The Perfect Distance

by Kim Ablon Whitney

  “We’re one week away from the regionals,” he continued. “This is your last year, need I remind you? When are you going to stop leaning up the neck?”

  Rob couldn’t have asked a dumber question. If I could, I would have told him so, but I couldn’t, per rule number six: Never talk back. He asked it like I could decide when I wanted to stop leaning up the neck. When all I wanted in the world was not to lean up the neck. When all I wanted in the world was to put in the perfect trip and to hear him tell me what he’d told Tara.

  Rob glared at me for a second longer and then shook his head. “Think about it, Francie. Stay here and think about it.” He turned and strode out of the arena. “We’re done here, girls,” he called, but he didn’t mean me.

  Gwenn looked at me and then followed Rob. Tara didn’t even glance back.

  Then it was just Tobey and me. It wasn’t his fault. Some riders blame their horse, but usually the horse isn’t to blame. I couldn’t blame Tobey, because he was only trying to do what I told him. I was just telling him the wrong thing. I had no one else to blame but myself.

  So I did what Rob told me to do. I thought about it.

  I thought about the first year I had gone along with Dad to Kentucky to help groom and watch the Maclay Finals—the granddaddy of the equitation, the Super Bowl for riders under the age of eighteen. I remembered how one of Rob’s girls choked. When she exited the arena, head down, he turned his back to her. Then Hillary Winston rode. Rob watched her trip, fists clenched. When she landed off the last fence, Rob clapped and whooped. His face was a huge smile, not only his mouth, but his eyes and cheeks, too.

  Goose bumps had flooded over me that day as they did every time I watched someone win one of the finals, but most especially the Maclay. To hear the announcer’s voice over the clapping and cheering as the rider led the victory gallop. Ever since that day, all I thought about was hearing the announcer say, “And winning the ASPCA Maclay Finals, Francie Martinez.”

  Outside the ring that day, Hillary dismounted and Rob threw his arm around her. They both smiled, and a reporter snapped their photo. Like some riders who had won the finals, Hillary rode professionally now. Other riders went on to compete as amateurs or stopped riding altogether to go to college, to have a career in what riders liked to call “the real world,” or to get married and start a family. But I wanted to be like Hillary and turn pro.

  Driving home in the trailer cab from Kentucky, I’d asked Dad if he thought I could train with Rob, become one of the eq kids at West Hills. I’d been riding for as long as I could remember, but just with Dad calling out to me, “Heels down,” or, “Eyes up.” I’d practiced on my own on horses that needed to be exercised, or sometimes Susie would give me a lesson. But Rob had never taught me before. Dad said he didn’t think it was such a good idea, but over the next few weeks I begged and begged him, promising to work off my lessons and to keep up my grades in school. Finally he said he’d talk to Rob.

  Now here I was in my last year of doing the equitation. I wasn’t as beautiful on a horse as Tara and I didn’t have money like Katie, but I was a good rider. I’d mucked stalls, scrubbed water buckets, cleaned tack, and swept aisles to work off my training. I’d worked too hard to let it just slip by. This year I wanted to be the one Rob put his arm around—and not like I wanted to be his girlfriend or anything like that, although over the years there had been girls who wanted that, too. No, this year I wanted to win.

  Chapter Three

  * * *

  After the lesson I was sweeping the aisle outside Rob’s office when I heard him and Susie talking.

  “How’d they go?” Susie asked.

  Sometimes Susie got to watch our lessons, but a lot of the time she was busy teaching the other riders at West Hills. Besides us, the juniors, there were the three-foot eq and children’s hunter riders, the pony kids, and the adults. Rob taught the other riders, too, but around finals time, he concentrated all his attention on us.

  “Tara was good,” Rob told Susie.

  “Just Tara? What about Francie?”

  I stopped sweeping to make sure I heard Rob’s answer. Of course I hadn’t been very good—I’d been downright awful—but I still hoped he’d say something halfway nice about me.

  “Just Tara,” he said.

  I started sweeping again, brushing the bristles hard against the cement floor. I had the broom handle in a death grip.

  Rob continued, “Remember all those years we had so many girls who could win? You stop winning, people stop sending their kids to train with you.”

  “You won two years ago,” Susie said. “You act like it’s been decades.”

  “That was just the Washington.”

  “Oh, right, just the Washington.”

  “We’ll work with what we’ve got. We’ll pull it out. Only one winner, so you only need one shot, right?”

  Of course Rob meant Tara. She had been the one to win the Washington two years ago. She was a surprise winner that year. She was obviously good but she was still young and relatively green to the big eq, and she had popped up to win. Ever since people were expecting her to win at least another final, but it hadn’t happened yet. Somehow she had always fallen just short, placing third in the Maclay and fifth in the Medal last year. This was her year to finally come through in a big way.

  Rob didn’t think I could win. I stared at the little pile of wood shavings and dirt I’d accumulated, hoping I could force his words—just Tara—out of my head.

  “Is Tara still out in the barn?” Rob asked.

  “I think so,” Susie said.

  “Good.”

  “Rob,” Susie cautioned. “She doesn’t need any more pressure.”

  “Don’t worry. Just a little pep talk.”

  “I’ve never known you to be one for pep talks.”

  Susie came out of Rob’s office and stopped when she saw me. “I heard you didn’t ride that well today,” Susie said gently.

  Besides being Rob’s assistant, she was also his current girlfriend. She had ridden with him as a junior and then went to California to work for a big-name trainer out there for a few years before coming back to work for Rob. She was really pretty in an all-American way: blond hair and blue eyes. She was super nice, too. She was the complete opposite of Rob, and sometimes I wondered what she saw in him.

  “That’s the understatement of the century,” I said.

  Susie smiled. “It’s nerves. The day before I won the Medal, I had the worst ride of my life.”

  “Really?” I said, cheering up just the tiniest bit.

  Susie nodded. “I swear. You can ask Rob. He got so mad he wouldn’t talk to me until I was about to go in the ring.”

  I tried to picture Rob being mad at Susie or, for that matter, Susie messing up, but it was hard to do. Susie was such a great rider. Part of the reason Rob had such amazing eq horses was because Susie schooled them and then prepared them at the shows. Rob used to ride when he was younger but people who knew him then said he actually wasn’t that good. It was funny how you didn’t necessarily have to be a good rider to be a good teacher. Sometimes the best riders couldn’t teach at all. Every once in a while Rob still got on a horse that was being a real dog, but mostly Susie did all the riding.

  “Thanks,” I said. Even if Susie was making it all up, it was helping me feel better.

  I finished sweeping and walked down the aisle. Gwenn was sitting on the bench with her mother. Tara was in the tack room, no doubt texting her boyfriend, Connor. Katie was feeding Stretch carrots. She reached out to pat his neck, but he shook his head. Katie smiled because it was so Stretch. He never liked to be bothered, not even for praise. It was like he knew how good he was and didn’t need anyone else telling him. He also was a huge pig when it came to food. He gobbled the carrots and nudged Katie’s shoulder, demanding more.

  Rob walked by us. “Gonna ride better tomorrow, Francie?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I sure hope so.”

 
; After he’d passed, Katie said, “Where’s Susie? We’ve got to talk to her. Obviously she’s not making Rob very happy, if you know what I mean.”

  “Stop it.” Katie always liked to joke about Rob and Susie’s sex life, something I tried not to think much about.

  “Oh, Francie,” Katie groaned. “Don’t be so lame, I swear.”

  “You swear what?” Tara said, coming up behind us.

  “I swear I don’t know why Connor hasn’t dumped your skinny ass already,” Katie said to Tara.

  As much as Katie teased me sometimes, it was always in a good-natured way and she never did it in front of Tara. But with Tara, I always had the feeling Katie wanted blood.

  “Last time I checked, you don’t have a boyfriend or a skinny ass,” Tara snapped back, and that shut Katie up for the moment.

  Rob came back down the aisle. “Tara, I want you to hop on Moose. Ride him in the gag today.”

  Moose was a new prospect Rob had imported from Europe. Rob always asked Tara to ride extra horses for him—horses whose owners couldn’t ride that day, horses that Rob had in the barn to sell, or horses that he was bringing along. It was kind of a chicken-and-egg thing. The more horses she rode, the better she got, and the better she got, the more horses he had her ride. At the shows people asked her to catch-ride all the time. Katie got to ride other horses, too, but that was because her father owned them. Besides leasing Stretch, Katie had two junior hunters. I would have loved to ride other horses, but Rob hardly ever asked me to because I was supposed to be working and because Tara was better.

  “Yes,” she said.

  He looked at us all discerningly. “This is a big year for all three of you. This is it. Your last chance.”

  Katie and I nodded, but said nothing.

  Tara looked back at him. “I won’t let you down,” she said. “I’m going to win.”

  Rob grinned. “That’s my girl.”

  Tara’s words made me want to puke or, even better, maybe smack her.

  Tara went to get on Moose. Once she was out of earshot, Katie mocked, “I won’t let you down, Rob. I’m going to win.” She shook her head. “Seriously? She’s unbelievable.”

  We walked into the main aisle of the barn, where Camillo, one of the grooms, was getting Moose ready. All of the grooms on the circuit were either Mexican or Brazilian. They were willing to work long hours for little pay. Dad had lived in a really poor town in southern Mexico, and after saving for a long time, he’d made enough to pay the coyotes to smuggle him over the river into Texas. First he’d picked fruit, but the farmers worked you to the bone and treated you like a slave. Dad heard from a friend about work with horses, and since he’d had some experience with farm animals back home, he went to see about it. He worked at a few different stables before coming to West Hills. And that’s where he met my mother and had me.

  Katie checked her watch, a Rolex her father had given her for making the finals a few years before. “I have my tutor in a half hour. I better get going.”

  Katie went to a fancy all-girls private school in New York City and had a tutor when she had to miss school to ride. During the finals she lived in the gardener’s cottage that Rob had converted to living quarters. A lot of the riders stayed on or near the farm during the finals so they could practice intensely and at other times during the year too when they didn’t need to be home, catching up in school. Riders like Gwenn, who came with their parents, often stayed in a local hotel. Tara stayed with her mom in a camper parked by the barn.

  “See you tomorrow,” I said, heading off to help Dad feed and hay up.

  A few hours later Dad and I had finished at the barn and we headed home. Home was a five-room one-story house down the dirt road through the woods but still on the West Hills property. It was close enough to walk, but Dad usually drove in case he had to run out to pick up anything for the horses during the day. Not far from our house stood the one-story housing that Rob had put up for the grooms, where we used to live when I was younger. After Rob had given him permission, Dad had built our house himself in the little free time he’d had. Nothing special architecturally, it was well built, and Dad kept it up, painting it every few years and tending to the yard. Dad loved to garden, so beautiful flower boxes filled with mums lined the front walkway, and he grew the most delicious tomatoes, peppers, and carrots in a vegetable garden out back.

  Bandit wagged his tail from where he lay next to the kitchen table but didn’t get up. We’d gotten him a few years ago from Danny and Ron’s Rescue. He was the best kind of mutt—the kind that didn’t look like any one type of dog but like a million pieces of different breeds. He had a collie’s long nose, a hound’s floppy ears, a Lab’s stocky legs, and a cattle dog’s wiry fur. He loved being at the barn, chasing the collection of half-wild cats and begging for scraps of doughnuts and sandwiches. But as he’d aged—we weren’t sure exactly how old he was—he stayed home more and more, especially on hot days.

  I headed to the shower while Dad started whipping up one of his specialties, his four-alarm enchiladas chipotle. Besides having a green thumb, Dad was also a really good cook. When I came back into the kitchen after showering, dinner was almost ready and Camillo was sitting at the table. Camillo was only a few years older than me, and Dad often invited him to eat with us. He said it was because Camillo was lonely and missed his family back in Mexico. I also knew it was because he didn’t want Camillo hanging around the girls at the barn and getting himself into trouble—the kind of trouble that had brought me into this world.

  I grabbed a plate from the cabinet. As I sank down across from Camillo, I realized I was starving.

  “La vi montando a caballo hoy,” Camillo said.

  Dad and I always spoke English, but Camillo’s English wasn’t so good yet, so he was always practicing. But at night, over dinner, at the end of a long day, he usually spoke Spanish and we answered him in English. “Se veí a usted muy bien.”

  Dad was in charge of hiring the grooms for West Hills so most of them were Mexican, not Brazilian.

  “You didn’t see me mess up, then,” I said.

  “No,” Camillo replied.

  Camillo was pretty good-looking. In fact, I’d overheard some of the other girls saying they thought he was hot. He had peach-colored skin and longish dark hair that he usually tied back in a ponytail. He must have done push-ups in addition to the barn work because he was also pretty built.

  “I completely messed up and Rob made me stay behind after the lesson was done,” I said.

  I wouldn’t say anything more. It was the closest I’d come to complaining about Rob. No one forced me to ride with him. I’d been the one who had begged Dad to let me, and I knew I could quit anytime I wanted to and he wouldn’t care. He didn’t pressure me to ride like some of the other parents at West Hills.

  I devoured all of the food on my plate. When all three of us were done, I took our plates to the sink and washed them, plus the pot from the stove. Dad and Camillo rattled on in Spanish about how the vet was coming tomorrow to give shots. Every week the horses each got a shot of Polyclygan. It was hard to believe that such a small amount of what looked like milky water would do anything, but if they didn’t get their weekly fix, the horses were creaky and stiff.

  Camillo thanked me for washing up, thanked Dad for dinner, and said he’d see us in the morning. As he eased the screen door shut behind him, I told Dad I was going to my room to do homework.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, not so fast.” Dad patted the chair next to him. “Come here. Sit down. Take a load off.”

  Dad’s hair had started to gray, but only in the front. The rest of it was still shiny black, but unlike my hair, his was straight. The only thing I seemed to have gotten from Dad was my skin, which looked tan even in the winter. My annoyingly thick, wavy hair, which I kept shoulder length so it would fit up neatly into my riding helmet and always wore back in a ponytail, and my green eyes must have come from my mother.

  Even though I knew what was coming,
I sat down next to Dad as he grabbed the manila folder that held the college brochures he’d been requesting for months. Besides promising to do well in school if he let me ride with Rob, I’d also promised I’d go to college. I’d held up my end of the bargain with my grades—I was one of the best students in my class. But college was another story. For someone who wanted to ride professionally, college only put you four years behind all the other riders who got riding jobs right out of high school. Or at least that’s the way I saw it.

  “I want you to apply to at least five,” Dad said.

  “But we’ve been through this.”

  Dad took out a brochure for Sweet Briar College. He pointed to the rider on the front and said, “Oh my God! What’s that? It’s a horse! They have horses at this college!” Dad opened the brochure and pretended to read a few lines. “Look here—it even says you can have a horse for a roommate if you want.”

  “Dad,” I moaned.

  He slid the brochure away and turned serious. “You can go to a school with a good riding program. I’m not saying you have to quit riding or can’t turn pro. I’m just saying you need to have a backup in case it doesn’t work out the way you hope it will.”

  I knew, like always, he was just looking out for me. Dad believed that education was the most important thing in the world. When I was little, he’d taken ESL classes at night to learn how to speak English better and how to write so he could order grain, talk to the vet, the farrier, the acupuncturist and masseuse, and fill out entries for the shows. Without those skills he wouldn’t have been promoted to barn manager, which meant a steady salary and health insurance for us, instead of just a couple hundred bucks a week as a groom. He dreamed I’d be the first person in our family to go to college—not counting my mother, that is, which I never did. I wasn’t even sure she had gone to college, although she probably had. All I knew about her came from two sources: Dad and a Christmas card addressed to Rob that I’d happened to see when I collected the mail for the farm one day a few years back.