Starting, of course, with picking out the tiny office where they’d be spending most of their time.
Chapter Six
On the following Monday, Jenny signed two leases.
The first one was for a studio in Prospect Heights, or so the building owner generously described its location. If most people in the area, including the nearest dry cleaners, Bed-Stuy Cleaners, thought the neighborhood was actually Bedford-Stuyvesant, that was fine with Jenny, too. It had everything she needed, more or less: the apartment was small and didn’t seem likely to catch on fire and was on the second floor, which meant a minimum number of stairs to carry grocery bags up, and the tiny, tiled front lobby did not smell like cat piss, and the toilet was not in the kitchen, which was a change from some other places she had seen, and finding all of that for a rent in her price range was a steal. Bed-Stuy or not.
She signed the papers on the bubbling laminate of the kitchen counter while the leasing agent surreptitiously pushed a mouse trap, occupied, between the wall and the refrigerator.
But Jenny had grown up in barns, and she knew how to handle mice. Mice, spiders, sure, even roaches, if you came down to it. She was willing to put up with any number of inconveniences, however unhygienic, if it meant she could move out of her current digs while her roommate was still off on vacation. It wasn’t that she disliked Amelia. It was just that they had never really clicked, despite—or perhaps because of—three years of being thrown together in their tiny student apartment. School was over. It was time to say goodbye. By email, while Amelia was in Michigan visiting her parents and looking for a job.
With her copy of the lease stowed in her bag, Jenny tripped down the narrow stairs, across the grubby maroon-and-white mosaic behind the lobby doors, and out onto the street. Her new street! Her new bodega on the corner, with a fluffy white cat licking his paws on the stoop. Her new pizza place just down the block on Atlantic Avenue, her new subway station a few blocks beyond that, with a convenient walk which passed a drug store, a small grocery store, a Chinese take-out, and four nail salons.
She waved at the grim-faced proprietor of Bed-Stuy Cleaners, who did not wave back but did look gruffly in her direction, acknowledging her existence in a way which she appreciated, and made her way down the sidewalk towards the subway station, feeling light-hearted. She had a place! Of her own! No roommate! Thank god! For an only child from a large farm, learning to live with another person in one small room had been painfully challenging. Now she’d never again have to wonder what on earth Amelia was cooking. That in itself was worth the expense of living alone. Amelia was not a strong cook, but she was an enthusiastic one.
She went off to Manhattan to sign the next contract on her to-do list.
The second lease she signed was for a pretty, sunlit office space in Midtown West, yet another new real estate term which was overriding old New York’s original neighborhood names. “I think you mean Hell’s Kitchen,” Mr. Farnsworth teased, and the leasing agent, a stylish young woman named Mikiko, flushed and told him she wasn’t going to knock anything off the rent just because he wasn’t new to the city.
“This is the most up-and-coming neighborhood in Manhattan,” she said dramatically. “It deserves a brilliant new name!”
“And Midtown West is the best you could come up with?” Jenny muttered, peering out a tall window with square black panes. Aidan, close enough to hear her, guffawed.
“I love the mix of old and new,” Lana said, shooting Jenny a glare. “A prewar building with a totally renovated, modern interior—it’s just what I had in mind!”
Jenny bit her tongue to stop herself from laughing at Lana’s real estate jargon. She knew her friend had been brought up with these nonsense investment terms being thrown around the dinner table every night. While Jenny herself was brought up with perfectly normal conversations about teasing stallions, mare ultrasounds, and quarter-mile splits. She grinned to herself, then pretended she was smiling at something on her phone when Aidan looked her way, eager to be in on the joke. She wasn’t going to repeat it and hurt any feelings.
In the end, Mr. Farnsworth signed Mikiko’s lease—and then the trio of entrepreneurs signed an agreement renting it from him, at a token rate. “For my accountants,” he said, tucking the papers into a portfolio, and then he bought them all lunch at a nearby bistro with astronomical prices and a terrifying taxidermy boar balanced on a ledge beside their table. The dead hog glared at them menacingly as they worked their way through their steaks and salads. Aidan reached up and tickled its whiskers at one point, and Jenny kicked him in the shin to make him stop before he knocked the beast off of its pedestal and into her lap.
“Well, I need a walk after all that,” Jenny announced as Mr. Farnsworth signed the check and closed the leather folio. She kept her eyes on her empty plate, hoping no one would volunteer to join her. She could use a little alone time to process everything that had happened this morning. The new apartment—which everyone was dying to see, even Lana, who had blinked a little too quickly when Jenny explained it was on the edges of Prospect Heights—and now this modern, elegant space in Hell’s Kitchen—no, Midtown West!—which was going to be her workspace every day.
And the money she’d promised so many people today—oh dear god, the money. The website absolutely had to work out now, so that she could pay her rent, and so that they could pay Lana’s father his pittance rent. Those two figures alone were enough to occupy large corners of her brain with their forbidding presence. Why had they decided to do this venture in New York?
Luckily, Lana seemed unenthused about the idea of a wander through Central Park on a hot June afternoon. “I’m going to see some friends about furniture,” she said, clipping her purse closed. “I’ll text you some pictures. I’m thinking really clean lines, light-colored wood—”
“Don’t spend too much,” Mr. Farnsworth warned. “Stick to your budget.”
“I think I know how to budget, Dad,” Lana said irritably. “I’ve been running the farm for seven years while you fly all over the world closing your deals.”
Aidan raised his eyebrows and pushed back his chair in one smooth motion; he hated conflict of any sort, and he and Jenny had both spent enough weekends at the Farnsworth farm in Connecticut to know what was coming. Lana and her father put on a good show most of the time, but when she decided he was being overbearing, she turned into an ice-cold society woman who could chip paint off walls with her glares. She claimed it was a legacy of her late mother, who had passed away when she was fifteen. Wherever this gift had come from, Aidan and Jenny found it terrifying.
“I’m going to go give Lily the good news,” Aidan said, sliding his phone into his pocket. “She was hoping I’d be in Midtown… she works over on Fifth by the library. Close enough to meet for lunch sometimes.”
Jenny couldn’t help but purse her lips at that. Couldn’t he go an hour without talking to Lily? She glanced across the table and saw Lana watching her knowingly. She threw down her napkin.
“Thanks for lunch, Mr. Farnsworth,” she said. “Text me, Lana.”
Midtown was its usual tiring self: too many people on the sidewalks, too many cars on the roads. Jenny loved Manhattan, but thought maybe Midtown could give it a rest. The haze of green a half-dozen blocks north was tantalizing. Jenny turned north and started up Seventh Avenue, weaving in and out of tourists as they hesitated outside of luggage stores and gawked at pedicab hawkers waving laminated rate sheets, shouting that they gave the best tours of Central Park, all the best sights, better than any of those other guys!
“Hey lady, special price for tour,” a young guy wheedled as she paused at a corner, waiting for the sluggish line of delivery vans and yellow cabs to pass. “My man show you all the best places in Central Park, Sex in the City, Mr. Big, what you think?”
Jenny took a mental inventory of her outfit: striped sundress, ballet flats, canvas tote bag. She looked exactly like she should on a hot June day in the city. There was nothing here to
indicate she’d just gotten off the bus from Birmingham to see the big city. “You know I’m not a tourist,” she told the kid witheringly, and then, just to prove it, she stepped into the street against the pedestrian signal and made her way through a gap between two idling cars, while their drivers sat and seethed in the lunch-hour traffic, and the actual tourists watched gaping from the curb.
There was a pall of sun-baked manure scent hanging over Central Park South and pigeons darting around the buckets of sweet feed set out for the carriage horses. Jenny glanced their way with professional interest as she followed the road into the park. A few protestors stood at the corner waving signs. One of them glanced her way. “Save the carriage horses,” the protestor exhorted.
“They’re fine,” Jenny said, shaking her head, and kept walking.
At last the trees of Central Park reached out for her, linking branches over her head, shading her from the late June sun. The southern blocks of the park were always filled to the brim with tourists this time of year, wandering in confusion and taking pictures of all the things they were supposed to take pictures of. Jenny had learned over the years what city parks were for: rest and respite from the bustle and noise of the streets. But tourists usually missed that in their scavenger hunt for all the little monuments and statues and arches that were supposed to add to the serenity and bliss of the park, not stand apart from it. Jenny followed a paved path west, towards the bridle path, where there were fewer guidebook stops and the buzzing crowds began to thin.
As soon as her flats began crunching on the gravel, she felt better, even though she knew she’d be digging rocks out of her thin shoes later. The bridle path was shaded by massive northern trees, the names of which escaped Jenny—were they oaks? Were they beeches? Were they elms? She didn’t know the names of things here. In Florida, she could name every tree, bush, and bird. In New York, she simply knew street numbers and subway stops.
She liked the bridle path because it wasn’t paved, a rarity which her tired feet craved, and because it was quiet, flanked on either side by green sweeps of hillside which dulled the sounds of traffic coming from Central Park West. Benches on the nearby paths were mainly occupied by people quietly eating their lunches, and the occasional jogger went past, shoes sinking softly onto the manicured path. Here and there were the tell-tale signs that horses still trotted this old path: horseshoe tracks, and a few piles of manure. The sight was enough to calm Jenny’s roiling feelings. Wherever there were horses, she’d feel at home.
Footsteps came thudding up the path behind her; she figured it was a jogger, and didn’t turn around. So she was surprised when they stopped next to her, and Lana was there, pushing blonde strands out of her face and looking a little pink-cheeked from her run. “I thought you were going shopping,” Jenny said, unable to keep a little accusation out of her tone. She’d been counting on the solitude this afternoon.
“Got in an argument with Dad,” Lana sighed. “I’ll have to wait until later to get his credit card. He’ll be over it by dinnertime. You were quiet at lunch.” She had a way of changing the subject without pausing. “Do you not like the place?”
“I’m always quiet,” Jenny said. “That’s my thing.”
“You were more quiet than usual,” Lana argued. “Is this about Aidan and Lily?”
Jenny frowned down at the gravel. “They’ve been together a few months now,” she admitted. “Is this serious?”
“Aidan is incapable of being serious. We’ve been over this. That’s why he has a new girlfriend every month.”
“Except for this one.” Jenny glanced sidelong at Lana. “I’d really like to get over him, you know? I just wonder if things are about to get even worse. Maybe I shouldn’t be working with him.”
“Um, then maybe you shouldn’t have signed that contract with my dad. You’re working with us, sweetie. I don’t care how bad it gets.”
“I know, I know. There was never any question that I wouldn’t. What would I do? Go home to the farm? Get my trainer’s license?”
Lana gave her a serious look. “Would that be so bad? Listen, I love you, but sometimes I wonder why you decided to stay in New York. You’re a farm girl. You’re shy. You’re a horsewoman. I know college has been fun, but I really always thought you’d go home when it was all over.”
“Jeez, Lana, are you saying you want me to go home?”
“I’m saying that even though I’ve known you forever and you’re one of my best friends, I don’t get you.”
Their feet turned onto the pavement near the Sixty-ninth Street park entrance, and they crossed the drive to walk deeper into the park, cutting between the heavy traffic of runners and cyclists and strollers. The quiet of the bridle path faded quickly, replaced by whizzing wheels, angry shouts, and squabbling children. Ah, Jenny thought, the city in summer. Like a racetrack before a forecast of rain, everyone trying to get their works in at once, shoving and shouting for their place on the rail.
“New York is like the urban equivalent of horse racing,” Jenny mused aloud. “It’s all attitudes and throwing out your elbows and pushing for your spot five strides before it’s going to appear. There’s no points for grace. It’s just about getting there first. Looking pretty is for the winner’s circle.”
“That’s good,” Lana said. “You writing that down?”
“I already did,” Jenny admitted. “Not exactly like that, but I’ve written things like it before. It’s my own personal cliche. I’m hoping to go down in history for writing it a hundred different ways before I die.”
Lana nodded thoughtfully. They walked in silence for a few minutes, their footsteps taking them in unison towards the cafe overlooking the Sheep Meadow. Even though they were just a half hour or so past lunch, New York was always easier to take with a drink in one hand.
“I’m glad you’re not thinking of leaving,” Lana said later. They were perched on an outcropping of sun-warmed granite, lemonade cups dripping condensation onto their skirts. The flask in Lana’s purse was empty. “Honestly, your partnership with Aidan is what’s going to make this whole project unique. I could write about equestrian sports with anyone and it would be just another website. You guys… when you come back from the track and combine his photos with your words, it’s transporting. I feel like I’m there. You’re not writing about bets and odds and sires and trainer stats. You’re writing from this deep, personal knowledge of what it’s like on the other side of the rail, and Aidan’s photos go places most photographers never even consider. The expressions he captures on horses are just… you’d never doubt they’re as thoughtful and passionate as the people racing them, honestly.” Lana trailed off, running her fingers along the frosted walls of her cup. “I know it’s hard for you, working with him, but it’s going to pay off. Big-time.”
“You really believe that?” Jenny had drawn her knees up to her chin, and wrapped her arms around them. Her sweating cup was at her side, tilting dangerously on the slanting rock. Ahead of her was the sweeping green of the Sheep Meadow, filled to the brim with humanity; farther in the distance, she could see the canyons of Midtown, the distant neon of Times Square. Even in the mid-afternoon sun, the tourist district’s chaotic billboards were visible. It was as far from the Ocala peace and quiet as could possibly be imagined. She wondered what the afternoon at Sugar Creek was like. Thundering, probably, everyone gone inside to escape the afternoon heat and storms. The idea of it was deeply alluring, as if she hadn’t wished to be here in the city every day she’d been in Florida.
“I think every day that I’m not sure if I belong here,” Jenny admitted. “But I don’t think I belong back in Florida, either. It’s weird, still not knowing, after all this time here. Like I love it, but I shouldn’t.”
Lana leaned against her for a moment. The gesture was subtle, but welcome. Just her touch made Jenny remember that she had friends here, and support to chase her dreams—two things she didn’t have in Ocala. “You don’t have to belong in New York, I think. You just
have to be tough enough to take it. And you’re tough. You don’t grow up galloping racehorses and handling yearlings without getting tough, that’s for sure.” Lana paused; considered. After a moment she continued: “And you don’t grow up around racing people without getting tough, too.”
Jenny nodded slowly, her eyes still fastened on Midtown’s distant blocks. “That’s the gospel truth, Lana.”
“A break from it all once in a while is nice, too,” Lana admitted. “Come to Connecticut for the weekend whenever you need it. I’ll be up there this weekend. Speaking of which, were there any nice prospects down in Florida?”
Jenny thought about it for a moment. None of her parents’ horses were looking for retirement homes. She nearly said no, but then she remembered the Lawson horse. “There was, actually, but I didn’t catch his name. I can tell you he’s going to need a soft landing soon, just because of whose barn he’s in.”
“Well, I’ll take him if you can find him,” Lana said. “Ryan’s been after me for some greenies, and I think he’d love to try his hand at the Retired Racehorse Makeover sometime. I guess my spoiled kids aren’t keeping him busy enough.” Lana snorted. “Four show horses and a pack of collies ought to be enough for anyone, but no, not our Ryan.”
“Ryan lives the life of Riley up there. Tired of riding your boss’s show jumpers? Demand she buy you some off-track Thoroughbreds to play with! That’s the trainer lifestyle they don’t tell you about when they’re trying to scare you away from being a professional equestrian.”
Lana shrugged, but she was smiling. “He’s a good horseman. He keeps my horses fit and ready to go. I can’t ask for more than that, and if he just wants resale projects from time to time, I can buy those for him, so why wouldn’t I?”
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