Ambition: (The Eventing Series Book 1)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  “You feel ready for Intermediate?” Lacey asked, like she was reading my mind. She was brushing out Dynamo’s tail carefully, avoiding pulling any strands loose. A rider’s chief vanity is their horse’s tail.

  “I think so, yeah,” I said thoughtfully. We were ready. We’d been practicing for so long, schooling for this very level for the past year. “So is he. Nothing out there is going to scare him.” Confidence was key. If you stopped to think about the madness out there on the cross-country course, you’d stick to the show-ring, where the fences fell down when you hit them.

  On the cross-country course, hitting a fence could send you head-over-heels. And Intermediate was the level when things really got salty, preparing horse-and-rider teams for the challenges of the Advanced level.

  And that’s where we were heading. It was all up there at Advanced. All those big capitalized words…

  The United States Equestrian Team. The World Equestrian Games. The Olympics. The world. Ashleigh Cooper’s stupid sports car.

  The big girl in the barn for once. If I could keep Dynamo going — or if I could get a new horse to follow in his hoof-steps. I resisted the urge to look out at Mickey, grazing in the paddock, his ears and face masked by the ridiculous fly bonnet.

  Lacey fiddled with a knot in Dynamo’s long ginger tail. “This is it, then,” she said quietly. “The big next step.”

  “Yup,” I agreed, not willing to talk too much about it. It was too big. It was a debutante ball, and I was making my bow. Intermediate level wasn’t for the dabblers and the hobbyists. It was for the riders with the guts and the drive to go all the way. “This is it.”

  “Can I groom for you? Or is Becky doing it?” Her voice was deliberately flat, but I knew how she felt about my working student. Competitive types were all the same. It was all or nothing with them — with us.

  “You’re so jealous of Becky,” I said with a grin. “Just admit it.”

  “Puh-leeze. No I’m not.”

  “Come on, Lacey,” I teased. “Be honest. You want her job. You want to work for me for free. You wish you were so lucky.”

  “I already do work for you for free,” she pointed out, holding up the tail comb for illustration.

  “And do I charge you for your lessons?”

  “No.”

  “Alright then. See, you’re practically my working student already. Just part-time.”

  “I want to be full-time,” she admitted. “But I got here too late, I guess.” She put on a schoolgirl pout, quivering her lower lip for effect. “You should fire Becky and hire me.”

  Didn’t I know it. But it wasn’t so simple. “You know I can’t do that. I need a good reason. I told her she could work five days a week, and that’s what she does. Competently. It’s my own fault I let her work banker’s hours, not hers.”

  “Tell her your needs have changed.”

  It still felt wrong, somehow. The fact was, Becky had never done anything wrong. And I had never hired or fired anyone before her. Even without a paycheck, or benefits, it still felt like a contract that we had.

  “I’ll be ready for a second working student before too much longer,” I said confidently, and downed my soda. “Things will get better. This place is about to take off.”

  “Yeah…” Lacey disappeared into the tack room and returned with my jumping saddle, settling it gently on the thin cotton pad that Dynamo preferred to all the fluffy bio-tech sheepskin BS on the market. He had a way of making his preference very clear. Bucking came to mind.

  “But in the meantime, Becky is my groom at events,” I pronounced with finality. I didn’t want to be cruel, but I had to keep it fair. I wasn’t going to play the games trainers and students had played with me. “Just… It won’t be forever.” I’d figure something out.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The next two weeks flew by in a whirlwind of wet arenas, stormy afternoons, and muddy horses. The Sunshine State Horse Park’s Summer Horse Trials were rushing towards me, and Dynamo, and all of sudden it was the week before the big event we had been waiting for.

  In every way except for the knot of terror and anticipation I carried around in my stomach, it was a normal week. That is to say, it was nearly impossible to distinguish one day from another. If I hadn’t been crossing off the calendar days with big black X’s, one after another, on the eventing calendar which hung over my tack room desk, I couldn’t have said whether it was Monday or Tuesday or Saturday.

  But each day had its own challenges. Monday meant that Ronny Anderson, the old racetrack blacksmith, showed up in his Cadillac Escalade and his shiny belt buckle, opened up the back hatch to reveal enough tools and equipment to build a rocketship, and set about sculpting Dynamo’s flat, shelly feet into something resembling a decent set of hooves. Ronny was an old redneck, dismissive of girl trainers and disapproving of any horse that wasn’t good for chasing cows, but he made a living tacking racing plates on young racehorses and he often remarked that doing my quiet sport horses was like a paid vacation. For him, maybe — I was the one who had to stand there and hold them all day long. Ronny didn’t trust cross-ties.

  Tuesday was dry and hot, the atmosphere thick and unforgiving, and though I prayed for clouds, rain, torrential flooding downpours, anything to break the heat and shield me from the sun as I rode horse after horse in the sweltering arena, every hopeful little cloud simply shriveled up in the pitiless blue sky. That night I took a cold shower, turned up the air conditioning, and sat under the living room vent until my lips turned blue.

  Wednesday night I finished chores alone (Becky had a paper due and left early) and sat out on the porch afterwards, watching the sun sink into pink and green clouds somewhere west, beyond the sandy hills of Levy County, beyond the swamps and the clapboard shanties and the fishing piers out at Cedar Key, where people were living a different kind of Florida life. I drank cold coffee from a midday pot, waiting for some prospective boarders to arrive from Orlando. The sun sank beneath the distant tree-line, and the frogs began to sing from their pop-up ponds, the flooded patches in the corner of every paddock and in the ruts of the driveway. The amphibian song was deafening to my ears, but not to Marcus’s. The beagle began to snore beside me. Venus glinted in the heavens, a mosquito whined in my ear, and no one came.

  I went inside, emptied a packet of ramen into a pot of boiling water and poked at it until the noodles were cooked, then went into the living room and turned on the weather. Marcus woke me up an hour later, baying his hound dog howl from the porch where I had left him.

  “We’re so sorry,” the woman in the parking lot was saying repeatedly, slamming the door on a shadowy BMW. “The traffic was just a mess. We left Orlando at five…”

  “There was an accident and the turnpike was shut down,” the man continued, pocketing the car keys.

  “You must be Maggie and Dave,” I said, and smiled as warmly as I could.

  I waved away their regrets and slipped bare feet into Wellington boots to give them a moonlit tour. There was an appreciative silence as they looked around the grounds, which were damp, but spotless. I could say this for people who showed up after hours, they saw the barn as it was meant to be seen. If they visited during the middle of the day, civilians from the world outside horses could be easily excused for thinking a barn was a shithole. Hay and shavings and manure everywhere, sweaty horses being walked, annoyed horses banging on their stall doors because they wanted to go outside already, sweat-foamed bridles heaped on top of dirty saddle pads heaped on top of errant wheelbarrows… a war zone. But if they came at night, they would find a well-run stable, a picture-perfect representation of classical horsekeeping, without a hair out of place, without a sliver of wood shavings marring the smooth perfection of the barn aisle.

  I watched them blinking at the gleaming expanse of shining barn aisle and thought I should schedule all my barn tours for after five o’clock in the winter, and after seven o’clock in the summer. I should make that a thing.

  The coupl
e explained, in halting words and with the sort of innocence that showed that they knew they were novices and were just hoping I wouldn’t cheat the life out of them, that they had just imported two youngish Hanoverians from Germany, and wanted them started in jumping and made into solid amateur-level horses that they could both show.

  “Do you guys have riding experience?” I asked. Thinking: gold mine.

  “I do,” Maggie said eagerly. “I rode all the way up to college. Hunter-jumper.”

  “Kind of,” Dave admitted, less enthusiastic. “With my cousins and stuff, during the summers… they had a farm in Indiana…”

  “So you’re going to be taking riding lessons while your youngsters are up here being trained, is that right?”

  They looked at each other as if they had been hoping this wouldn’t come up. Dave pursed his lips a little; Maggie blushed. “Well,” Dave said after a moment. “Maggie here is pretty experienced—”

  Maggie put her hand on his arm. “No, I think she’s right, Dave.” She looked at me. “We’ll take riding lessons,” she promised. “From the best trainer we can find.”

  Sensible girl. I liked them very much.

  I invited them in to celebrate the deal with Diet Cokes, the champagne of equestrians. We sat around the kitchen table until nearly ten o’clock, discussing the finer points of show jumping before a plainly mystified Dave, who was clearly getting involved with horses just to please Maggie, and then I produced boarding and training contracts for the two Hanoverians, who had a few more weeks left on their quarantine.

  They looped their elegant, expensive signatures onto my homemade documents, adapted from a workbook of equestrian legal forms I’d checked out of the Marion County Public Library, and after handshakes and back-slaps they went back out into the night, leaving me up too late on a school night, alone with Marcus, who was snoring without pity on the couch.

  I looked over the training contracts with pleasure, popping open a beer to counteract the late-night caffeine. Signed documents were always nice.

  And daunting, as well. Two more stalls filled, but two more horses to ride. I didn’t have the time in my day. I needed help. I thought again of Lacey, who had been out four more times since she’d asked if she could work for me full-time. She had been going out of her way to show how useful she was, handing me a new horse to ride as soon as I came into the barn with a finished one, cleaning stalls between groomings and bathings. She was stellar. And she was fun to have around.

  I tore the label from the bottle of beer, rolled it between my fingertips, gazed out the kitchen window to where Dynamo grazed in his circle of tangerine light.

  On the living room couch, Marcus rolled onto his back and yawned, a high, piercing puppy yawn. “I should be asleep, too,” I told the beagle, but he was passed out again, legs in the air, ears flopped on the brown fabric.

  I watched him snore for a moment and then wandered around the house, looking for something to do. My heart was pounding with caffeine and adrenalin from wooing new clients, and falling asleep wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. I flipped on the television, thumbed through a romance novel, opened the freezer and searched for a carton of ice cream that did not exist. I paced. The double-wide felt very empty after having company so late at night. The quiet was loud and outside the night grew darker, the shadows deeper. There was a rustle in the kitchen. A mouse or a palmetto bug? I’d rather not know. I was better off in bed.

  I sidled into the kitchen and turned off the light, so that the house was lit only by the blue of the television. And why blue, I wondered, coming back into the living room and throwing myself down on the couch. There was nothing blue on the screen.

  Well. I felt a bit blue. I rubbed Marcus’s spotted tummy and shook my head, trying to dislodge the melancholy feeling that was taking over. I had nothing to mope over. I had new clients. The barn was almost full. Dynamo and I were more than ready for the event this weekend. Sure, the house felt empty. But I was just tired, and coming down from an emotional and a caffeine high. And I had horses to ride in the morning. It was time for bed, not time for feeling sorry for myself.

  “Come on, Marcus,” I commanded, but the beagle ignored me and snored on, his black lips pulled down from his incisors to give him a ferocious, utterly out-of-character snarl.

  “Fine.” I gave up and shuffled off to bed alone.

  Then Thursday was gone, very suddenly, a haze of half-asleep chores and half-frenzied tack cleaning, and it was Friday morning, time to get Dynamo over to the event grounds, to walk the cross-country course and memorize its horrors and high points, to begin the weekend of competition. We’d have dressage and cross-country on Saturday, stadium jumping and the final awards on Sunday, and a full slate of nerves throughout it all.

  Becky didn’t usually work on Fridays, so that she could attend some ridiculous class on Greek poetry or British literature or statistics, something that had nothing to do with horses. But I had already impressed upon her that grooming at events was a mandatory job requirement — “I will fire you so fast your head will spin if your classes interfere with my events,” was how I put it — so she was forced to skip her classes and show up at six a.m. to get morning chores done as early as possible. I always took my horses to the show-grounds early, to settle them in, and Dynamo’s nervous nature made this non-negotiable. He had to have time to look around, eat some grass, accept the new surroundings, or he would perform Lipizzan-worthy airs above the ground during his dressage test and we’d be disqualified for destroying the judge’s gazebo.

  I had Dynamo in my aging four-horse trailer by eleven o’clock on Friday morning (not bad, really) with all the hay and feed and bedding I would need for the next three days loaded up in the front. Dynamo gazed out through the bars on the window, his expression long-suffering after he stopped fussing over the snug plush-filled bandages on his legs and the bell boots wrapping all four hooves in heavy rubber protection. I told him he was lucky they didn’t make bubble-wrap in big enough sheets to wrap around his entire body. He sighed, fluttering his dark nostrils, and nosed moodily at the alfalfa in his hay-net.

  Becky set off ahead of me with a few bags of shavings and Dynamo’s water buckets in the back of her old sedan, so that she could prep the stall before we arrived. I took one last look at the trailer, running my fingers over the hitch, the electric plug, the tires, the door latches, paranoid as only a horsewoman can be, and then hopped into the cab of my truck. It was a Ford dually that had seen better days, but my farm name was on its side over the silhouette of a jumping horse, and that in itself was a dream come true. What were a few dents? I had a future, and today I was going after it.

  I always drove horses with the knowledge that I had priceless cargo tagging along behind me, weaving around potholes, taking turns so slowly that a toddler could have stood up in the trailer, driving at the speed I preferred. Only a few of the cars which blew past me on the interstate blew their horn, and only one driver gave me the finger, which I considered progress for humanity, and within an hour I had turned into the long grass and gravel driveway of the Sunshine State Horse Park, a massive acreage turned over by the county for the good of sport horses and their people everywhere.

  Becky was smoothing out shavings in the little temporary stall we’d been assigned. Dynamo bulled into the stall with pleasure and she hustled out of the way, throwing me a glare as she went.

  I ignored her. Dynamo was on his toes, ready for action, and I wasn’t about to get into a fight with him. Rule number one of a happy horse show, never get into a fight with Dynamo.

  “The stall looks good,” I commented, unsnapping the lead and stepping out, fastening up the stall chain behind me. “Really nice.”

  It was perfect, in fact. Deep fluffy bedding, brimful water buckets, a net of hay in the corner to keep him from leaning on the stall chain and annoying the other horses walking down the narrow aisle.

  Becky nodded, her jaw still tight. She had a thin face, with a sharp nose and a po
inted chin, and she seemed to jut it out when she was angry with me, which was most of the time.

  Then Dynamo, who had been snuffling around his stall, got down to the really important business of throwing himself down and rolling, and rolling, and rolling in the fresh clean shavings, groaning with pleasure like a pig in mud. He rubbed his head back and forth in the bedding, pine shavings clinging to his furry ears, and looked generally like a clown. I shook my head.

  But then I looked back at Becky, and saw that she was watching Dynamo’s stall ritual with something akin to pleasure. The first smile I’d seen on her face in a month was blossoming slowly, and for a startling moment I thought she was going to laugh. Maybe she wasn’t going to be such a bitch this weekend, I thought. Maybe we’d be friends again, the way we had been when she had started, before she had somehow been disappointed by me and started considering her other options.

  That would be nice, I thought wistfully. It was hard to remember now, after months of animosity, but we had been close once, giggling like teenagers at the mall, eating popcorn and watching TV movies after the day’s work was done. I wasn’t sure where I had failed her and turned her against me, but once, we’d been nearly as chummy as Lacey and I were now.

  That was a scary thought. I shoved it from my mind.

  “He loves the stall, Becky,” I told her. “Thank you.”

  Becky considered me, looking away from the frolicking horse, and then her mouth went sour again. “You’re welcome,” she said off-handedly, as if the effort didn’t matter, as if the compliment was unimportant. “I’ll start unloading the trailer.” And she turned on her booted heel and went out of the stable, heading through the hot June sun to the horse trailer.