Other People's Horses (Alex and Alexander Book 2)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  Except we hadn’t decided to breed her back; I had.

  The mare had dropped weight very suddenly, there was no denying that. Her back had sagged and her belly had sprung from carrying so many foals, and because of that, some of her ribs would always show slightly, just from the way that gravity had treated her as she dragged around the weight of hundreds of pounds of fetus and fluid. But there were now many ribs showing, and her hip bones were sharp points under her thin skin. The hollows above her eyes were deep, as befit her advancing age, but these were more like pits. The mare was, over the course of the past three weeks, turning into a walking skeleton.

  “She should never have been bred back,” Alexander fumed, arms crossed across his chest as he surveyed the mare. The groom who held her lead rope was a young girl who went to Equine Management classes part time at Central Florida Community College; she looked at me nervously and then down, brushing at some straw clinging to the threads of her cut-off denim shorts, and some streaks of dirt on her bare calves. She was a nice girl, quiet and fairly knowledgeable; she’d flat-out asked me for a job as I leaned over the rail at the Ocala Breeders’ Sale last summer, and I couldn’t tell her no — it was too close to how I’d come to Cotswold. I chewed at my lip, walking around the broodmare in a slow circle. The mare herself stood quietly, head down, nostrils blowing harder than they should have been, even in the dense jungle-like humidity that was only growing thicker with the advancing clouds. A mosquito whined in my ear and I shook my head, knocking it away with my ponytail as if I were one of the mares gathered around us, shaking their heads and stamping their hooves.

  “Everyone agreed she was healthy enough to breed back with no problems,” I said carefully.

  “I was against it. I thought she should have the year off.” He said this with utter conviction.

  The groom, Kerri, locked eyes with me. I remembered; she’d been there. Kerri and the vet, and me and Alexander. I shook my head slightly. Just keep quiet. She nodded. She knew.

  “We thought if we gave her a gap year she wouldn’t conceive next year. It would be tough for her body to get ticking again, is what we decided.”

  “What nonsense,” Alexander declared. “And now look what we have. A sick mare, you see? And what happens when we lose her? What happens to her colt?” He looked at the owlish little colt, who was even now nosing underneath her, bending his knees a little and twisting his neck in an uncomfortable-looking maneuver in order to get to the inconveniently placed udder.

  “We’ll have the vet out and get an answer.” I turned away from the mare and foal and scanned the rest of the herd. No one else had dropped any noticeable weight, and coats … well, all of their coats were dull, from the constant burning of sweat and sun. “She’s still producing milk, and she’s still eating … right, Kerri?” Kerri nodded. “So we’ll get some tests run and see what’s going on. It might not be the pregnancy. It probably isn’t. It’s too soon for it to be that much of a draw on her.”

  Alexander just shook his head. He went back to the golf cart and sat down, making a great show of going through the paperwork on his clipboard. “Come on, Alex,” he called impatiently. “We need to look at the yearling’s feed charts. I’m not sure I like the way a few of them look. I want to know just what you’ve got them all on.”

  I waved a hand to the nervous Kerri, who smiled wanly in return and started to slip the halter off Chatterley’s Lover, and climbed into the golf cart. I could see what was going to happen now. It was Discredit Alex Day.

  ***

  I could see exactly what he was doing, of course. I’d said, over that last cup of coffee, that perhaps I should just go to Saratoga, as trainer, and free up Alexander to help Tom and Polly if they should need it. I’d been trying to give him an option. I’d been trying to ease his mind. But it was becoming increasingly clear that all I’d done was upset him. He didn’t think I was ready to train alone, and he was reminding me that I needed his help. That things would utterly fall apart without his help.

  Who was I kidding? I paused and leaned out to pick up a rock from the path, and flung it into the bushes next to the broodmare barn where no delicate hooves might tread on it. Alexander was never going to trust me to run the horses on my own. He’d given me three years as his assistant trainer, taking on the fitness and placement of the racehorses; before that, I’d been the farm manager, handling the daily operations and breeding management (admittedly under his constant surveillance), and before even that I’d been head rider in the training barn. Assistant, yes, but he wasn’t prepared to let me take that next step, and do what I’d been gunning for all along: take out a full-fledged trainer’s license and run horses on my own. And maybe he was right. Suppose he did go to Tom’s farm this summer? Suppose I needed help with a horse? I’d never done any of this on my own.

  I pulled the golf cart up in front of the yearling barn and threw it into park. How far from Florida to New York? How far from Australia to New York? Too far for comfort.

  “Maybe I should come to Australia with you, then,” I suggested. “If you do go.” It had been hinted at; it was a possibility. I thought it must be a certainty. Alexander was leaning over a fence, watching the yearlings arguing over a new block of alfalfa, but he was getting no pleasure from their rambunctiousness. He was imagining kick marks, long scars across hindquarters that were only bad in a cosmetic way, just enough to scare away ignorant buyers with deep pockets at the sales. He was running an inventory of all the things that could go wrong, and ignoring the reality that these things would happen whether we were here or not.

  “You’ll be running things here,” he said. “Who else would I leave in charge?”

  That was flattering, although I had been the farm manager before, and could do it again. “Heidi can run things. We just have to ask her.”

  Heidi was a neighbor, tall and German and implacable and more knowledgeable about horses than anyone else on earth, so far as I could tell. She lived down the road on five acres, just enough room for a narrow trailer, a dressage arena, and a paddock and barn for her two horses. The trailer was luxuriously appointed with a Jacuzzi tub and high-end stainless steel appliances; the dressage arena was cushioned in rubber and shredded fabric. The barn was built from restored cypress planks and the doors and bars of the stalls shone with polished brass. Heidi was a singular woman. She always watched over the farm, living in our guest room, while we took horses to Miami or to the sales in Kentucky, and somehow it was always cleaner and tidier when we returned. The horses were fatter and brighter. It was uncanny. “She always said we could use her for long-term absences.” I liked the clinical way in which Heidi spoke.

  But Alexander was determined to be difficult about even the most palatable of solutions. “I just don’t like the idea of both of us being so far from home. It’s not that I don’t want you going up there, love, it’s just all this…” He looked around and I knew he was being truthful. We were standing in the bowl of the farm, with the pastures reaching all around us, from horizon to horizon the horses of Cotswold Farms were moving around us, and they were all our children, all our creations, all our responsibility. He saw it all and thought we couldn’t both go gallivanting off to another hemisphere, another day of the week, even with Remarkable Heidi to man the helm. It was just too far.

  ***

  “You could do it if you wanted to, though, Alex. You’re plenty good enough.”

  I looked at Kerri, holding the lead of Chatterley’s Lover. The vet had just come and drawn blood, and given vitamins by injection, and clucked over her vital signs for a few minutes. Chatterley’s foal, more shaken than the mare by the vet’s truck, was in for another suckle, tail thumping his hindquarters in rhythm with the slurping, sucking noises coming from beneath the mare’s flank.

  “I don’t know, Kerri. That’s nice of you, but … that’s a big step. Training horses away from Alexander? All the way in Saratoga? Maybe I should start smaller. Take a few down to Calder now and then, while he�
�s away.”

  She shrugged. “Have it your way, I guess. But that’s not what you wanted at all, is it? You wanted the big races. For Personal Best, especially.”

  I toyed with Chatterley’s yellowish mane, yanking free some of the witch’s locks. I should stop confiding in the staff. But Kerri was a nice girl, close to my age … I didn’t know many people like that in this town of retirees and aging horsemen. “I did want the big races for Personal Best,” I admitted. “And not just him. Idle Hour, Virtue And Vice … they could be big horses, not just Florida horses. They could be national horses.

  “A stallion the whole country wants babies from, not just Florida breeders.”

  “Yeah.” Kerri knew how it worked. “I think we could have a big stallion. Look at Alexander’s brother. He has one of the biggest breeding farms in the Southern Hemisphere. I don’t need all that. But we breed good horses. We just don’t showcase them well enough.”

  “You have to run them in the right spots,” Kerri said. “You know how to run horses, Alex. And if you have a question for Alexander … well, that’s why God made cell phones.”

  “And Skype.”

  “Does an old guy like Alexander know how to use Skype? Wow.”

  “Shut up! Come on, Kerri. He’s not so old.” I laughed.

  Kerri shook her head, smiling. “He’s pretty old.”

  “You should be so lucky as to marry a guy like Alexander.”

  “I know it,” she said, and she sounded serious this time. “So go show him what you’ve got and let him know he’s lucky to have you.”

  That would be nice.

  “Saratoga,” I agreed. “Ready or not.”

  “Here you come.”

  ***

  “I guess it comes down to whether or not you think I’m capable. And you taught me everything I know about racing horses. So if you don’t think I’m able to do it on my own now, Jesus Christ, Alexander, isn’t that kind of an insult to yourself?”

  I studied myself in the mirror. The last line was either the icing on the cake or laying things on much too think. It was hard to know, really.

  Did I have the words right, though? Could I march down to Alexander and recite them without stumbling over my own tongue? They seemed straightforward enough. I took a deep breath.

  “An insult to myself?”

  His face was laughing at me in the mirror; he was standing in the doorway. Shit! I turned around and saw him grinning at me, leaning against the doorframe with his hands in his pockets. He looked more relaxed than I’d seen him in weeks. I leaned back against my desk and blew out my cheeks.

  “I wasn't sure about that part.”

  “It’s true enough, though.” He straightened, and his face grew more serious. “I spoke with Polly a little while ago.”

  I stiffened. Rain thrummed against the dark window, thrown against the glass by the stiff tropical wind. I thought of wet horses in muddy fields. I thought of soft feet and skin infections.

  “Tom will be going into hospital in the city … and staying there for some time, she says. It’s too far for him to commute back and forth while he’s in treatment. And even once he comes back … it will be a long time before he has the energy and strength to tackle the farm management. They need help preparing for the season, if nothing else. The quarantine center, the stallions and mares arriving, staffing.”

  He wasn’t looking at me anymore; his eyes were blank, off in the direction of the window, the streaming water flowing down the glass. “I’ll go in a month’s time.”

  It stopped being about me then. He was going to go to Australia. Alone. And whether I stayed in Florida or went to Saratoga, I’d be alone, too.

  “I opened that bottle my uncle sent from Scotland last year. Come help me drink it and we'll discuss your training stable.”

  That rare scotch! That was exactly what we both needed. One shot of that stuff would sedate Secretariat. “I’ll find some crackers and a piece of cheese,” I said, pushing off the desk. “We’ll need something to soak all that moonshine up.”

  As I was on my way past him, thinking hostess-y thoughts in order to ignore our impending separation, Alexander swung an arm around my waist and pulled me close. I buried my face in his neck, feeling his lips in my shower-damp hair, and tried not to think of a summer without him near. Australia was unimaginably far away, and this was really happening: he would be gone for at least three months on the other side of the world. My personal drama, my cloying ego, my burn to prove myself, those things fell away with the reality of being alone.

  I sniffled.

  “None of that now,” he murmured. “We’ll both manage just fine.”

  But his voice didn't sound all that steady, either.

  ***

  Horse time can seem glacial: the eleven months between breeding and foaling, the year and a half between foaling and backing, the three years between deciding to breed a mare and seeing a two-year-old that might be ready to run a race.

  But the summer was advancing at a full gallop: plans executed almost as soon as they were made; the van already booked and the trunks being sorted, the grooms keeping busy in the barn with twitch and clippers and a judicious meting out of acepromazine from its little clear bottle to settle nervous minds and kicking legs, trimming whiskers and fetlocks and bridle paths, plucking delicately at the bushy growth on the tail bone to even out the hairline and create a refined silhouette, pulling manes with little silver combs to the four-finger-length I preferred. The English turned out their racehorses like show horses, a tradition I was only too happy to continue. I couldn’t stand a raggedy horse. Or, rather, since it wasn’t the horse’s fault, I couldn’t stand the groom of a raggedy horse. The grooms watched me from out of the corners of their eyes, and plucked, plucked, plucked.

  One of the conditions that we had hammered out over scotch and Irish cheddar was that I would hire an assistant trainer here in Florida, and Alexander would assist in her hiring. “Her” hiring: I’d made it clear from the first that my assistant would be female, and Alexander had no objections. I didn’t want to spend every day in the company of some old-fashioned chauvinist racetracker who thought he knew better than any woman, and Alexander just plain didn’t want me in the company of some racetracker. Let’s just say they don’t have a good reputation, and leave it at that for now.

  There wasn't time for anything like an ad in The Blood-Horse or Ocala’s little daily racing paper, so Alexander just made a few calls to see if anyone knew any trainers who wanted to get out of Florida for the summer. Not surprisingly, there were quite a few. Finding ways to get out of Florida for the summer is a constant preoccupation of people who train horses in Florida. But none of them were thrilled by the prospect of being my assistant.

  But they came to Cotswold anyway, saying they were interested in the job. The secretary made the interview appointments one after another, typing them into the calendar, in the same disinterested and efficient manner that she dealt with everything on the farm. Eileen spent her thirty hours a week sitting behind a relentlessly tidy desk in a good-sized office on the ground floor of the house, with an outside door and its own bathroom and kitchenette, and I usually forgot she was actually there, interacting with her almost solely through terse text messages and the dings of appointments added to my calendar, vet visits and farrier schedulings popping up on my phone screen. Although she had been a farm secretary for her entire thirty-year career, Eileen was not necessarily a horsewoman; when I did have need to go into her sanctum, I usually got a glare for wearing my mucky, muddy boots on her clean floor. The phone system was much easier, but Alexander and I still exchanged nervous glances when we saw the six interviews lined up for a single afternoon.

  It was a very long afternoon. While thunder growled outside, I sat on the couch next to Alexander and listened, attempting to keep my face dispassionate, as one by one, the trainers enumerated to my husband all the excellent reasons they would not take the job. That I was too young. That I was to
o inexperienced. That they’d have no problem at all taking me under their wings, that they’d have no problem at all watching over me and showing me the ropes at Saratoga, but that they would most certainly not answer to me as boss.

  Painful to hear? Yes. Eye-opening? Yes. Humbling? No. I wasn’t at all chastised by their gentle reminders that I was just Alexander’s little gallop girl, all up-jumped and married to him, as they certainly must have hoped. I was fucking infuriated. Who were these people? Nothing but old washed-up trainers who had retired to breeding farms and training centers years ago because their win percentages crashed, their owners fled, their checks bounced. They came sniffing around Cotswold the moment they heard Alexander might have horses to train, looking for a boost back into the game with horses of a higher quality than any they’d ever trained before, and they weren’t shy about throwing me under the bus, undermining me in front of him, so that they could have my gig, steal my big chance with my very own horses. I was brimming over with outrage. I was ready to hit someone, horsewhip someone. The next person to call me “sweetheart,” I decided by the fifth interview. That son of a bitch was going to get it.

  But then the last appointment canceled, and I went out to supervise the evening feeding without having my outrage appeased by physical violence.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Littlefield