“You heard what I said. You want Kerri on your side of the barn, give her a job. I’m done with it.”
***
Kerri wasn’t impressed by my ultimatum, either. I’d even made nice and taken her to the races for the afternoon, something that I didn’t often do, despite preconceived notions about mornings at the barn, afternoons at the track, and evenings at various watering holes that I had entertained when planning this trip to Saratoga. So much of it had descended into curling up in bed or falling asleep watching television. And the weird part was, I didn’t even feel sorry for myself. Just very practical and matter-of-fact about the whole situation: Yes, I’d come to Saratoga with high hopes; no, none of the things I had wanted, with the exception of getting a show out of Idle Hour’s first start, (which wasn’t exactly something that I’d wanted but was certainly better than a fourth place or a stick in the eye) and a win from Personal Best (which of course had ended with an inexplicable illness) had come to pass in the any way, shape, or form, and I was really, really lonely for Alexander. These things were facts. I lived with them. Melancholy was for teenagers and for my recent dramatic quarter-life crisis. I wasn’t due for another crisis for a good twenty years. I was just going to have to enjoy the solitude.
And it looked like it was going to get a lot more solitary, just judging by the look on Kerri’s face when I told her that it was Roddy Ellis or her job. I decided to leave her alone in the box for a few moments to think it over while I got up to place a bet and grab another drink.
The little bar closest to our box was devoted to Woodford Reserve, and since the company was nice enough to sponsor big horse races, I decided to become a Woodford Reserve groupie. I ordered a Woodford Reserve and soda, my second of the young afternoon, and then went over to a tote machine so that I could key an exacta in on the third race, a maiden special weight for bright young things that were all aspiring to get in their first graded stakes wins before the end of the meet. Or rather, their trainers and owners were aspiring. The horses were all aspiring to get back to the barn in time for supper.
The man in front of me at the machine was wearing a loud green and yellow checked jacket, a wonderful remnant of old-timey horseplaying attire, and when he turned around, he had the ratty mustache and damp, unlit cigar to match. I adored him instantly and smiled at him without thinking. He leered back, yellow molars clenched around the ragged cigar, and went clumping off in horribly sensible shoes to the staircase down to the boxes, where he would almost certainly roll up his race program and beat his open hand with it as he screamed his horses down the stretch. Some things never changed.
And then there was me, I thought, looking ruefully at my plastic cup of amber liquid as I nestled it on the counter next to the auto tote. Placing exactas and drinking bourbon. That was usually a sphere of the racetrack experience that I left to Alexander. Maybe I really was a horse trainer. Maybe this was just one more sign that I was morphing into a whole new person, so slowly and quietly that I wasn’t even noticing. Maybe I was accomplishing everything that I had wanted to with this trip –- experience, independence, success --- without even realizing it.
Buoyed by these thoughts, I went back to the box to face Kerri and root on the one and the six. Post time: eleven minutes.
I was only slightly dismayed when I saw that Kerri wasn’t there. She’d gone to the restroom, probably. Or to get a drink of her own. I probably should have offered her one, but I doubted she would have accepted. We weren’t on friendly speaking terms at this exact point in our relationship. I settled into my chair, laid my drink on the desk, waited for the horses to come out onto to the track. On the screens, the analysts in the paddock explained their betting strategies, using jargon like “she’s really on the muscle” and, in the case of Roddy Ellis’s entry, a pretty little bay filly with a big white blaze like a splash of paint, “this barn has been really hot this whole meet.”
So it was, I thought, sipping bourbon and rocking the chair on its back legs. Hot stuff, that barn. In more ways than one. Romance in the air. I looked around but Kerri was nowhere in sight. The horses went to post and there was still an empty chair beside me.
The one and the six ran somewhere mid-pack. Roddy Ellis’s filly ran all alone in the front, her beautiful white face a beacon in the homestretch, blazing in the sunlight. I watched her with my chin on my fists, my elbows on the desk, imagining my chestnut filly out there, sweeping home miles ahead of everyone else in the race. She’d had five starts in her young life and never a sniff of the winner’s circle, but that didn’t matter. I had a theory about my pretty princess. She could run like hell, just not for very long, but speed was nothing without conditioning. Any horse could run fast for a quarter of a mile. Thoroughbreds had to hold that speed a little longer than that. Brains, and stamina, those are the gifts I had in mind for her.
The horses galloped out, pulled up to a jog, turned around and cantered back to the grandstand, where the grooms and trainers waited, buckets in hand, lead shanks over shoulders. Roddy Ellis went out to catch his filly, jacket and tie firmly in place despite the heat. He liked to look good in his win photos. He had so many I couldn’t imagine why he kept caring, but he was a vain son of a bitch, so that was probably it. His cheeks were red with heat.
As the jockey hopped off the bay filly, Roddy stepped aside to give the groom space to squeeze a wet sponge over her head. And that’s when I saw Kerri, her slight frame no longer hidden behind him.
I closed my eyes, more hurt than I had expected. Kerri had made me crazy, and had been a liability in many ways with her ignorance of How Things Were Done. But I had given her this job on faith, I had given her a big lift out of the broodmare barn, I had brought her up here to the very pinnacle of racing and put her in charge of quality horses, and this was how she repaid me. By going over to the enemy.
“Never ask a girl to choose work over love.”
It was Johnny. He slipped into the empty chair next to mine. “You shouldn’t stalk me like this. It’s weird.”
“I was here, you were here, there’s a spare chair, what’s weird about that?”
I opened my eyes. He was smiling at me through that carefully maintained stubble of a beard, a plaid button-down shirt replacing the striped T-shirt I thought he was living in this summer. He was clubhouse material today instead of sitting out with the working class in a lawn chair drinking PBR. He’d dressed up because he knew where I was going. Oh, he was following me around all right.
“I talked to Kerri downstairs,” he added.
“She told you that I’m the evil queen and I came between her and Prince Charming?”
“Something like that.”
“Welcome to the grown-up world, Kerri-boo,” I muttered. “Sunshine and rainbows are poor career choices.”
He laughed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That this girl isn’t cynical enough for this game. She’s going to get hurt.”
Johnny looked at the TV monitor, where the happy couple were standing side by side near the bay filly’s flank while Roddy held the bridle. “She’s in a win photo,” he observed. “Good start.”
I was suddenly ready for my bed. “I gotta go,” I said, rising from my chair. “You can use the box if you want.”
His glance was calculating. “I’ll come with you.”
I shook my head. “I’m going home. It’s hot. I have the whole barn to do myself tonight … I think I’ll just take a nap.”
“You take a lot of naps.”
“I sure do,” I said, walking out of the box without him. “Love me some naps.”
***
But I didn’t go home. My car turned, almost of its own accord, back into the barn road and I went in and sat in my office with the door open, watching the horses tear at their hay nets.
Then I called Alexander and told him.
It was six a.m. in Australia, but he’d been up for an hour and was caffeinated enough to disapprove of my decisions for a solid fift
een minutes.
“You’re so supportive,” I told him when he had finished.
“You broke the agreement,” he pointed out. “You were supposed to have a capable assistant to help you. You wriggled out of that and took this kid with you instead. And now she’s off sleeping with another trainer and has left you in the lurch. I can’t see how this is anyone’s fault but yours.”
I smiled. I felt slightly insane. “I love you,” I said sweetly. “Wish you were here.”
He sighed. “I love you, Alex. But I wish I was there too, and not just because I miss you. Because you need someone watching you. You need someone to give you solid advice and rein in that emotional streak of yours.”
“I don’t,” I said idly, not even a little offended. I flicked a nickel across the desk. It rolled into a sticky patch left by a bottle of some medicine and fell over. I leaned over and retrieved it so I could spin it again. “I don’t need to be watched. I’m doing fine. Alone. I work very well alone.”
“I think you should go back to the farm,” he said firmly. I could hear his anger across all the thousands of miles, from a farm in the Outback to a satellite in orbit and then down to me, in a barn in upstate New York — was that how it worked? I had no idea. I was sure there were satellites involved, I knew that much.
“You’re too far away to make me. You went to Australia and I have to take care of myself.”
He was quiet for a moment. And then, in a voice tense and hushed: “What is all of this about?”
“How’s Polly?”
“Alex, I — are you okay? Really.”
I smiled, a fat lazy stretch of my lips and my cheeks. “Tell Polly I said hello. You should get to work, Alexander. You have a long day ahead of you. I hope Polly helps you in the barns. I hope she doesn’t just lie around the house waiting for you to come in and keep her company for dinner.”
“Alex—”
I hung up.
Well, now I’ve ruined that, I thought. What’s next?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Breaking Free
I shouldn’t have gone out with him, except that it didn’t matter. People could see me and call Alexander and tell him that his wife was out with some skeevy kid with a half-assed beard and jeans that were too tight; what did I care? It might be just the thing to remind him that he had a perfectly nice wife back in the States, and that maybe Polly ought to just hire a farm manager to help her out after all.
Whatever the reasons, I was in a terrible mood after the barn chores had been done. Kerri had shown up, done her job in silence, and then disappeared. I’d sat in the office and doodled on a legal pad, drawing horses and palm trees and waves crashing on beaches. And when Johnny wandered over and invited me to head out with him again that night, I said yes. He took me to the Congress, a wonderful second floor watering hole on a side street off Broadway. We slipped through a signless door, pounded up a narrow staircase, and stepped into a Gilded Age wonderland. I skipped through the crowded main room and out a pair of glass doors onto a cast iron balcony, where I laid claim to a pair of sensually curved chairs and a delicate table for drinks. I reigned there, the queen of the alley, while Johnny handled the mundane things like procuring alcohol and interesting things to munch on: pickled carrots, bison sliders, house-pulled mozzarella and heirloom tomatoes drizzled with Saratoga-bottled balsamic vinegar.
“How did you find this place?” The food was clever and alien, the whiskey was flowing, and I was enchanted by the dazzling surroundings: all the brass sconces shimmering behind gas lamps, the dark wood reflecting the round white globes of the antique ceiling fixtures, the ornate whirls of the cast iron railings. It was like a speakeasy for the Saratoga horsey set.
“A few friends moved up here to start a farm.” I could hear the amusement in Johnny’s voice; something told me he would never try anything as silly as farming. “Sheep. Organic sheep, like, cheese and all. They got bored so they opened this place up so they’d have something else to do at night.” He looked back inside, through the warped panes of the windows. “I don’t know if your horsey friends get it.”
At a booth just inside, I caught a glimpse of Carl Hessing, a sixty-year-old New York racing legend, gazing with dismay at a tiny bowl of something artisanal and outside of his normal ken, and enjoyed his alarm very much. Welcome to the twenty-first century, old man. “They’re not exactly forward-thinking.”
Two people came outside and took up residence at the other table. I resisted the urge to shake my hair over my face and disappear; one half of the couple was Lulu Windham, whose family were old friends of Alexander’s family back in England. Lulu, who had covered her graying hair with a startling layer of henna, was nuzzling with a younger man whom I hoped very much was not Roddy Ellis. But it was hard to mistake his honey-streaked hair and Viking warrior height. I wiggled my seat so that my back was to him, and concentrated very hard on gazing down onto the street.
No one else was so discreet. There were several stares in my direction, from both inside and out, when Johnny pulled his chair closer to mine and leaned near my ear, as if to whisper sweet nothings. In truth, he was describing a movie he’d watched on his phone at three that morning when he was drunk and couldn’t fall asleep. The whole thing seemed to be about pot and three guys who were pushing around a goat in a shopping cart. I declined his offer to send me the link to the movie.
“I don’t have time for things like that.”
“Too busy with all the millionaire’s horses?”
“Yeah.” I laughed and then sighed. I’d only told Johnny that our biggest client was a millionaire scented candle manufacturer; I hadn’t gone into specifics about the Fasig-Tipton fiasco. “I think I fucked that up.”
“No way! What did you do?”
“Basically told him he was a rich asshole.”
Johnny burst into laughter.
“Slash alcoholic.”
He slapped the table, clutching at his chest with the other hand.
“I told him to go to Roddy Ellis.”
Johnny, to his credit, stopped laughing and looked appropriately sober. “Damn, Alex. You were seriously mad at that dude.”
Roddy disentangled himself from Lulu Windham and turned around to look at us both. Johnny jumped. “Whoa man!” he choked. “You were totally hiding out over there!”
Roddy fixed Johnny with a contemptuous gaze. “Altman, when the hell are you going back to the damn city? Some of us got serious work to do out here. We aren’t just up here to chase tail.”
I snorted with laughter. Johnny just grinned. “Damn, hard to tell from where I’m sittin’.” He nodded to Lulu, who flashed a flirtatious smile in reply. I put my hand over my face to hide the smirk. That old cougar!
Roddy just shook his head, his face reddening as he realized what he’d said. The flush was not attractive in with his pale hair. It was nice to see that Roddy Ellis wasn’t always Leading Trainer Ken Doll.
“How’s Mason Birdwell working out for you?” I asked, not wanting to be left out of the fun. “You claim him a horse yet?”
“Sent him back to his candle factory.” Roddy shook his head. “That man’s a drunk.”
We could agree on that much, at least.
“Said he didn’t like how my horses looked,” Roddy went on, sounding aggrieved. “Like he knows a damn thing about horses.”
I was silent. Mason Birdwell thought Roddy’s horses were in bad shape? He was no horseman. And yet Kerri, a true horsewoman, didn’t seem to see it.
There was only one explanation, of course. She was in love with him.
I looked at Roddy, his arm still draped around Lulu’s silk-clad shoulders, and shook my head. I was going to have to tell her that her lover boy was a piece of shit. “Hey Johnny,” I said. “Can a girl get a refill?” I waggled my glass at him and smiled.
***
The phone woke me out of a stupor.
“Yes?”
“Alex?”
“Yeah …” Things we
re hazy, but I was pretty sure that was me.
“This is Dr. Palmer. About the blood tests on the three year-old-colt.” There was a pause, and I could imagine her looking down at her iPad. “Personal Best?”
I sat upright, feeling the blood rush from my head as I did so. I put my hand to my forehead to try to quell the dizziness. “Yes?”
“We’ve found some abnormalities. Anemia. Basically, oxygen isn’t being transported readily. It could be an infection somewhere in his system that’s causing it. We’re running more tests, but in the meantime, please observe him carefully and report back if you see any changes.”
I would have loved to see any changes. He was eating well enough, but there was no glint in his eye, no spring in his step. He dragged when he was being walked around the shedrow. His coat had lost the bright golden sheen that glinted through the copper when he was out in the sunshine. “He’s only been walked, and he hasn’t been keen to do anything beyond stand in his stall. Grass perks him up.”
“I see.” Dr. Palmer’s voice had the absent quality of a person scratching down notes. “I’ll be back out in the morning after training, if that’s okay. We’ll see if we can narrow this down. Keep your eye on his temps, okay?”
I agreed to make a chart of his temperature three times a day, which of course I should have already been doing. What was the matter with me? I put down the phone and shook my head. I wasn’t doing this right. I wasn’t doing this well enough by any stretch of the imagination. It had all looked very pretty, but I was making mistakes.
I phoned Kerri next.
“You didn’t wake me up?”
Other People's Horses (Alex and Alexander Book 2) Page 22