“Answer it!”
So I did. “Linda?”
“Alex, where are you?”
“What? I’m in traffic outside Everglades Park… why?”
“Oh! That explains it!” I heard Linda talking to someone else. “How far away are you?”
“I’m at least a mile… I’m never going to make it in time to drop a claim. Why — what’s going on?”
“Oh, honey, everyone decided at the last minute we were going to make this a Rodeo Queens-sanctioned event. We came down with a film crew from the news and everything. Did you bring the little girl? Wendy?”
I shook my head in disbelief. “No, she spent the day with her grandmother and Linda, seriously, I’m not going to get there in time!”
“Oh, I’m sure you will.”
“No, there’s literally no chance!”
“Everything will be fine — oh, I need to go. Call us as soon as you get here!”
And the call ended.
I looked at Alexander in disbelief. “I think she lives on another plane of reality.”
He nodded. “They all do.”
***
Everglades Park was decked out in tinsel and holly for the season, and white twinkle lights glistened in a tableau of wicker deer, grazing near the old-fashioned sign out front. But I wasn’t looking at any of it. Christmas, I was certain, was ruined, and I didn’t want anything to do with it now.
The race had just gone off.
I didn’t have a radio to follow it, no one on Twitter was live-tweeting it. It was an unimportant five thousand dollar maiden claiming race on a holiday not normally associated with gaming and going to the races. Nothing that happened today was important to anyone but the tiny cluster of connections of each horse running, and maybe a few hundred gamblers with money on the horses. And to me, and to Wendy.
Alexander pulled up to the clubhouse entrance and a valet came out to take the keys. We went in, flashing credentials at the bored looking girl in the ticket-booth, and walked straight past the betting windows and the escalators to the boxes, heading instead for the apron near the wire, where we’d be able to see the finish line, and the winner’s circle. The horses were galloping out there somewhere, I could hear the call, but it was echoing in the big structure, the words garbled, and I didn’t know who was where. I didn’t where they were. Only that they were out there, and that Wendy’s filly was one of them, and I hadn’t been in time to put in my claim.
I didn’t waste time looking at the monitors as we passed them, didn’t try to see where she was. I just walked as fast as I could, Alexander at my side, holding my hand tight — so he was nervous too, so this meant something to him too. We spilled out of the building and into the hot sun, to join the crowd of people on the apron, the cigarette smoke and beer fumes rising up around us, as the horses went spilling around the final turn and into the homestretch. I stood back and looked at the screen in the infield — of course. There she was. Her tiny white spot showing as her forelock was blown back by her own breeze, her dark neck slick with white sweat in the unseasonable heat, there she was, Christmasfordee, cruising for home on Christmas day.
“Oh there you are!” I felt a hand on my elbow and turned reluctantly — it was Linda, her Kentucky Derby chapeau a ridiculous overstatement for the provincial track, her white hand sprinkled with gems as if she was a child running loose in a vintage store. She smiled, coral lipstick stretching across her papery cheeks. “I’m glad you made it. Look! Here she comes!” And she pointed — I looked back in time to see Wendy’s filly come under the wire, the winner by five lengths. I watched her gallop past us and on towards the clubhouse turn, her jockey standing in the stirrups, and thought, once again: I’ll never get her now.
“She’s beautiful!” Linda sighed. “What a lovely horse!”
“I can’t wait to take her home,” drawled a familiar voice.
I felt sick to my stomach. “So you got her, Mary?” I said, trying to play nicely.
Alexander put a hand on my shoulder.
Mary slipped up in front of us, smirking in that familiar way. “I was here at nine a.m. You have to allow for traffic in Miami, honey, didn’t you know that? Maybe you’re more of a country girl than I realized.”
“I hope you do well with her,” I muttered, looking at the ground. Mary flounced away. I turned to Linda. “Linda, I’m sorry I didn’t get here in time. You guys went to all that trouble — ” Behind her, I could see a cameraman and a reporter setting up for a shoot with the racetrack in the background. Two of the Rodeo Queens were engaged with their compacts, doing a thorough re-painting of their faces. “What’s going on? You’re still doing a story?”
The horses were jogging back to the wire now, and I watched a groom walk out to catch Wendy’s filly. She was hot and tired, but the groom had a more sympathetic hand than her owner — than her old owner — and had a bucket and sponge at the ready to slather her hot face with cool water. Mary was leaning over the fence proprietarily, she was watching the steward do that walk of doom, carrying her red tags… a lot of red tags, as it happened. I saw Mary lean back, confused. “Linda?” I asked. “What’s going on?”
And Linda just laughed. “Oh honey,” she said. “We all have credentials, you know. We just figured it would be harder for any other claimer to lose a twelve-way shake than a two-way.”
Alexander joined her laughter. “Well played, Rodeo Queen,” he chuckled. “Your math is correct.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Kerri dusted her hands off and stepped back to see the results. We’d been working for at least two hours, and now I thought things might actually be done.
“This is gorgeous,” Alexander said from behind us. He’d hung up the garland along the front of the training barn with the help of a few grooms and an extension ladder and then spent the rest of the time watching us ladies go nuts with twinkle lights and peppermint sticks. “It looks like Candyland.”
I went to stand next to him, leaning back against the bar of the shed row railing. “It does look like Candyland,” I breathed, and he clapped a hand on my shoulder. Kerri swung her hands and just gazed at it in pleasure.
Christmasfordee had her hay-net tied up inside her stall, with plenty of rich alfalfa, to keep her from being too tempted to eat the Christmas finery that adorned the stall’s front. And it was a good thing: I’d go nuts if that horse messed up our beautiful decorations after all that hard work! The pine garland draped so dramatically from the boards at the stall wall’s top, more wrapped around the blanket rack and hung all over with candy canes, the lights blinking all over the entire confection. “This is a party,” I declared.
“And it’s time for the guest of honor,” Alexander announced. He slipped my phone out of my back pocket and dangled it in front of me. “Call the princess and tell her that her presence is required at the stables.”
***
I had never been so nervous in my entire life.
“I’ve never been so nervous in my entire life,” I told Kerri, because I felt like I needed to say it out loud.
“I don’t see why. It’s not like she’s going to be disappointed you bought her her dream horse and then decorated her stall up to look like a Christmas wonderland.”
Kerri as usual was making excellent points.
“Here she comes!” Alexander announced, watching from the barn’s central aisle. I retreated into my desk chair and started spinning it in circles. “Alex?” he called. “Come on out, you’ll miss it.”
I came creeping out of the office, my stomach full of butterflies. And why? Of course she wasn’t going to be upset. The only question was if she was going to be so excited that she did something awkward, like faint, or throw up.
The aunt got out of the car, her phone in her pocket for once, and went to the passenger side to open that door. That was new. Then Wendy climbed out of the backseat. She looked around, pushing her thin dark hair behind one ear as she squinted up at the garland along the eaves of the traini
ng barn, and then at Alexander, Kerri, and I, standing in the central area grinning like the cats in the canaries. “Is something going on?” she asked, her childish voice piping. “What’s with the decorations? It hasn’t been Christmas for almost a week. You only just put stuff up?”
Then she came a little closer, and saw the lights on the stall inside. “What’s happening?”
“Come in!” I cried, unable to bear it another second. “Get in here and see!”
Wendy put her hands over her mouth, and then I heard a thin whinny and realized that the filly would be just as happy to see Wendy as Wendy would be to see her. “The game’s up,” I told Kerri and Alexander. “Christmas is going to be very happy.”
“I should say so,” Alexander agreed, and we went into the shed-row together to see the happy moment.
It was enough to bring tears to my eyes. The filly was leaning out over her webbing, her head pushed against Wendy’s chest. And Wendy had her face pressed close to the filly’s, her cheek in the luxurious dark forelock, just whispering.
Just whispering.
We watched for a moment, wiping at tears we didn’t want to admit to, and then I heard a rustle behind us. I turned and saw a bent woman pushing at a walker, making her difficult way into the clay of the shed row. Close at her elbow was Wendy’s aunt, the mysterious young woman who never paid any attention to Wendy. Now she was hovering over what could only be Wendy’s grandmother, as nervous as a nurse with an overambitious convalescent. The senior woman looked tired and thin, but when she looked up and met my eye I saw the same steely courage that I saw in Wendy, and I had a surge of hope: maybe she really was going to feel better after the holidays!
She came up next to me and stopped to catch her breath. “So this,” she said after a moment. “This is the horse Dee is always going on about.”
“Yes,” I said, and then admitted it all: “We bought her. We’re keeping her for Wendy — for Dee. She’ll need some time off and some new training, but hopefully she’ll make Dee a nice horse someday. She won’t always be a racehorse.”
Wendy’s grandmother nodded. “That was very kind of you. I can’t begin to thank you… so, thank you. I won’t worry too much about the racehorse part: it doesn’t look like she’ll have too much trouble with her. Her parents were racing folk, did you know that?”
“I didn’t.” It shouldn’t come as much surprise; this was Ocala, after all.
“They loved horses,” the old woman said thoughtfully. “They were on their way to the farm where they worked…” She swiped at her eyes. “They’d be so happy to see Dee learning to ride.”
I blinked, my own eyes hot and prickling. We were silent for a moment, watching the girl and her horse.
“Thank you,” the grandmother said again.
I put my hand on her thin one and gave it the lightest squeeze. “It’s my pleasure,” I told her. “Thank you for letting us help.”
We were interrupted from what might have been a very extended session of public crying by the approach of the aunt, who still had no phone in sight. “Karen,” I said, thankful for the diversion. “Thanks for bringing Wendy over. I know it isn’t your favorite thing to do.”
Karen actually blushed. “I’m sorry I’ve been so preoccupied. I had things going on… it’s not a problem anymore.”
“She had boy trouble,” Wendy’s grandmother hissed in a loud stage-whisper, and Stacy nodded and shrugged, embarrassed.
“Don’t worry about it.” I turned my attention back to Wendy, who was planting a big smooching kiss right on Christmas’s nose. “Look at those two. Smitten with each other.”
Wendy looked my way then, and her face had that brilliant incandescence that I loved. She was glowing with joy, standing there amidst the Christmas lights and the candy canes and the evergreen and the horse she loved more than anything. It was late, but Christmas had come at last for Wendy, and for her filly.
I was surprised she could tug herself away from the horse for even a second, but Wendy gave her a last pat before she came up the shed-row, holding herself back from running as she knew was proper in a barn. She smiled up at me tremulously. “You did this,” she said.
“I wish I could take all the credit,” I smiled. “But a lot of people did this. And I think officially Rosemary Wood signed the ticket.” Rosemary was the Rodeo Queen whose claim eventually won out at Everglades Park.
“I know a lot of people helped,” Wendy admitted. She looked around: at her aunt and grandmother, at Alexander and Kerri. “But,” she whispered, coming in for a hug, which I knelt to receive, “You did it.”
I’ve never liked children very much, never wanted any of my own, never paid much attention to them. Horses were more my thing, and that hadn’t changed. But there was no denying the thrill of having a child wrap her arms around my neck, the satisfaction of having made her life more special, the simple happiness that came from making her happy. So I hugged her back, bent over in the clay of the shed row, while a Christmas racehorse looked on from a stall turned into Candyland, and our family stood around and cheered for us.
About the Author
Natalie Keller Reinert has always had the horse bug. From short stirrup classes on a gray pony named Silver to eventing on a retired racehorse named Amarillo, from teaching dressage to galloping Thoroughbreds, it’s always been about the horses. In 2011, following the success of Retired Racehorse Blog, and several equestrian short stories, Reinert released her first novel, The Head and Not The Heart, which quickly became a category best-seller at Amazon. In 2013 she continued the story of Alex and Alexander in Other People’s Horses, which joined her debut at the top of the horse racing and equestrian best-sellers.
Natalie Keller Reinert currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family, where she continues to work on equestrian-themed novels. Find out more at nataliekreinert.com or find her on Facebook and Twitter: @nataliekreinert.
Other titles:
The Head and Not The Heart: (Alex & Alexander #1)
Amazon — Barnes & Noble
Other People’s Horses: (Alex & Alexander #2)
Amazon — Barnes & Noble
Horse-Famous: Stories
Amazon (Ebook only)
Claiming Christmas (Alex and Alexander Book 3) Page 9
