Barn Sour (Show Jumping Dreams ~ Book 26)

by Claire Svendsen

  And there wasn’t anything wrong with the way Petal rode. She got a good trot and a decent canter out of Hashtag and she even managed to get him over the fences without stopping, which was the one thing I’d been most worried about.

  “You looked great on him,” Rose told her sister when they came back to the gate.

  “He was okay,” she said.

  She got off and threw the reins at me, not even offering to untack the horse or brush him down.

  “So I guess you’ll let me know then,” I called after them as they walked back to the car. “When you decide?”

  “We’ll let you know,” Rose called back with a wave but I wasn’t sure that I would ever hear from Petal again and if I did, I definitely wasn’t sure I wanted her to have Hashtag. He deserved better than a girl who didn’t even pat him when they were done riding.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  “How did it go?” Dad asked later when I finally went back into the house.

  “I don’t like her,” I said.

  “You don’t have to like someone to sell them a horse,” Dad said, shaking his head.

  “Of course you do,” I said. “Otherwise how do you know that they’ll take care of him?”

  “You don’t,” Dad said. “That is life. If you want to make sure nothing happens to the horse then don’t sell him. If not then all bets are off.”

  “Well I’m not selling him anyway, I’m only leasing him and not to that girl.”

  “She couldn’t ride him?” Dad asked.

  “She rode him okay,” I said.

  “So what is the problem then?” He was starting to sound frustrated.

  “You wouldn’t understand,” I said, picking up the cat and holding him tight. Meatball let me hug him for a minute and then dug his claws into my hand so that I would let him go.

  “I guess it's a girl thing then, is it?” Dad called after me as I went up to my room.

  “Yes,” I shouted back, annoyed. “It’s a girl thing.”

  But it wasn’t a girl thing to want to know that all the horses you once had but no longer did were okay, was it? It was human decency. I thought about Four, stuck at Fox Run with Missy watching over his care and vowed that I would call Dakota and find out how he was doing but I sat on my bed and the next minute I was fast asleep. Running a barn and riding and showing all at the same time was turning out to be more exhausting than I could have ever imagined.

  I woke later as the sun was sinking behind the trees and went down to help Dad put the blankets on the horses. I'd seen him out my window, struggling to put one on the foal. Phoenix seemed to think that blanket time was fun time and usually the only person he let put his blanket on at this point was Cat but she’d stayed late after school for some reason or other. She had told me why but I hadn’t been listening and I didn’t know what time she’d be back.

  “Stand still you little monkey,” Dad said as Phoenix slipped through his arms and ran off to the other side of Bandit, like somehow my chubby miniature horse could protect him.

  “How about if I hold him and you put the blanket on?” I said, wrapping my arms around the foal that was almost getting too strong for us to manhandle anymore.

  “He nearly wasn’t going to get this thing on,” Dad said.

  “I know,” I told him.

  Dad was the sort who would just give up if it seemed like too much hard work whereas I would have spent all night out there until I got that blanket on the foal but then again I was stubborn like that.

  “Do you really not care where the horses you sell go?” I asked Dad as he fastened the straps on the blanket.

  “Of course I care,” Dad said. “I’m not going to sell them to the knacker’s yard or some abusive person but when they are sold well that is that and you just have to forget about them.”

  “But what if that person ends up selling them on to someone horrible?” I said.

  “That is why you have to forget about them,” Dad said again. “If you don’t, this business will break you.”

  “But I can’t forget,” I said. “I just can’t let go.”

  “You’re going to have to learn to,” Dad said, putting his arm around me. “These are athletes and performers. They are not your friends, your family or your loved ones. They are horses. If you don’t accept that then you are going to get your heart broken over and over again.”

  But I guess maybe it was a girl thing because my horses were all those things to me. They were my family when I didn’t have one, my friends when no one else would listen and I loved them with all my heart. I couldn’t help it. And I didn’t think there was anything wrong with that, except for the heart breaking part which was pretty much inevitable because there was no way I was going to change who I was. I couldn't.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  Cat didn’t come home from school. Dad didn’t seem to care.

  “She probably just made some friends,” he said as my mother paced the kitchen in the dark. “She’s practically an adult. Cut her some slack.”

  But my mother just paced up and down the kitchen in her slippers, her face pale and when she poured herself another cup of coffee, her hands were trembling.

  “What if it is Derek?” she whispered. “What if he’s come back for us?”

  “Of course he hasn’t,” Dad said, retreating to the living room where he could watch the television and ignore my mother. “Let the kid live a little. She’s had a rough time of it.”

  Dad was right. In a way, I did feel sorry for Cat. She’d been pulled away from her mother to come and live with us and then she’d been dragged all the way to Wisconsin and now she was living with a family that essentially wasn’t even hers. Soon she’d be eighteen and it wouldn’t matter but for now she was a minor living with no legal guardian except a stepmother who was flakey and spent half her time in bed sleeping off a hangover.

  “You don’t really think Derek is back, do you?” I asked my mother.

  I didn’t want to be worried but I was. Derek was a mad man in every sense of the word. If he’d snapped, I knew he had the capacity to come back here and kill every last one of us. Or what if he hurt the horses? I really needed to look into getting that guard dog that I’d talked about. I bet there was one at the shelter all mean and full of sharp teeth just waiting to be adopted and I could train it to stay by my side and attack anyone who came near me.

  “He could come back,” my mother said vaguely, interrupting my attack dog daydream. “If he wanted to.”

  “But Cat was at school. Nothing could have happened to her there. They have security and stuff. They don’t just let anyone wander on campus.” I paused for a moment, picking at a splinter of wood on the table. It dug into my finger and made it bleed but I couldn’t feel the pain.

  “He is her father,” Mom said. “He has a right to be there, to see her.”

  Mom was right. Maybe we should have taken out a restraining order against the guy or gone to court to get custody of Cat but that would have cost money we didn’t have and I realized that no one had ever even asked Cat what she wanted. She’d just been dragged around seemingly without much say in the matter at all.

  “Do you think we should call the cops?” I said.

  “I don’t want to involve them,” Mom said. “Not yet.”

  And she went back to her pacing, stopping every now and then to peer out of the window even though you couldn't see anything out there in the dark night.

  In the end I went to bed. I’d called Cat’s cell but she didn’t answer. Maybe she was just off having a good time. I hoped that she’d made some friends. She deserved to be happy and there wasn’t much here to make her except for some horses that she couldn’t really ride and a foal that would eventually be sold.

  I drifted off to sleep, imagining Cat and a group of girls all laughing and giggling about the fact that we were worried sick about her. That was the old Cat that I remembered. Maybe she’d just slipped back into her old ways again. If she had, I couldn’t exact
ly blame her. What else did she have?

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  It was the middle of the night when I heard a bang. I sat up in bed, immediately worried about the horses. What if someone was stealing them? What if Jess had snuck over here to hurt Bluebird again? But as my heart rate returned to normal, I heard the stairs creak and knew that the bang I’d heard was the front door. Cat was home. I tiptoed across my room and opened the door.

  “Where have you been?” I whispered to my step sister. “Mom was worried sick about you.”

  “Out having fun,” she said. “Finally living my life after being stuck in this hell hole with you guys.”

  Cat was drunk. She slurred her words and was using the wall to hold herself up. She had a pair of strappy high heels in one hand and a half empty bottle of vodka in the other. Her makeup was all smeared and her cheeks were red. She had on clothes I’d never seen before, a really short skirt and a skimpy, sparkly top. Her midriff was bare and her belly button was pierced. I hadn’t remembered her belly button being pierced before.

  “I met a boy,” she said dreamily. “And we had the best time ever and he took me back to his place.”

  “You went back to a boy's place at this time of night?” I said.

  “Yes,” she cried, throwing her arms out wide and dropping a shoe. It tumbled down the stairs, bumping and knocking against the wall as it went.

  “Be quiet,” I whispered. “You’ll wake the parents.”

  “They are your parents,” she said. “And you don’t need to be such a prude. Maybe if you did more than just hang around with Jordan and stare at him dreamily then you’d know what I’m talking about but you don’t because you are just a little kid.”

  Her words stung. I didn’t know what she’d been off doing with a boy she’d only just met and I was afraid to imagine. I wasn’t ready to do anything remotely like that with Jordan and besides it was none of her business anyway. But she was drunk and drunk people said stupid stuff. I knew that well enough from living with my mother.

  “You should go to bed,” I said again. Then I closed my bedroom door.

  I stood there with my back against the cold wood. Two days of school and Cat had already slipped back into her old ways like pulling on dead skin. Maybe it was the only way she felt she could fit in. Maybe it was the only way she thought she could get people to like her. But I didn’t like this Cat. I liked the one who helped me muck stalls and talked about learning to ride and going to shows.

  She should have tried harder to get into virtual school. I should have helped her. It was bad enough living with my drunken mother but I couldn’t take living with two of them and I knew that my father wouldn’t stand for it either. Cat wasn’t his daughter or his stepdaughter. She wasn’t anything to him and if she got too out of control he’d sent her to live with her real mother, wherever she was or maybe even ship her back to Derek and I didn’t want that to happen. I liked having a sister again, even if she wasn't my blood and I was going to do everything in my power to make sure that Cat didn’t mess things up.

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  Cat didn’t go to school the next day. No one seemed to care. I’d peeked into her room and found her sprawled on her bed, still in her clothes with a blanket sort of draped over her but mostly on the floor. I crept in and covered her up. She looked so young and innocent but I knew that whatever she’d been doing the night before had certainly been anything but. I picked up the now empty bottle of vodka and took it downstairs, placing it in the recycling bin with the others that my mother had drunk.

  She was sitting there in her dressing gown, swirling her cereal around with a spoon. It had long gone soggy. I didn’t know how long she’d been sitting there like that.

  “Cat is back,” I said, trying to sound cheerful about it.

  “Yes,” Mom said vaguely. “Thank God.”

  She did look relieved. I had to wonder if she would have been as worried about me if I’d run off and not come home for hours. Probably not. She’d just assume it was a horse thing and part of me was glad that I had that freedom but the other part was jealous of the sister who wasn’t even my mother’s blood.

  “She’d been drinking,” I said, feeling a little sick with myself that I felt like I had to get Cat into trouble.

  “She’ll be okay,” Mom said. “I’ll talk to her about it later.”

  “Alright.” I shrugged.

  What was Mom going to say? Don’t drink because it is bad for you? She couldn’t exactly talk. She was the worst person to give Cat advice. It should have been my father up there, yelling at her like he did at me when I was really in trouble. But he didn’t seem to know where he fit in with Cat and I couldn’t blame him. How were you supposed to parent a child that had nothing to do with you?

  “Cat is back,” I told my father. He was in the barn mucking stalls, wearing the new gloves that I got him for Christmas. “She’d been drinking. And she was with a boy,” I added.

  I couldn't tell my mother that. I didn’t know why. Maybe because I was afraid that she wouldn’t even mind. That she would say that Cat was old enough to hang out with boys until all hours of the night and if she thought that about Cat then what did she think about me and Jordan?

  “Well that’s not really my territory is it?” Dad said, leaning on his pitchfork. “That is for your mother to deal with.”

  “But that is the problem,” I said. “I don’t think she will.”

  “Nothing I can do about that,” Dad said. “When your mother makes her mind up about something that is just the way it has to be. She was like that with Summer too.”

  “What do you mean?” I said, pressing my face against the bars at the mention of my dead sister. The metal was cold against my flushed skin.

  “She was always letting Summer get away with more than she should,” Dad said.

  “Like what?” I said.

  But Dad suddenly seemed to realize that he was talking about things he wasn’t supposed to. That he’d been sworn to secrecy and if he broke those vows then something horrible would happen like he’d drop dead.

  “Never you mind,” Dad said. “You need to muck out the foal’s paddock before he can go out since I guess your sister won’t be doing it today.”

  He said sister like it was a bad word, like Cat wasn’t really anything like such a thing and as I dragged the muck tub and pitchfork out into the dreary day, I wasn’t sure she was either. For a moment I’d caught a glimpse of what our life could have been like. Cat coming to shows, starting to ride, being a stand in for Summer. But she wasn’t like us. She didn’t really have horses in her blood and trying to mold her into something she wasn’t was never going to work, just like Mickey trying to force me to grow up and wear makeup. As far as I was concerned I could grow up fine without it and Cat probably thought the same about our raggedy herd of four legged friends.

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  Cora came down the drive as I was dragging my full muck tub back behind the barn where we were currently dumping the manure. It wasn’t the best solution for it and come summer we’d be inundated with flies but Dad had promised that we would have a spreader by them. I hoped he was right.

  “Did you know Cora was coming out?” I asked Dad.

  “Again?” He sighed. “She really just needs to let us work with the horse by ourselves.”

  “Good luck telling her that,” I said as she got out of the car and waved.

  She was wearing the same vile perfume that she had been before and she rushed into Oscar’s stall and enveloped him in it. The horse stepped back until his butt was against the wall but Cora didn’t seem to care that she was smothering him.

  “Are you riding him today?” she asked me.

  “I don’t know, Dad am I riding him today?” I asked my father sweetly.

  After the disaster that was the trail ride, I wasn’t too keen to repeat a performance like that but I wouldn’t have minded riding him in the ring. Only I saw my father's eyes light up as he
thought about showing Cora how well her horse jumped and while I wanted to jump Oscar, I also wanted to do what was best for him and his owner. After all, that was why he was here.

  “Of course,” Dad said. “Tack him up.”

  As I ran the brush over the bay horse’s silky coat, Cora stood back watching.

  “You can get him ready if you like,” I said, holding out the brush.

  “No, that's okay,” she said. “I don’t mind watching.”

  What kind of person didn’t want to groom their own horse? My opinion of Cora was rapidly dropping every time I met her.

  “Cora,” I said, trying to figure out how to ask the question without sounding like I was being mean. “What is it you hope to get out of Oscar being here? I mean, what is it that you want to do with him when you get him back home?”

  “Oh I don’t know,” she said vaguely. “I just want to do a bit of this and a bit of that. Have him be more confident.”

  “You know,” I told her. “He’ll be more confident if you are. You have to be his leader.”

  “Why can’t he be the leader?” she asked, sounding like a little kid instead of a grown woman.

  “Because if he’s the leader then he’ll just do whatever he wants. You have to guide him. Show him the way.”

  “Right.” She sighed and rolled her eyes.

  It looked like she’d been told that before, probably many times. I don’t think she was really interested in listening. Some people were like that. They thought you could just fix their horse and all would be right with the world but riding was a team sport and you couldn’t really train one half of that team without the other. Not if you wanted that training to stick.

  “Maybe you could take some lessons with my dad,” I said. “Then that would help both of you.”