Ambition: (The Eventing Series Book 1)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  I ground my teeth, took another look at the threatening clouds rolling in, but it was just to avoid his gaze. Because he had me. I hadn’t been on a vacation since my mother dragged me along on a spring break cruise when I was eighteen. My grandparents came. There was a faux-Broadway show and a dinner dance with a big band and more drunken college students in one place than the Swamp parking lot before a University of Florida home game. I missed an event I’d been aiming for with Dynamo. It was awful. I remembered the disappointment, wandering around the ship, missing my horse, feeling completely unable to have fun, to talk to anyone, to connect with anyone. And then there it was again, that awful sinking lonely feeling again, the one that hit me in the middle of the night and kept me awake until I went to the window to watch Dynamo, my forehead against the cool glass, watching the one friend I could always count on.

  “Don’t kill yourself. Go slow, learn, let it come to you. And in the meantime, make a little time to enjoy yourself, okay?”

  I started to speak, to tell him that he was right, I should work less and play more, and I should start by having dinner with him, or at least buying him that Coke at the country store down the road, but a rumble of thunder distracted us both, and as we broke off from one another, eyes roving the cloud-strewn sky to gauge the storm’s progress, I saw again the perfection of his farm: the trim barns, the tidy arenas, the rolling fields. And I remembered that he had it all, the prize already in his grasp, and I was barely hanging on.

  “You expect me to take it slow?” I snapped, viciously angry again. No good pretentious client-stealing bastard! “You didn’t get all this by going on vacations. We are ambitious people, Peter Morrison, and what you have — I will have. I will never stop working until I do.”

  He looked at me sadly, sun-tanned skin crinkling around his eyes. “I see that,” he said softly.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Dr. Em diagnosed Dynamo’s listless behavior as heat stroke, and told me to go easy on him until the weather broke. Which might be in another month, or in another three months. I thought of the event dates written on the calendar for the next six months and bit my lip.

  She didn’t find anything new with Mickey. “Just his hooves,” she announced, stepping back and putting her hands on her hips to regard the gray horse, who was standing quiet as a saint in the barn aisle, having submitted to her pokings and proddings and flexions for the past twenty minutes. “And we already know they need fixed.”

  “He hasn’t had any abscesses,” Lacey said, rubbing his face and spilling short gray hairs all over the front of her black tank top. “But they’re too flat, right?”

  “Way too flat,” Dr. Em confirmed. “There’s white line in there… you can soak it in vinegar and this packet of meds they sell at the feed store…”

  “I’ll do it,” Lacey said. “We’ll fix him.” She had gotten really attached to Mickey after Lochloosa, as if his incident of psychotic behavior confirmed her worst suspicions that I was overworking him in the name of commerce, and she was his only hope of friendship. She didn’t know I came out in the night and hugged him in his paddock, and told him I loved him, and that someday all this hard work would be worthwhile. And I wasn’t going to tell her. What kind of a softie boss did I want her to think I was?

  “I guess it could be his feet. Panicking about working on sore toes. I’d say they’re fine now, but if he’s always had flat feet, he might have a memory. Horses get stuck on memories of pain sometimes.” Dr. Em rubbed her forehead, as if she wasn’t quite sure of what she was saying. It would be easier if horses could just tell us. There would be fewer guessing games and false starts. I gazed at Mickey, and he gazed blandly back at me with soft brown eyes. There was no sign that he’d had a panic attack at a horse show and made me look like a total hack in front of everyone I wanted to call my colleagues.

  “And then, he could just be overtired,” Dr. Em told to me later, over our ritual of cold Diet Cokes at the kitchen table. “He could be a little sour, and the prospect of strenuous work was too much for him. He must have thought he was at a race, after all. You expect that with these horses for the first few outings. Especially if they had any pain issues while they were racing.”

  “That’s true.” I sighed and ticked my fingernail against the cold soda can. “To be honest, I’m really worried that if he’s not ready to compete this winter, I’ll lose him. There are expectations here. If not spoken, implied.”

  Em nodded sympathetically. “He’s a Donnelly horse, right?”

  “Yeah. And Donnelly horses win. You don’t see the failures. She doesn’t tolerate failure. She moves the horse.”

  Dr. Em looked over my shoulder, studying the fridge magnets from pizza joints and feed stores, avoiding my eyes. “That’s a risk you have to take,” she said finally. “I don’t know that Donnelly will pull him right away, just because you can’t get him through Novice by December.”

  “I’m the only rider on her team that isn’t seriously looking like international competition next year,” I admitted bleakly. “She isn’t going to sit around and wait for me to learn to ride her horse. She’ll expect results as long as the horse is sound.” I paused. “He needs a break, right?”

  “Oh, for sure.”

  “He needs an injury, then.” I rapped my knuckles on the table.

  “You want me to forge something?”

  “No, I want to ride him all afternoon until he bows a tendon for real,” I snapped, fresh out of good mood. “Come on. I want you to write something down that gives him time off. As much as you think he needs. Heat in his knee. Something minor, but it will give him a couple weeks off. A month. Sometime to explain the time off to the owners, and his bad behavior. In the meantime I’ll be giving him a very gentle remedial education. Catch him up a little on the basics. Maybe we went too fast,” I conceded. “So this will buy us some time.”

  She drummed her fingers on the table. Dah-dah-dah, dah-dah-dah, dah-dah-dah. A cantering horse. I held my breath, waiting for her to decide.

  “I can do that for you,” she agreed finally. “Heat in the knee, some tenderness in the suspensory region. Nothing conclusive on ultrasound. Time off, poultice and standing wraps, light turnout in sports medicine boots. Easy enough to explain with that angle on his hooves, anyway — he really could strain the suspensory ligament without too much effort.”

  I let loose my pent-up breath, relief flooding through my limbs. “Thanks, Em… for real.”

  She shrugged. “We do what we have to do. And listen — do all that stuff anyway. Poultice him, turn him out in boots, give that vinegar potion time to work on his hooves. I can’t say he isn’t feeling some discomfort from that hoof angle. No harm in giving him some support. You can still work him. Just do exactly what you said, work on the basics. Give his head some time to catch up with his body.”

  Fair enough, I thought, nodding my head in agreement. “About Dynamo… how easy is easy?”

  “Easy. Like, walking, until the humidity drops below sixty or the temperature drops below eighty… whichever comes first.”

  “That’s not happening any time soon.” The misery came creeping back. Lochloosa had utterly ruined my life. It was Friday. In five days I had lost two horses, received three cancellations from scheduled barn tours with prospective clients, ridden exactly no one, and demolished a case of beer and a bottle of cheap tequila. It had been a long five days.

  “Early morning or late evening, if you walk.” Dr. Em said thoughtfully. “Put him up in the bridle for some lateral work, just walking but you can work him good, then a half-hour of free walk for a cool-out. Keep him sweating. If he stops sweating, we’re sunk. You see anything, put him on dark beer and a sweating supplement.” She paused, considered. “Put him on dark beer now, anyway.”

  I nodded fervently. I’d do anything to keep him sweating. Anhydrosis ruined good horses, especially in Florida. You saw them forgotten, in the corner stall of training barns, the stall with the most airflow, three or
four fans trained on them as they heaved their labored breaths with red-rimmed nostrils, unable to keep themselves cool in the summer heat. It was devastating and unpredictable, and all we could do was keep them fit and hope for the best.

  Dark beer wasn’t cheap, unfortunately. Nothing in this business was.

  “This season is pretty much shot.” I slapped my hands on the table, feeling defeated. “It started so well, too. Now I’ve lost both my big horses for the season. I can’t keep Dynamo in shape for Intermediate if he’s not doing conditioning work.”

  She shook her head. “Nope. But you have plenty of sales horses to work on.”

  “I know, they’re just not…” I sighed, thinking of the sales horses in the barn. Good citizens, who could jump fences and perform a solid dressage test without embarrassing anyone too much. So much vanilla. “They’re just not exciting. You know? The best of the bunch is a good solid prelim horse, but his gaits aren’t pretty, and his dressage scores are always going to reflect that. He’s never going anywhere. I’ll sell him eventually, but his name will never make me famous. And I just… I want to keep moving up, Em, you know? I want to climb, not stick around at prelim and try to sell adult-amateur horses.”

  “That’s where the safe money is, though.”

  She was right. The bombproof packers went for big bucks.

  “No glory, though.”

  “No,” Dr. Em agreed, shaking her head. “Listen, I have another appointment. Thanks for the drinks. And hey —” She paused and ran her finger around the water ring on the table. “I work with a lot of big trainers, Jules, you know that.”

  I nodded. She wasn’t boasting, it was the truth.

  “I just have to tell you… people are talking. So listen, Jules? Slow down. Okay? Just, do the amateur horses and do them well this winter, and next year come back out swinging. Dynamo and Mickey will appreciate the slow-down, too.” She grabbed her truck keys and headed for the door. “I’m sorry to preach,” she said as she was leaving. “But you’re my friend, right? I want you to be aware. Just — take it easy. And by the way? I was at Briar Hill yesterday. Pete Morrison still wants to take you out. If he asks, you should go.”

  The storm door slammed behind her.

  I spun a coin on the table and looked glumly out the window. Lacey was riding Liesl, a Hanoverian mare whose primary recommendation was that she was too lazy to run away with a nervous rider, in the flooded dressage arena, making careful serpentines in and around the puddles. She was going to show her Novice later in the fall, nice and easy, fences no higher than two and a half feet, a dressage test mostly comprised of twenty-meter circles and trotting.

  Thunder rumbled somewhere, not too far away.

  Lacey looked around nervously, searching for the source of the thunder, then sat deeply in the saddle, bringing Liesl down to a walk. Even at this distance, I could see that Lacey’s face was flushed red with the heat, and her shirt was soaked through with sweat. Liesl had tiny white patches above each eye, where her eyelids had been collecting sweat each time she blinked.

  Heat, and storms, and flooding. Take it easy, indeed. I didn’t have a choice. Only September, but fall was looking like a write-off already. I got up to head back to work, and for once, I left my urgency behind.

  Everyone was telling me to take it easy. What the hell, I’d give it a shot.

  Lacey was informed of Mickey’s supposed injury, in case she answered the phone when Eileen called for her weekly check-in, and I spent an hour teaching her how to properly fit his sports medicine boots and how to apply poultice under standing wraps. “The brown paper soaks in the bucket while you slap the mud on, and then you wrap the wet paper around the mud to keep it damp all day. And then cotton bandages over top to hold it in place.”

  “This is messy.”

  “You get used to it.”

  There was clay everywhere when we finished, white and gooey and smelling deliciously of menthol. Lacey inspected her hands. “I look like a mummy.”

  “Wait until it hardens on you.”

  “At least it’s cool…”

  “Spearmint and menthol,” I mused. “I want to take a bath in it.”

  “Smells better than the vinegar bath for his hooves.”

  Fake injury or not, Mickey was enjoying the attention. He closed his eyes and let his head hang off the cross-ties while we fussed over him. Lacey giggled and kissed him on the nose. His ears flopped but he didn’t move. Then she straightened and looked around. “What’s that sound?”

  I held up a finger and listened for a moment. “The weather radio,” I said. “Be right back.”

  It was a tornado warning for the rural town of Fort White, miles away from us, but even so, I came back to the barn with a new appreciation for the fresh weather that was approaching the farm. The northwestern sky was dark, with white fingers of cloud stretching out ahead of its flat blackness, and flickers of lightning flashed from heavens to earth like curtains of electricity.

  “We’re going to have a tornado?” Lacey asked nervously, trotting after me as I led the way to the paddock where we had set up a few jumps. “Should we be out in this?”

  “No,” I said. “But I just want to drag these jump standards together and lay them down flat.”

  “In case what?”

  “In case the wind knocks them over and breaks them.”

  “What if the wind picks them up and throws them into the barn?”

  I didn’t answer. What if? You could spend all day answering that question. I did what I could.

  In the end, there was just a lot of wind and rain and lightning, not that different from any other day in summer, and I managed to ride two horses while Lacey fed dinner, the eastern sky yellow and flickering as the storm blew out its fury across Ocala and the Forest and the beaches far to the east.

  But the evening was a little more tense than usual. Lacey felt unsettled by the tornado warning, and that night she found a television show called Surviving the Storm, which she watched with rapt attention. She turned to me when it was over.

  “Did you know this is the most serious part of hurricane season?”

  I nodded without looking up from the game on my phone. Floridians knew that from birth. Lacey, on the other hand, was from Pennsylvania.

  “Where will we go in a hurricane?”

  I considered her question. I didn’t actually have a hurricane plan. When you live on flat land in a double-wide, it can be a thought best pushed to one side. “Dunno.” I admitted finally. “Tack room?”

  “Is that safe?”

  “Well,” I said. “It’s certainly safer than a double-wide trailer. The walls of this thing are made of cardboard.”

  She bit her lip. “Have you ever been in a hurricane?”

  “Sure, of course. I grew up in Florida. They’re like big thunderstorms.” I studied Lacey’s nervous face. She had grown up in the north, where hurricanes were something you saw on the evening news, full of wreckage and reporters trying to stand up against howling winds. They weren’t all like that. But the ones that were… “Want to see the prep kit?”

  Lacey nodded.

  Out in the tack room, I pulled a heavy rubber container out from behind a wooden trunk, sliding it across the sandy linoleum floor. Marcus wagged his tail, snuffling at the lid as I yanked it off the bin. “Get out,” I told him. “There’s nothing dead in here for you to roll in.” I hoped so, anyway. There was really never a guarantee of that when you stored something in the barn. I popped off the lid, did a quick recon for dead mice and giant spiders, and then motioned for Lacey to come and take a look at the contents. I might not have a plan for myself, but I was pretty proud of my horses’ hurricane supplies.

  Piled up and bound in neat bundles with orange baling twine were piles and piles of luggage tags, spare leather halters, bags of braiding bands, yarn, roles of duct tape and packing tape, plastic gallon-sized bags, scissors, and permanent markers. Lacey peered in, pawed through the stacks, and finally shook her h
ead. “I don’t get it.”

  “The luggage tags have the farm address and my phone number on them,” I explained, picking up a bundle of the leather tags. “The braiding bands are for braiding them into everyone’s tails. Extra leather halters in case someone doesn’t have a leather halter when there is a storm coming in. Can’t use nylon in case it gets caught on a broken fence or something — we need breakable halters. We write our phone number on paper and then use clear packing tape to wrap it onto the halter cheekpiece. And even if they lose their halter on a tree branch or something, at least one of the luggage tags will stay in.”

  She nodded. “Do they stay outside in a hurricane?”

  “Depends on how strong it is. Big one, yes. In case the barn collapses.”

  Lacey bit her lip and turned around, studying the dark barn aisle beyond the tack room door.

  I knew how she felt. It was traumatizing to just imagine what could happen if a major hurricane rolled through and took the barn down. To say nothing of our fences, setting the horses free on a storm-torn landscape. But what were the chances, honestly? Not great. “It’s really unlikely that we’d have a bad hurricane,” I offered. “It’s been years since a big storm hit here.”

  She nodded slowly, reaching her fingers down to rub Marcus behind the ears as he sidled up against her. “Maybe too many years?”

  I grinned and sat back on the cold floor. “It’ll be fine. And I don’t say that very often.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  I was sitting on Mickey in the dressage arena, waiting for something to happen.

  Fortunately, nothing was happening. Sir Spazziness hadn’t given me another fit since he’d come running backwards out of the horse trailer after Lochloosa two weeks ago, and now, the first time I’d been on him since the whole affair, he was acting as bored as a lesson pony. I dropped my feet from the stirrup irons and twisted my ankles in slow circles, loosening up the tense muscles in my legs. I’d been prepared for the worst, but Mickey evidently saved his worst for public performances.