Everyone agreed.
“That’s Sloopy and that one’s Dawber. He’s the biggest. That’s Piccolo and the smallest one there is Runt.” Once the dogs all got petted and fussed over, they took off. “Don’t feed them snacks or you’ll never get rid of them,” Ben advised.
Steven nodded, then looked around and sighed. “Is this Iowa, Ben?” he asked, a variation of a line in one of his favorite movies, “Field of Dreams.”
It happened to be one of Ben’s favorite movies too. “No, Steven, this is heaven,” he replied in kind.
Lucy and Vicky walked outside after doing lunch dishes and changing the beds. Lucy smiled a shy smile. “Thank you, Ben.”
He nodded. “Well, I’d best get going. These shoes are made for walking.”
“Oh my,” Vicky said, pretending she needed to shade her eyes. “How did your appointment go?”
“Good,” Ben said, flipping his sunglasses up to show her. “A patch at night for a while and I’m good to go.”
“When’s the next one going to be done?”
“Never,” Ben said.
“Ben,” Vicky scolded. “You know you can’t put it off.”
“I know.” He gripped the railing as he started down the ramp. “I know.”
“Hold up a second. I’ll walk along with you.” Ben waited for her. “I could use the exercise.” When they were well out of hearing distance, she told him, “They’re all so happy. I can’t thank you enough for what you’ve done for them, and for me, and for Lucy.”
“What’s the plan with her?” Ben asked.
“That’s basically what I wanted to talk to you about. Is there any way we could just let her stay here with us for a while, just until she gets through all the morning sickness? She’s no trouble. In fact, she’s actually a lot of help.”
“Well, let me run it by the “Board,” Ben said, smiling.
“She’s a hard worker, tell them. She wants to earn her keep.”
“I’ll let them know.”
“They also want to know if they’re allowed an occasional beer or glass of wine?”
“Gosh, I don’t know. Why not? I’ll ask them about that too.”
“Thank you.” Vicky headed back toward T-Bone’s Place. “Oh, I almost forgot. Mim got a phone call from someone at Family Services today. She told them she was senile and to bugger off.”
Ben chuckled. “Tell her it comes in handy to be crazy sometimes. Tell her thank you.” Mim was the sharpest of all of them, Ben included. She could remember every detail from her whole life and most everyone else’s too.
Ben got a standing ovation when he walked into Dawn and Randy’s house. “Enough, enough,” he said. “You’d think these were magic slippers or something.”
“Well, they are,” Tom said. “Look at you walking all over the damn place.”
Ben waved them off and glanced back at T-Bone’s Place. “Wonder how far a walk that actually is?” It was one thing to walk the distance from his farmhouse, but all the way back here to Dawn and Randy’s was at least twice as far, and further yet if dinner should happen to be at Liz and Senior’s.
“I’d say about three quarters of a mile at least,” Randy said.
Mark took out his cellphone, asked for the addresses and punched in the numbers. “Point seven two miles.”
“I wonder what the track record is?” George asked.
They all laughed.
“Now don’t be trying to time yourself, old man,” Tom said. “The world ain’t ready for the sight of you running up and down the road in jogging shorts!”
Ben laughed. They all did and sat down at the dinner table. Matthew motioned to Mark to hand him his cellphone. “Sweet,” he said. It was the latest version of a Stylus Smartphone. When Tom promptly took it from him and handed it back to Mark, Mathew laughed.
This evening’s dinner was an abundant roast pork, mashed potatoes and gravy, with hot rolls affair. No salad. Never any salad when this menu was served. Everyone dove right into the main course. Liz had made a chocolate-chocolate cake for dessert with peanut butter ice cream.
The children had already eaten and were watching a dinosaur cartoon in the living room. “Wait! Look!” D.R. said, “He’s going to eat the whole tree.”
“I know!” Maeve said. “Stop telling me!”
The adults laughed.
“So how’d it go at Buffert’s today?” Tom asked Mark.
Randy smiled. He’d already heard the story. “It went okay,” Mark said. “After I got the horse to roll in the healing powers of the earth, it was clear sailing.”
Tom laughed. He’d heard the Hillary-earth-story, but listened to both accounts again as Randy and Mark told everyone else.
“Well, you know,” Senior said. “Being a pig farmer, I can attest to the joy a pig experiences wallowing in the mud. They squeal with delight!”
“We raised pigs once, my ex-wife and I,” Mark said.
“Oh?” Senior looked at him. “What kind?”
“Whiteshires.”
“You’re kidding?” Senior reached over and shook his hand. “Hot damn! Raised them all my life.”
“Yes,” Liz said. “Four-thousand three-hundred and twenty-two of them.”
“Raised them right too,” Senior said, and let it go at that. Dawn never liked to hear about the butchering part, even with it being done at home and humanely. “I had a pet sow once. She hated Liz.”
“She did,” Liz said. “She used to chase me all over the place squealing, Liz Liz! Liz Liz!”
The children echoed her from the living room in little piggy voices. “Liz Liz! Liz Liz!”
Randy passed the mashed potatoes to George. “If I recall, Mom, when her time came, you called me home and you held her and cried.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t like her. I said she didn’t like me.”
“Point taken,” Randy said. “And then dad and I had to bury her.”
“She was old,” Senior said, pragmatically. “Nine, ten. She wouldn’t have been good for food anyway.”
Liz looked at him.
“Getting back to the dirt,” Dawn said. “I think there’s something to that. People go for mud facials, mud body treatments.”
“Well, in Malaysia...” Mark said.
“Give me that damned phone! I’m on to you now,” Randy said.
Everyone laughed.
Randy proceeded to read some of the article highlights out loud. “Detoxification, found in antacids, kaolin, essentially clay, isolated from the earth mass, slippery, stays in your mouth….”
“Well, if that doesn’t sound lovely.” Dawn took the phone from him and passed it back to Mark. Matthew intercepted it and the way he studied it, moving it all around to bypass his blind spots, caught his mother’s attention.
Matthew passed it on to Mark. “How much did it cost?”
“About four hundred. I got it on a payment plan.” Mark glanced around the table, around the room. Randy and Dawn’s house was larger than he’d expected. Driving up to it this evening, he’d have to admit it was rather imposing. It looked like the Big House of a country estate. Thankfully, inside, though large, the house had a warm feel to it, a down-home feel. Even so, he couldn’t help but wonder where all the money came from.
Glenda passed the rolls. “When I visited the old-timers today, they asked about you Señor.”
Senior smiled. “I like that. Beats all the confusion all the time.”
“Let’s see a show of hands,” Randy said. “Señor?”
“Señor!”
When the bowl came back around, Glenda buttered a roll for herself.
“Speaking of the old-timers,” Ben said.
It was not Mark’s imagination that everyone sat up a little straighter. They knew by Ben’s tone that the conversation was about to turn serious. “It’s about Lucy. They’d like her to stay there for a while if that’s all right with everyone.”
Tom sat back. If it were just Lucy….
“That w
ould be three people sharing a bathroom upstairs,” Dawn said.
“What do you mean, three?” Tom asked.
Dawn ignored that.
“Is there a way to install another bathroom up there?” Dawn asked.
Mark looked at her, knowing now who was most accustomed to having money and fine things.
“If they take care of Lucy then Junior’s off the hook,” Tom said.
Wendy shook her head. “I don’t agree.”
“It’s not a matter of you and me agreeing. It’s Junior we’re talking about.”
“Either way,” Ben said. “I told Vicky I’d let her know.”
“They’ll need bedroom furniture,” Wendy said.
“And linens,” Liz added. “Towels.”
Tom sighed. It was obvious he was alone in his thinking. They all knew the boy. They saw his strengths and his faults. They knew his work ethic, which aside from being notoriously late, was fairly hard to beat. Tom thought of the boy as a good hand with horses. They all saw the boy as family. He lowered his eyes. Admittedly, deep down, he too saw the boy as family.
“They’ll need a crib.”
“So this is long term?” Tom asked.
Dawn looked at him. “I think they need to know they have a home. They might decide they want to move on someday, but until they get on their feet….”
When Tom nodded, everyone looked at him, including Mark. He knew very little about this particular situation but was starting to put two and two together.
“Mim has some furniture in storage at the racetrack,” Dusty said. “I’ll talk to her. Maybe we can just bring it here.”
“All right,” Tom said. “We’ll have room in the van when we bring Bo-T and B-Bo home tomorrow.” Without anyone asking for a vote, there was a unanimous show of hands.
“Done,” Ben said. He thought about the day Mim received her diagnosis. Her “death sentence” as she’d called it. He recalled the spirit in which she had taken care of business. She dispersed her horses, making sure they went to trainers who had good track records. She listed her condo with a realtor she instructed not to quibble over price. She bought a hospital bed and had it delivered upstairs at the racetrack. Then without even looking back, she dusted off her hands and walked stoically down her shedrow with the help of her cane, and climbed onto her golf cart for a final ride to the grandstand.
“What do you think about the plumbing, Señor?” George asked.
“Well, there’s plumbing already up there. I don’t know about a second toilet. I guess we could put one in back-to-back somehow.”
“Oh, and they want to know if they’re allowed to have a beer now and then?”
“Why not?” Randy replied.
“Well, I think they think they need permission from someone.”
“Certainly not something I want to comment on,” Tom said. “I think it’s up to them.”
They all just sat there a moment. It was an odd question, given that the old-timers were all adults who had spent their entire adult lives making their own decisions, and yet....
“Or Vicky,” Liz said. “She knows their health situations better than any of us. And their medications. Aren’t Miguel and Mim diabetics?”
Ben nodded. “I think so. All right, I’ll tell Vicky it’s up to her discretion.” He sat back out of the way when Glenda started stacking plates and reached for his. Over dessert, Dawn brought up the subject of the RJR Enterprises situation at the racetrack. It was the first Mark had heard of it.
“Wait a minute,” Randy said. “Get a sharp knife. Mark needs to drip a little blood and be sworn into the covenant of secrecy first.”
“What?” Mark said.
“Look it up,” Randy teased.
Dusty explained. “What is said in these discussions at the table or in the barns, anywhere here, when it’s just all of us, it stays between all of us.”
“Got it,” Mark said. “Though all of you are actually the only people I know.”
“Come on, Mark. You know Buffert,” Tom said. “Hut, hut. Tow the line! Hut!”
They all laughed.
“Seriously,” Ben said. “this has to stay between us.” Everyone looked at him. “We suspect someone might be trying to put us out of business and we’ve come too far to fail now. You name it and we’ve done it to try and get the crowds back. Wendy and Richard have done a fine job. Dawn writes the articles to counter the attacks, and now we have this….” He waved his hand. “I don’t want to talk about it. It just aggravates me.”
“What’s going on now?” Carol asked.
“Well, it’s seems like a big casino conglomerate from Las Vegas is trying to undermine us,” Dawn said.
“How?”
“By finding us at fault in something, anything,” Dusty replied.
“I suspect they’re behind the Morning Banter articles,” Dawn said.
“I think they’re the cause of all of the Family Services inquiries,” Wendy said. “I stopped by on the way home and asked Mim about her daughter. She said there’s no way that her daughter would ever file an inquiry.”
“Into what?” Mark asked.
Well, see, that’s the thing,” Tom said. “We can’t figure that out, because our main concern has been to just keep buying time. But now that the old-timers have moved here….”
“Uncle Matt says we still have to lay low though. He says if we could somehow just walk away from this Family Services issue now, he’ll see what he can do to get it all buried in the archives.”
“Uncle Matt?” Mark said.
“Matt Fioritto,” Randy said. “Dawn’s uncle.”
Tom grinned. “Google that one.”
“No, don’t,” Randy said. “Not unless you want to be paid a visit tonight. Where are you sleeping?”
Mark smiled. “Is that because his name is like the Mafia Don fella?”
“Like?” Tom said. “How about one and the same?”
“Is that who I’m named after?” Matthew asked.
Everyone laughed.
“More cake?”
Wendy fanned herself with her napkin. “I’m wondering about a lot of things that have happened over the last couple of years. Is it hot in here?”
No one answered.
“Remember when you put the zero tolerance on drugs into effect?”
“You mean when a third of the trainers left?” Tom said.
“Yes, that precise day. Actually they trickled out over a couple of weeks,” Wendy explained to Mark. “But the writing was on the wall.”
“I wanted to stand at the gate and wave,” Ben said, “But Dawn wouldn’t let me. She insisted the headline the next day would say, ‘This confirms it. Ben Miller has lost his mind. There it goes. Hitch a ride.’”
Everyone laughed.
“The most puzzling for me,” Dawn said, “is that all these articles most certainly have to be initiated by the same person. There’s no other explanation.”
“So let me get this straight,” Mark said. “You introduce the soft whip, you do away with drug violations, essentially, and you’ve increased the crowds. What would this person or persons’ complaint be? What is their problem?”
“The fact that we don’t make any money,” Dusty said. “We just get by. We have a monopoly on the area. We have the facility, the reputation, the integrity. We don’t want the slots, but the slots are out there to be had. What else can they do but try and bring us down?”
Mark nodded.
“They feel there is money to be made by adding slots, a lot of money,” Dusty said. “We’ve ridden out the storm of failing crowds. We got them back. There’s a big interest in our ReHab and ReHome program. We hardly ever have to stable many ReHab horses very long now; that’s how supportive the community has become. They know we care. If we start running it like a strictly-for-profit business and only a business….”
Ben sighed. “Did you know that you’re not allowed to stay in business if you don’t turn a profit? Seriously,” he said. “I
t’s not enough to employ people, pay them a good wage, offer benefits, and share in the cost. It’s not admirable to even pay all your bills, not unless you have a profit margin. I don’t understand that kind of thinking. At the end of the day here at the farm, if we’ve all eaten, the horses have all eaten, we all have roofs over our heads and we don’t owe anybody, why isn’t that good enough for a business? Why isn’t that at the end of the day considered a job well done? Somebody tell me that. Somebody explain that to me once and for all.”
~ * ~
When they all parted for the night, Ben’s glow-in-the-dark walking shoes lit the way. “They really do work,” he said. “I’ll be damned.”
When Liz and Señor were almost to their house, Señor called out, “We can still see you!”
Ben laughed. George and Glenda and Tom did night check in the barns and Wendy and Matthew turned up the walkway to Ben’s house. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” he said. “I’m going to walk over and let Vicky know what we decided.”
Matthew and Wendy stood on the porch and watched Ben’s feet glowing in the night, each foot lighting up a little more than the other whenever it was put to the ground. “He coming!” they heard Miguel say. “Come see! He coming!!”
“We can still see you!” Señor called out.
Dawn and Randy watched from their porch steps, each holding a child! “We see you, Grandpa!!!”
Ben waved, called back, and kept walking.
“Here he comes! Look!” Steven said. “Would you look at that!”
George and Glenda passed him in their truck. “We see you!” they both said.
By the time Ben got to T-Bone’s Place, he was so winded from laughing and calling back to everyone, he had to sit down and catch his breath.
“Would you like a glass of water?” Vicky asked.
“Don’t mind if I do.”
When she went to get it, Ben looked around the living room. Mim had been reading a book. “A racetrack novel,” she said, holding it up. “It’s not bad.” Steven and Clint were playing cards. Jeannie was knitting a scarf to donate to Headstart. Jack was doing a crossword puzzle. Frank and Miguel were watching TV. Bill was reading the racing form. The scene was like an old racetrackers’ Hallmark card.
“Tomorrow we’re going to hang win pictures,” Vicky said, coming back with the glass of water.
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