The tiny woman nodded. “And you prefer this now?”
“Actually, I don’t mind. I’ve gotten used to it. The people are a little friendlier back here.”
The woman chuckled. “I wouldn’t know. I usually sleep the whole time. There’s something about the roar of the engine. I can’t keep my eyes open.”
Richard smiled. “So do you live in Vegas? Returning home?”
She shook her head. “I’m going to the Casino. Me and my two lady friends.” She pointed to the two women across the aisle. Richard leaned forward. Both women waved.
“Good morning,” Richard said.
“They talk too much,” the little woman at his side whispered. “I can’t sit next to them. It drives me crazy. They talk and talk and it’s like I’m in a bad dream. They live together. What more can they have to say?”
The stewardess walked by, glancing at everyone’s laps checking for fastened seatbelts.
Richard hunkered down, figuring he’d take a nap too, and sensed the old woman looking at him. He opened one eye. “Yes?”
“You remind me of someone?”
“A movie star maybe?” Richard asked.
The woman laughed. “No. But I never forget a face. What line of work are you in?”
Richard closed his eyes again. “I’m a CEO.”
“Where? In Vegas?”
“No, here. Nottingham Downs.”
“That’s where I saw you! Virginia, Nancy, he’s from Nottingham Downs. He’s the C-E-O.”
Both women waved again.
“We go every Wednesday,” the woman said.
“Senior day,” Richard said, eyes closed again.
“No, Rueben day!”
“Oh…” Richard said. “I can’t remember whose idea that was, but it’s a hit.”
“It was my idea. I suggested it at one of the Meet the Team Breakfasts a few years back. That’s where I met you. You were a real stuffed shirt then. That’s why I couldn’t quite place you. I never forget a face.” She took in his turtleneck and jeans. “Look at you now!”
Richard smiled. “Thank you. I think.”
The little woman nodded. “I told you I never forget a face.”
~ * ~
Lucy finished drying and putting away the morning dishes and filled the coffee pot to have it ready for lunch. It took about twenty minutes to perk. The old-timers loved their coffee. She glanced into the living room and smiled at the sight of several of them all comfortably situated in their favorite chairs. They each had their own which was not to be shared. She and Vicky each had their own chair now too, thanks to Mim’s extra furniture. All the old-timers felt at home here. So did Lucy, and in such a short amount of time. They hadn’t even been here a week.
She felt the baby move and pressed her hand gently against the fluttering motion. She could imagine living here forever and helping to take care of the old-timers. But nothing lasts forever. She thought about Junior, the look on his face when he asked her to marry him, and then the look of hurt in his eyes when she said no. She loved Junior. As much as any eighteen-year-old girl could love any eighteen-year old boy. He was fun. He always made her laugh. He made her pregnant. They had shared a lot.
But he also made her cry. He’d cheated on her several times, said it was nothing when she heard and cried her heart out. “I should have been more careful,” she said to herself. “How do I know he won’t do it again?”
She walked out onto the back porch and took in a deep breath. Mim was sitting on her golf cart way over by the main pasture. She looked so happy, so resigned to her life drawing to a close. Lucy’s baby fluttered again.
She wished she could talk to her mother. But her mother wasn’t talking to her. “You have shamed me,” her mother had said. “You have shamed us all. People are talking all over the racetrack. Couldn’t you at least have had the decency to come tell us first?”
Her father wouldn’t even look at her.
“You okay, Sweetie?” Jeannie asked.
Lucy turned, wiping her eyes. She hadn’t realized Jeanne was sitting on the back porch. “I’m fine,” she said.
Jeannie tapped the seat next to her wheelchair. “Come sit. You’ve been working all morning.” Lucy sat down next to her and sighed. Jeannie patted her on the arm. “So what’s the matter?”
“Oh….” Lucy shrugged.
“Let me guess,” Jeannie said. “You’re going to be a mother.”
Lucy laughed and wiped her eyes.
“I think that’s why God makes pregnant women nauseated in the beginning. It gives them something to think about besides the wonder of what is happening inside of them.”
“Did you have children, Jeannie?”
“Three of them.” Jeannie nodded. “Two of them have passed.”
“Who’s left?”
“My son. He lives far, far away. He’s gonna come see me someday, he says.”
Lucy gave her a hug.
“And here I was trying to cheer you up,” Jeannie said, wiping tears from her eyes.
“Is there anything harder than being a mother?” Lucy asked.
“Possibly,” Jeannie replied. “Maybe being a father.”
Lucy nodded. “I think I’m going to go for a walk.”
Jeanne patted her on the shoulder.
“Tell Vicky I’ll be back.” Lucy followed the already-worn path in the grass from Mim’s golf cart and stopped along the way to talk to the horses in the various pastures. When she got to the main barn she climbed onto the golf cart next to Mim and she and Mim just sat there for a moment.
“It’s such a gorgeous day,” Mim said.
Lucy gazed off into the horizon. “It looks like rain.”
Mim looked at her. “That’s what I mean. We need the rain.”
Lucy smiled and motioned to a large gray horse in the pasture. “Which horse is that?”
“Oh, well that’s All Together. She belongs to Dawn and Ben. In case you haven’t noticed, she’s in foal too.”
“I see that. I wonder if she has any doubts.”
“About what?”
“Life. Liberty. The pursuit of happiness.”
Mim laughed. “You’re going to do just fine. Junior too.”
“I wish I had a crystal ball.”
“Well, you don’t,” Mim said. “Besides, then you wouldn’t live in the moment and look how much you’d be missing out on.”
Lucy nodded.
“Do you want a ride back or do you want to walk?”
“I think I’ll walk. Thank you.” Lucy walked up past the barns, waved to Glenda and George, waved to the children playing in the back yard, waved to Carol, and walked to what looked like the end of the world and stood staring out at the training track. She loved the smell of the racetrack, the dirt. She always had. She held onto the rail and tried to see into her future, her baby’s future. What kind of mother will I be? What kind of father will Junior be?
“Lucy…?”
She turned.
“You okay?” Junior asked. “Jeannie said you went for a walk. Mim said she thought this was where you were headed.”
Lucy shrugged, wiping her eyes. “I was thinking about all the babies that got started here. How they probably bucked and played and then galloped. How they learned to break from the starting gate and they didn’t think too far ahead. They didn’t worry.”
Junior walked toward her.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you be at the racetrack?”
Junior shrugged. “I was worried about you. I was worried about us.”
Lucy smiled and reached for his hands, held them both tight. “I think we’re in this together. The baby’s going to need you. I’m going to need you. And I want to always be there for you. I want us to be a family.”
“Does that mean yes?”
“Yes.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Dusty walked into the Stewards’ office and was greeted warmly by all three men. “What can we do for
you?”
“Well, I’m wondering if we can have a conversation off the record?”
When the answer was yes, Dusty initiated a discussion about claiming races, the policies, the grievances, complaints, the upside, the pitfalls. They covered everything.
“Why are you asking about all of this, Dusty?”
“Well,” he paused. “I’m dealing with some issues on the backside that have brought it all to the forefront for me. I appreciate that claiming has been a practice since as far back as the 1930’s and I think it’s served its purpose in its day. I guess what I want to know and I’m just speaking for myself here….”
All three Stewards smiled. They knew better.
“What if we try and change it around? This is state jurisdiction, right?”
All three nodded. “What kind of change?” Simpson asked.
“I don’t know exactly. We talk about honesty and integrity when it comes to claiming races. That it’s to keep racing honest is waved like an honor flag. But I’m just not so sure there’s a whole lot of honor to it any more. Or if it hasn’t outlived its usefulness.”
“How else would we determine the horse’s worth?”
“Well, again, I don’t know. It’s just something I’ve been thinking about. I don’t think it’s fair. I don’t think it’s fair to the trainer or the owner. I don’t think it’s fair to the horse. I just don’t think it’s right. Then you have the trainers trying to unload a horse by dropping them down. How many times have we seen that happen? Too many to count. Where’s the honesty and integrity there?”
Fitzgerald, the State Steward, leaned forward, perhaps agreeing. “I have no idea about the logistics of trying to change claiming races. As to whether they’re fair or not…? I have to say I hadn’t given it much thought, but I don’t see a change happening. Not in our lifetime.”
Dusty nodded. “Thank you all for listening. I’ll do a little research and get back to you. How would that be?”
“That would be on the record,” Fitzgerald said, smiling.
“Fair enough,” Dusty said. As he walked back to the barn area, a thought occurred to him. Years ago he had an owner who refused to run her horses in claiming races when they had won their lifetime conditions and were no longer competitive in allowance or starter allowance races. She’d said she couldn’t sleep nights not having a say in those horse’s lives. Not being a good “steward” to the horse. Two of her horses could have gone on to be very competitive in upper claiming races, not to mention several of the others as middle claimers.
“I bred them,” she’d said. “I raised them from babies. How do you tell one of your babies: if you don’t perform at the top, I’m going to put you up for grabs at the bottom and you’ll go from trainer to trainer to trainer? How do you turn your back on them? What kind of person does that?”
“There has to be another way,” Dusty said to himself. “There just has to be.”
Ben looked up from his desk in the tack room when Dusty walked in.
“What are you doing?” Ben asked.
“I’m contemplating life.”
Ben laughed.
Dusty sat down on the cot and leaned his head back. “I feel like this claiming race issue is my purpose in life, at least here.”
Ben turned and looked at him.
“What do you want to accomplish, Ben? What is your main goal here?”
“Well.” Ben scratched his head. “I’ve said it before. I even wrote it down somewhere. I figured you could all find it when I’m gone and decide if I’d accomplished it.” He searched his top drawer, then the side drawers, and sat back. “Oh there it is. He’d taped it to the top of the calendar from last year. He took it down and unfolded the piece of paper. He thought he’d have trouble reading it, since it was so faded, but not so.
“Okay,” he said. “This is what I wrote. ‘Simply put, though no easy task, I want to change the course of history in Thoroughbred racing in this country.’”
“You’ve done it, Ben. You have made a difference. You’ve made a big difference. You have changed the course of history,” Dusty said. “I want to make a difference too. I know what it’s like to lose horses through no fault of my own. There isn’t another business that I know of where this happens. It’s one thing for someone to outbid you on a price at a sale. It’s one thing to buy and sell a horse. But when you’re trying to make a living and running your horse where you think it belongs and doing everything right by that horse, it’s just not fair to have it claimed out from under you. It’s just not fair.”
~ * ~
Matthew dug through his closet for his sketch pad and uncovered an old tam he forgot he even had. He put it on, found his art pencils in his top dresser drawer, and walked down to Biscuit, Poncho, and Bonnie Bee’s pasture. He fussed over them, petting them, talking to them. He’d brought carrots which he broke into pieces for them. Then he sat down in the grass and started drawing.
It had been a long time since he’d done any sketching. He’d doodle now and then, but that was the extent of it. He marveled at the shape of the three horses’ ears. Each pair was so different from another. Then again, he reminded himself, I’m not seeing them in their entirety at a glance. He found if he moved his head up or down or sideways in either direction, he could almost find the missing parts. When he couldn’t he left them blank. His eyes tired easily.
“Afternoon, Matthew!” Mim called from her golf cart up on the hill.
“Good afternoon, Mim!”
“Rain’s coming! Be careful!”
“I will! You too!”
“I’m heading back now!” she said, and moved along.
Lucy came out to see what all the commotion was about. “Do you need a hand?”
“That would be fabulous!” Mim said.
Lucy helped her park the golf cart well to the back of the garage. Its battery was just about dead and she needed a push. Lucy hooked up the charger and helped Mim up the ramp to the back door. The wind swirled all around them.
“Matthew!” Mim called, looking back.
“Yes?”
“You look like a beatnik.”
Matthew laughed and waved. “Bon Jour!”
Mim laughed.
Lucy helped her in the rest of the way. “I feel so sorry for him. It’s a shame about his eyes.”
“Don’t be,” Mim said. “He’s seeing brand new things every day. Life is not always about what you can read in books. Sometimes you just need to spread your wings and fly.”
~ * ~
Vicky lay down on her bed and closed her eyes. She could hear the old-timers talking downstairs. She could hear them laughing. She could hear Lucy laughing. It was music to her ears. How did I get here, she wondered. This small cozy bedroom: my sanctuary from the storm. My own bathroom. She relished the sound of the steady rain.
She was never a huge racehorse fan. She’d never been around horses much at all. She was a city girl most of her entire life. Yet here she was, living on a working Thoroughbred horse racing breeding farm, and loving it.
Living on the third floor of Nottingham Downs all those months with the old-timers was nice. It was interesting. It certainly was different. But there were times when it felt a little too clinical; all that tile and slate flooring, the eighteen-foot ceilings, the huge long walk to the bathrooms, the florescent lighting. This was home. A real home in every sense of the word.
She dozed and woke to the sound and smell of popcorn being made and hot chocolate. She glanced at her bedside clock and was amazed. She’d slept for over an hour. This was so unlike her. “That’s what you get for being so comfortable,” she said to herself, smiling.
“I need a six-letter word for arrow holder,” Frank said.
“Quiver,” Jack said.
“No. Yes. You’re right. That’s it.”
“Would you two be quiet,” Jeannie said. “I can’t hear myself think.”
“That’s ‘cause you don’t think,” Clint said.
“V
ery funny.”
When Vicky walked down the stairs, yawning, Lucy looked up and smiled. “I’m learning how to knit. Jeannie’s going to teach me how to crochet too.”
“That’s lovely, Lucy.” She poured herself a cup of hot chocolate, cocoa as Mim called it, filled a small bowl with popcorn and sat down in her chair amongst everyone. She glanced around. All accounted for, all content. “When did it stop raining?”
“About ten minute ago,” Miguel said. “More rain tonight.”
Vicky sipped her hot chocolate, ate some popcorn, and sipped some more hot chocolate. Such a lazy afternoon. “So what did we decide on for dinner tonight?”
“Chili,” Steven said.
“My chili,” Miguel said.
“Not too spicy,” Vicky cautioned. “Remember we had to throw out the last batch.”
“I remember,” Miguel said. “Such a waste.”
Vicky chuckled. “I’ll be standing at your side, making sure.”
Jeannie watched Lucy’s knit stitches. “Are you counting?”
“Yes,” Lucy said, concentrating so hard. “Oops.”
Vicky smiled. “It just doesn’t get much better than this.”
“Lucy put a touch of cinnamon in the cocoa,” Mim said. “Can you taste it? It’s divine.”
“I taste it. It’s divine indeed.”
~ * ~
The dogs would most always hole up in the barn during a rainstorm and as soon as the skies cleared, would go in search of mud puddles. Señor laughed when he saw them coming and quickly ducked back inside. Muddy dog prints everywhere. “Go! Go play!” He figured he’d hose the porch off once they left, otherwise Liz would be out there with her mop and bucket at first sight. She’d always been a good housekeeper, but now she seemed obsessed.
“I want everything to stay brand new,” she’d said. “I’ve had very little brand new in my life.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? You didn’t like our farmhouse?”
“No, that’s not it. I loved it. It was my home for close to forty years. I adored that old house. But it was also your mother’s house, and….”
Señor frowned at her. “Well, all your fussing so much makes me glad we don’t live in a mud hut. You’d probably scrub us a brand new window every day.”
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