Turning For Home (Alex and Alexander Book 4)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Just like that, the horse show weekend was upon us. There was the familiar cramping in my stomach, the familiar nerves keeping me awake at night, the familiar nightmares about arriving at the show-grounds completely naked. We’ve all had that nightmare, haven’t we?

  Alexander wasn’t really making things easier for me, though not through any malicious forethought. He was having a devil of a time with the Gulfstream horses, although he didn’t want to admit it, and so he spent a lot of his time at the farm muttering and making phone calls to the assistant at the training center, and sketching out training strategies in a weekly planner and scratching them out again, and thumbing through the condition book, its pages grown tattered with abuse, trying to find the right spots.

  Not just the right spots—Alexander had to look for the most advantageous spots. Where could he place Virtue to get him into the right company to prep for a stakes race? What race would come up at the right time to match Luna’s work schedule? He had sharpened her up with some fast works in company, and he thought he had her blood up for a fight now. I listened, and looked over his shoulder, but somehow it only made me feel more removed from the training process. I found I had a hard time concentrating on racing.

  Instead, I was spending my days thinking about Tiger, and his progression as a riding horse. I walked through the Roundtree tack room, paused by the horse show calendar, and found myself placing my finger against shows in late May, shows I thought that I could take Tiger to once he had successfully competed in the Thoroughbred Makeover. I had the feeling that I was losing my focus, and that if I wasn’t at the racetrack for much longer, I’d find myself shopping for a new hunt jacket and a fancy new hard hat.

  The thing was, I didn’t know if that was so terrible.

  Maybe, just maybe, I was capable of doing both.

  Not this time, as it happened.

  I came into the kitchen as Alexander was finishing up a phone conversation. “That’s right,” he was saying, “And I’ll need you in the paddock as well.”

  I pursed my lips, uncomfortably certain what he was talking about.

  He finished the call and turned around. “Luz is going to come down for the Bahia Honda and help us run Personal Best. She’s got the calmest nature of any groom I’ve ever met, so I think she can help him settle.”

  I nodded and dropped my eyes. Maybe I could show and race, huh? Silly me. Still, I persisted in the fantasy. “I’m going to try and get there,” I promised. “I’ve been looking at the ride times, and I think I can do it.”

  Alexander shook his head dismissively. “There’s no need to worry about all that. Concentrate on Tiger, let us worry about P. B. I don’t want you to miss your chance at this show because you’re busy fussing over us.”

  How was I supposed to concentrate on a horse show while Personal Best was running the biggest race of his career? Clearly, Alexander was insane. “Okay,” I agreed, but in my mind, I was still calculating the fastest route to Gulfstream from the show-grounds. I still figured I could make it, if no cops caught me on the way there.

  Kerri and I decided to take Tiger down to south Florida a few days before the show, just so that he wouldn’t think he was going to a race the minute he stepped out of the trailer. With his history of shipping to Tampa for races, I could only assume what his state of anticipation would be when we wrapped his legs and loaded him up. The last thing we needed was for him to come leaping out of the trailer on show morning and start bounding about like a gazelle, ready to go to the post, maybe taking out a few well-meaning ponies along the way.

  “Although he wouldn’t be the only horse there acting like that,” Kerri said reasonably. “Since they’re all supposed to be green Thoroughbreds.”

  “Well, then, we’ll have an advantage over the rest,” I countered, and sent off the email confirming that we’d like a stall at the equestrian center neighboring the county show-grounds for four nights before the show. This was really happening now.

  Just like preparing for a horse show back when I was a teenager, there was a mountain of prep work to be done. There would be leather that needed to be cleaned, buckles that needed to be polished. The problem was, I really didn’t have any English show tack to clean. My saddle was up to the task, but my nylon racing bridle, already a source of derision at Roundtree, was not going to do the job. I was considering going to Winning Edge and dropping several hundred dollars on a new bridle, but worried about how to break it in and make it comfortable enough for Tiger.

  Kerri saved the day. She arrived one morning with a tack trunk wedged into her little car’s backseat. Once we had coaxed it out of the car without doing too much damage to the seats and the doorframe, she nearly clapped her hands with excitement as I opened it up.

  Myself, I was too overcome to speak. I just gazed into the treasure chest she had brought me, not even knowing where to begin. Kerri might not ride anymore, but she had certainly invested in some very nice tack before she gave it up.

  Finally, I reached inside and lifted the topmost item from the trunk, a self-padded dark brown eventing bridle, its brass buckles gleaming dully in the midday sun. I ran my fingers along the butter-soft reins. “This is beautiful,” I sighed.

  “They don’t make them like this anymore,” Kerri said. “Like, literally, that saddlery closed down. I bought it when I was twelve. I had to mow a lot of lawns to get this bridle.”

  I touched the matching martingale and the sheepskin-lined jumping boots nestled in the box. The tack trunk was jam-packed with show gear—everything from bell-boots to saddle pads, spur straps to rein stops. “I think the sheepskin would be too hot on his legs,” I said regretfully, stroking the furry padding. “But those are gorgeous boots.”

  “Dress lightly,” Kerri said sensibly. “He goes in a saddle and bridle and neck strap. Why change?”

  “I’ll be leaving off the neck strap. But otherwise, you’re right. This bridle, Kerri! I’m obsessed with it.”

  “That’s awesome,” Kerri said. “Because I don’t want to polish the brass. You love it so much, you can do that part.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Much to my own surprise, as well as everyone else’s, Tiger was a gentleman at the new equestrian center.

  Sure, he came out of the trailer on his toes; sure, there were a few gasps from the boarders nearby as he reared straight up in the air and waved his legs around like a bay version of The Black Stallion. That should surprise no one.

  Happily, though, once he had hay in his face, he was fine. Kerri helped me cart in the tack trunk and set it up in front of his stall, but Tiger never seemed to notice our comings and goings. He was too busy tearing up the sweet orchard grass we’d brought along from home.

  Tacking him up the next morning was no different than back at Roundtree, either. I looped his lead around the stall bars—why did all show barns have stall bars, I wondered. Why not build extra wide aisles and let your horses poke their heads out, the way we did at the races? It seemed silly—and I saddled and bridled him without any fuss at all. I mounted up in the barn aisle, racetrack style, because I felt contrary.

  Kerri had been holding him for me. She dropped the reins, stepped back, and waved. “Happy ride!”

  I took him down the driveway at first, between the empty rows of paddocks, their green grasses winking at us under the brilliant Florida sun. It was odd to see such glorious grass gone uneaten, but the horses here only went out first thing in the morning, and then only until lunch-time. I’d asked the barn manager, Amy, about that last night. They could not be left out overnight, Amy explained, for fear that they’d be stolen. There was a terrible problem with horse thieves in South Florida, and all of the owners were terrified their horses were next. Nor could they be left out all afternoon, she had continued, for fear the sun would bleach their show coats.

  “And of course the bugs are always terrible,” she’d sighed, and peered out west as if she could see the Everglades and wanted
the swamps to know she was watching them. The wet, flat land sizzled with heat, a mosquito’s paradise. “So many of these northern horses develop skin allergies and have to shipped back north. That’s why part of the barn is screened.” She pointed back at the west end of the center-aisle barn, where screening had been installed over about half the barn, stalls, aisle, and all. “Those are my allergy boarders down there. We get people who move to Florida, bring their horses, and then find the horses can’t take it. They don’t want to send them away, so we try the screens first. I do pretty decent business in allergy boarding. It’s the new frontier of horse care, I think.”

  I couldn’t help but think about my hardy broodmares, tails swishing, sweating through the summer sun while they grazed through the hottest part of the day without complaint, but I just nodded and said the screens were a fine idea. Privately, I wondered if horses ever needed gluten-free diets. She could expand into that next.

  Amy had sighed again and looked a little sad. “We’re losing one next week. He’s going back to upstate New York. His owner is thinking of moving back to be with him.”

  Apparently even keeping horses walled off from the outside world wasn’t always enough. Maybe you had to be born to the swamp life. It made the Everglades horses even sadder to think about. At least Market Affair had been a Florida-bred. He was born to the mosquitoes and the biting flies that rose up from the wetlands in buzzing clouds.

  Then again, Tiger did pretty well himself, despite coming from New York. He never got anything more than a bump or two from mosquito bites.

  “You don’t mind staying in all afternoon though, do you?” I patted Tiger on his hot, hard neck. He flicked his ears back at me and then pricked them again, intent on the horses grazing in the pasture across the street. They evidently did not have such sensitive skins or coats as the horses in Amy’s barn. He was keen to see what they were up to, but there was no nonsense in his step, no dancing underneath me. His razor-edge nerves were finally mellowing out. Enough slow mornings grazing and slow afternoons jogging around a sandbox of an arena will do that for a horse. Enough timothy in the hayrack will do wonders to add a bit of a belly and slow down the metabolism, as well. “You’re almost a regular old horse again,” I told him, not unkindly. “Pretty soon we’ll be going on trail rides and falling asleep in the sun between our classes at horse shows. Doesn’t that sound idyllic?”

  Tiger took the opportunity to snort and blow at a passing mockingbird. I shook my head at him and made sure my heels were down. You never knew with this horse. Bored with the driveway already.

  “You want to do something hard, huh?” I asked him, turning him back towards the barn. Despite my long inside leg and my guiding inside rein, he could still be a bit of a tank in his turns, somehow managing to negotiate a turn without bending one vertebra in the long line from poll to tail. It was one of those million things you didn’t notice on the track, because they just plain didn’t matter, but which blew up into glaring absences of education once you were concentrating on the little things. “Let’s go find something hard,” I suggested.

  We started off for the arenas.

  The dressage arena and jumping arena were side-by-side, glittering expanses of white sand and clay that were hard on the eyes on a sunny day. In the jumping arena three different riders were posting their way in and out of the show jumps, making circles and transitions and looking as if they were working very hard indeed.

  In the dressage ring Amy was standing in the center of the ring and shouting commands at a female rider, who was being tugged around a semblance of a twenty-meter circle by a very eager and full of himself warmblood. “You’re not in control, are you Charlotte?” Amy asked, and Charlotte sounded near tears when she replied, “No!”

  Poor girl, I thought. Better stay out of the dressage arena, then. That looked like a disaster waiting to happen. I glanced back at the jumping arena. The three horse-and-rider teams in there all looked fairly together. One was cantering in a taut collected gait, the horse’s neck curved elegantly and his well-conditioned muscles rippling in the sunlight. His rider turned him towards a small vertical fence and the horse bounced over it with no noticeable adjustment to his gait.

  Tiger looked very, very interested. “Wanna go see?” I asked him, and he practically dragged me to the jumping arena. “Okay then,” I said. “But please don’t embarrass me.”

  We went through the little gate, which had a second fence in front of it to discourage horses from running away and right out the gate, and he shuffled his hooves a little in the sandy footing, testing it after walking on the firm driveway. Tiger, like so many racehorses, was a connoisseur of footing, adjusting and altering his movement and stride to every new surface he came into contact. Now, he danced a little, shuffling his hooves in a jig, and then settled into a long, head-bobbing walk, his ears pricked and watching the other horses.

  The woman who had been cantering brought her horse down to a prancing halt and then walked over in our direction. Her horse, an elegant light bay, was hardly sweating. She, on the other hand, was beet-red and completely winded. Despite the impending heat exhaustion, her face was friendly and interested. Tiger and I watched them approach, and Tiger was almost composed when she brought her horse alongside to walk with us, stride for stride. I jiggled the bit and sat deep, asking him to remain demure and not reach over to take a chunk out of his new companion, and he complied, though his ears were tilted and carefully watching the bay horse.

  “Well, he’s very pretty,” the woman announced, smiling as she looked Tiger over. “I haven’t seen this little guy before. What sort of horse is he? He’s so small.”

  Tiger was a sixteen-two hand horse, no small potatoes, but the light bay, though slender by warmblood standards, was a monster. He towered at least a hand taller than Tiger. I had to look up to meet his rider’s eyes when I answered her. “He’s a Thoroughbred,” I began patiently, ready to start leaping into a spiel every time I talked to anyone about Tiger. Breed advocate. “He was one of my racehorses, and now that I’ve retired him, I’m retraining him to be a riding horse. We’re here for the Thoroughbred Makeover this weekend.”

  “But he’s been a racehorse?” The woman looked excited. She was much like the others I’d seen at the equestrian center—somewhere near middle-aged, relatively decent shape, sweating through her make-up. (Why did people wear make-up to the barn? It must be habit.) A brunette pony-tail swung from the lower rim of her gorgeous Charles Owen hard hat. “Well that’s pretty exciting. I’ve never seen a racehorse in person before!”

  “Really? That’s too bad. You should come to Gulfstream and see them run sometime. It’s not far from here. We have horses running there all the time.” A good breed advocate would show them every side of the Thoroughbred breed, right?

  “I’ve been to the mall there,” she said thoughtfully. “I like the shopping. I don’t know if I’d like the races. They’re always getting hurt, aren’t they? Has he ever gotten hurt?”

  I bit my lip to stop from saying something I’d regret. Maybe I didn’t really have the temperament to be the ambassador for the horse racing industry, especially after my attempts to do just that had bit me so hard in the ass. Ah, but what choice did I have? Breed. Advocate. “This guy? Just little things here and there,” I said evenly, pressing down a surge of impatience. “A nick. A strain. The same as any sport-horse. We’re very careful with our horses. Although accidents do happen. He’s very tough.”

  “I’ve heard they get hurt all the time.” The woman sighed, reflecting on the stories she had heard, the articles she had read. For a moment, she looked downcast, then she shook her head and smiled brightly at me. “But I could be wrong! I’m Jessica,” she added. “And this is Cosmos.” She patted the bay on the neck and he dipped his fine-boned head, snorting. “He’s a Hanoverian.”

  More like half-Thoroughbred, half-Hanoverian. How many Thoroughbred mares had been approved into the registry that called this athletic beast a Hanoveri
an? He was no cart-horse from the villages of Germany, that was for sure. Would a breed advocate burst into a speech on the Thoroughbred’s contribution to the modern-day warmblood horse? Probably not on the first date. “He’s lovely,” I said instead. “I’m Alex, and this is Tiger.”

  “Tiger! Oh, you big scary thing you!” And she growled at him.

  That’s how I made friends with Jessica, who might not have been entirely living in the same realm of reality as most folks, but who was awfully nice anyway. We rode off together, Tiger swishing his tail to declare his displeasure with being so close to another horse and yet not allowed to gallop past him, and talked about everyday equestrian things: hoof-picks, pulling manes, barn politics. No one could have looked at us and seen that Jessica and I occupied two different worlds in the horse business. We were both sitting on horses in the same sort of tack, and suddenly we had a common language. It wouldn’t have been so simple, I knew, if we had met in a restaurant, or even in a shed-row. Now, it was easy, and it was nice. I wasn’t a girl to have too many friends, but a riding buddy—that wasn’t so bad.

  “Ride tomorrow morning?” Jessica asked as we led our horses into the wash-racks. Kerri ran up to hold Tiger, while Jessica merely slid a halter onto Cosmos and clipped him into the cross-ties. If she found my reluctance to use cross-ties weird, she didn’t say anything. Already getting used to racetrackers, I thought. See, it can be done! We can live in harmony!

  “I might be out later than this.” Kerri looked at me questioningly. “Well, since we’re here,” I explained to her, “I’m going to see if I can blow out P.B. tomorrow morning.”

  “Blow out? P.B.?” Jessica looked mystified.

  Kerri laughed and started unbuckling Tiger’s bridle. Tiger, tired and hot, leaned into her and started rubbing. Scary racehorse, I thought. “P.B. is Personal Best,” I explained. “One of my racehorses. He’s entered in a big race Saturday, and I want to give him a fast workout tomorrow morning. It’s called a blow out.”