what usually happened when you tried to prove yourself. You usually ended up proving that you were just an idiot. But I couldn’t get the image of my father teaching Jess out of my head. That should have been me up on the fancy horse. He should have been helping me realize my dreams. How many other girls had he taught while I’d been scraping by with lessons from Esther? The more I thought about it, the madder I got.
So I took Bluebird out to the ring where he fed off my anger and acted all naughty, spooking at the shadows the lights made on the ground and acting out in the dark corners where some of the lights didn’t work.
“Maybe we should just give up,” I told him as I took him back to the barn.
But giving up wasn’t in my DNA. I was far too stubborn for that.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I couldn’t figure out why riders from Fox Run were going to such a small, local show but I entered Bluebird anyway. I had to show my dad that I was better than Jess. At home Mom pulled me to one side and asked if I’d talked to my father yet. I lied and told her no. If she knew about Missy, she’d be just as upset as I was. Probably even more so. I couldn’t risk it. After all, I still didn’t want to move to Wisconsin and she was still planning our family’s great exodus from the state of Florida. If she had her way, we’d be in Wisconsin by Christmas.
“Look,” she told me, pushing a flyer across the dinner table. “Look what I found for you.”
It was a glossy brochure for a place called Happy Trails. It looked like the kind of barn that took tourists on trail rides up into the mountains. Or possibly a retirement home, I couldn’t really tell.
“You could board Bluebird there and I was thinking that the pay is better up there and so maybe I could help out with your board. I could pay for you to keep your pony.”
Her face was all bright and cheerful so I couldn’t tell her how I really felt so I just smiled and nodded.
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
“Okay.” Her face fell a little. “But there are other barns in the area too, if this one doesn’t work out.”
I went up to my room and thought about what would happen if I actually did move to Wisconsin. I didn’t really know anything about the place other than there was lots of snow and cheese and it was where that British guy went on vacation in the film Love Actually. But perhaps a fresh start was exactly what I needed. A chance to get away from my father and Jess and all the bad memories. If I stayed, I’d have to deal with my Dad. If I left, I could just pretend that he didn’t exist like I had always done. But the niggling little voice inside me said that I’d always be mad about the fact that he was teaching other people to ride instead of me. That maybe I wouldn’t be able to accomplish my dreams without him and that just made me feel even worse.
“Come to the show with me,” I begged Mickey the next day at school.
“Why?” she said. “I’ve given up jumping, remember?”
“I know,” I said. “You don’t have to actually show but I’m going to have to ride there along the old trail and I really don’t want to do it by myself.�
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“It’s not like you to be such a chicken,” she said, doodling on the paper that she was supposed to be doing her homework on because she hadn’t done it the night before.
“Thanks a lot,” I said.
She sighed and looked up. “Well I don’t even know why you are going. That show is going to suck. And even if you beat all the people there, it won’t mean anything because they all suck anyway.”
“But Jess is going to be there,” I said.
“And that is exactly why you shouldn’t go. Just leave it alone. You don’t have anything to prove.”
“I came in second at the last show,” I said. “I have everything to prove.”
She put down her pen. “Is this about your Dad?”
“No,” I said sullenly.
“It is, isn’t it? This is about sticking it to him or something.”
I picked up her pen and started drawing a horse on her notebook so that I wouldn’t have to look at her when I was talking.
“He’s teaching Jess,” I said. “At Fox Run.”
“So?” Mickey said. “That’s not exactly going to help her any. You know how she is with trainers. He’s probably so mad with her by now that he’s quit already.”
“But all this time, he could have been training me. I could have had a Dad that wanted me to ride and not only wanted but actively encouraged it. Think how much of a better rider I’d be if he’d been teaching me all these years.”
Just thinking about it made me want to cry. I bit the inside of my cheek to stop the tears from coming and drew a ribbon fluttering in the breeze on the stick horse’s bridle.
“You can’t think like that,” Mickey said gently. “I know it sucks and everything but he’s back now and you can patch things up with him, if you want to. Maybe he’ll teach you from now on.”
“Or maybe he’ll be too busy with the new baby,” I blurted out.
Off Course (Show Jumping Dreams ~ Book 12) Page 4