Other People's Horses (Alex and Alexander Book 2)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  I skirted the walking ring, Kerri a half-stride behind me, and made my way across the thick grass to the shady corner. I noticed a trash can full of empties. So this was a little party barn, eh?

  “You must be Alice,” the man in the chair announced happily. He was about sixty, I’d guess, bald but for a little ring of gray hair, but with hardly any lines on his face, and wearing bermuda shorts and a button-down guayabera decorated with a cascade of playing cards. With the sockless loafers and the tan legs and the Corona sitting in the grass beside him, I reckoned we had a card-carrying member of the Parrothead Club roosting in this little corner of Saratoga Springs.

  “Alex.” I held out my hand. “But I like Alice, too.”

  He grinned and lurched up from his chair to take my hand. He didn’t shake it, he just held on to it, thumb resting on top of my fingers. “Glad to meet you. I could use a few young ladies around this place. Too much testosterone around here, you know?”

  You’re still holding my hand, I thought. So yes. “There’s a lot of testosterone in horse racing, all right,” I agreed, managing a smile. “All these damn colts, jostling for position, looking for a retirement in a stud barn.”

  He laughed and let go, giving Kerri’s hand the same treatment: that tender grip, that long pause, that one-sided awkwardness. Maybe that was how he shook hands. Or maybe he was just a creepy guy. He would hardly be the only creepy guy in horse racing.

  “I’m Mike Weston,” the Parrothead said, smiling in a more genuine, not-creepy manner. He seemed alright when he wasn’t touching anyone. “Let me show you around.”

  It was a nice barn; that much was for sure. He showed us the quarter we could have: twelve stalls with a tack room and office at the top of the shedrow. The other three-quarters belonged to Roddy Ellis, he said meaningfully, waggling his eyebrows.

  Roddy Ellis. I sighed.

  “Who is Roddy Ellis?” Kerri hadn’t yet learned that her naivety was neither endearing nor confidence-inspiring.

  “Roddy Ellis was last year’s leading trainer,” Mike explained. “And he’s had a good spring at Belmont. I think we’ll be looking at another championship year. So you’ll be in good company, honey!”

  What he didn’t mention was that Roddy Ellis was viewed with much suspicion by the media and the public. He had a demonstrated preference for questionable training strategies, including running horses back after just two or three days rest, sometimes several times in a row, and a disconcerting way of losing horses that weren’t in good form. They simply dropped off the radar. Sharing the barn with this guy was definitely a con, in my opinion. But I didn’t have any other options. I had six horses on the road right now. They needed a comfy bed at the end of their journey.

  In the furnished office, behind a dusty laminate desk, I sat in a creaking leather chair and signed the contract Mike Weston put in front of me. For the entire summer, this was where Kerri and I would spend our mornings. And probably our evenings, and some of our nights.

  “I’m here mostly evenings after the races,” Mike said in parting. “If you ever need me, call me.” He winked, disconcertingly. “Day or night. Oh, and don’t be a stranger. There’s always beer in the cooler and I need someone to help me drink it all.”

  I watched him stroll back to his lawn chair. “Kerri,” I said thoughtfully. “This is going to be a strange summer.”

  Kerri laughed and clapped her hands. She clearly loved the guy. “This is going to be the best summer ever!”

  I sighed. What had been sweet earlier was starting to grate. I was feeling determined to slip into a pessimistic mood, and this girl was going to be the death of me. Barn Optimist, indeed. My high mood was starting to fade as the day wore on; despite the lovely barn and the friendly (too friendly? Maybe.) landlord, I was starting to remember all the things I had to feel morose over. Alexander in the Outback. Riding racehorses down the street. Roddy Ellis as my barn-mate. The fact that it was well past lunchtime and I was starving. I flipped Kerri the car keys. “Go find us some sandwiches, will ya? I’m going to make arrangements with the feed store, get a delivery over here.”

  Kerri snatched at the keys, missed, giggled, picked them up from the grass and went back across the lawn, waving to Mike Weston as she went. There would be a deli or a grocery store or something nearby; she had an iPhone, she’d figure it out. And I’d walk home. The barn wasn’t too far from the house that Alexander and I had rented, sight unseen, from a website specializing in Saratoga racing season rentals. All we’d known about it was that it was a two-bedroom two-bathroom bungalow, whatever that might mean, and, with the state of the Saratoga rental market—“Rent it five years in advance or get an extra stall in the barn” could easily be the town motto —we’d paid the full lease price right away, clicking “buy” the way you might when ordering a sweater or a pair of boots. Then we’d opened a bottle of wine and chortled over our find, toasting our magical summer to come. Now I had to walk over there alone, and hope my roommate found her way there with a couple of sandwiches and something with a lot of caffeine.

  I rubbed my hands across the desk, picking up dirt and dust and horse hair and hay on my sweaty palms. How things had changed. Alexander, in an airplane somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. Polly, driving to meet him at the airport, out across the Back of Beyond or wherever it was they had their farm. Would she bring Tom? Or was he already in the hospital, or too ill for the long trip?

  I looked at the dirty, chipped laminate of my desk and the black dirt on my hands and remembered how beautiful and vivacious and witty Polly was, and then I told myself I was a horrible person for thinking such things, and that I’d better get a move on before it was too late to get hold of the feed store for an afternoon delivery and I picked up the business card Mike had left for me and dialed the number.

  That done, there was nothing left to do but go look at the house. Kerri was not yet back; she was probably lost somewhere in Saratoga, somewhere in upstate New York, somewhere in the northeastern United States. The equipment was due to arrive later in the afternoon, all those trunks of stall webbings and leg wraps and feed tubs. The feed store truck would come still later, the last delivery window available, five-thirty to six-thirty, laden with straw and hay and sweet feed and pitchforks and brooms, necessary things too big and bulky to ship up with the boxes. I walked down the even clay of the shedrow, feeling the soft spot in the middle that belied the rut carved into it each morning by walking horses, surveying my domain of empty space, cobwebs, and wisps of hay. The empty stalls to my left were bare and gaunt skeletons waiting for the straw and buckets and horses to flesh them out. The two o’clock sun, a hot yolk, was creeping in just past the elbow-high railing of the shedrow; I could see why this side of the barn was available to lease. Western-facing sheds were not the most popular in the late summer, when the hottest part of the day was four or five o’clock and the sun was shining through the stall doors. At the far end, Roddy Ellis’s horses had disappeared from view, retreating into the backs of their stalls and abandoning their hay nets in favor of a little shade.

  It wasn’t ideal, but it wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t unsafe. There were no nails sticking out of haphazard construction, no broken boards poking splintering fingers from stall walls or crumbling concrete spilling down from the stall foundations into the dirt of the aisle. It was the opposite of those things: it was beautiful and well-constructed. And it was my first shedrow of my own, the first stable where I reigned supreme as trainer. Surely I couldn’t ask for anything more than that.

  ***

  “Well,” I declared, in a voice more hopeful and determined than I felt, “let’s head home and unpack.”

  I’d walked, following the helpful guide of my phone map, to the rental and poked around a little. I waited a while for Kerri and then wandered back to the barn, where, of course, she had returned, stuck my sandwich in the office’s little brown fridge, and gotten to work preparing the shedrow for our horses.

  At first glance, I t
hought I could kind of like the house. Nothing too fancy, the posh housing stock being long ago rented to Saudi Arabian princes and bottled water magnates. It was a low-slung little cottage with a living room and kitchen downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs, and a bathroom for each floor. The entrance was nearly invisible: a peeling door beyond the creaking wooden floors of a mysterious front porch once screened merely by aluminum but now also by a great spreading honeysuckle that buzzed ominously with entomological industry. The furnishings, inside and out—because of course the shadowed porch was ornamented by a sagging brown sofa, draped with an afghan of pre-war vintage—were of the chocolate and tangerine color palette, a decorating scheme that had enjoyed its fifteen minutes in the seventies. I had taken one look around its bead-curtain-and-stitched-sampler horror, a granny’s house of blinking tree-stump owls and novelty electrical appliance kitchen curtains, and shut the door behind me with a squeaking thud of warped and swollen wood, determined to spend all of my waking hours at the barn.

  “How is the house?” Kerri had signed for the tack delivery and devoured a roast beef sandwich while waiting for me to reappear and was already working on the tack room, filling the gray twelve by twelve space with the contents of seven tack trunks and countless plastic bags, knotted and bulging with training secrets pulled from cardboard boxes. “There was a shelf-thing in here already,” she added, gesturing at a tall plastic shelving unit. My tinctures and ointments and assorted witch’s brews glinted from the topmost shelf. It was comforting to see the row of bottles and misters and tubes, possessions that were so manifestly mine in a world full of other people’s things. I felt my resolve to avoid the house as much as possible grow stronger. This would have to be my happy place, if such a place were possible.

  “The house appears to be secure and dry,” I hedged. “Also a little retro.”

  Kerri looked up, a rattling bottle of pills in her hand. SMZs for infections. It occurred to me that I had no idea what S or M or Z actually stood for. She laughed. “Retro is cool.”

  I shook my head. “It really isn’t. But I appreciate your effort to be positive.”

  She gave me an appraising look, smile fading, and I found myself squaring my feet and crossing my arms across my chest. She shook her head at me. “You aren’t always going to be like this, are you?”

  “Like what?”

  “Pessimistic.”

  Ouch.

  “I know we didn’t know each other well in Florida, but you seemed pretty chipper there.”

  “Well, this has been difficult for me,” I began. “My husband is in Australia, for heaven’s sake, and things have been moving very quickly …” I trailed off.

  “We can’t do this if you’re going to be looking for the downside of everything,” Kerri said bossily. “I need you to cheer the hell up.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “And we have to be friends,” she added. “So I can say things like that to you and you can’t fire me.” She laughed a little.

  I picked up the sandwich she had picked out for me and regarded it. Checkboxes on the wrapper were marked in grease pencil, the instructions to some industrious sandwich-maker. “You knew I liked mayo and pickles.” I smiled at her. “Obviously we’re friends.”

  Kerri laughed and went back to stacking pill bottles on the top shelf of the plastic rack. I retreated to the office with my sandwich and tried not to think about the emotional output that Kerri was going to require of me. I didn’t see how I could possibly have anything left for her, but she wasn’t going to take no for an answer. The girl needed attention, and I was the only person she knew now.

  ***

  Kerri left a little while later, suggesting that someone should make sure the house was livable and grab some groceries and do all those boring household things. I was happy to surrender the chore to her and hung out in the barn longer, listening to the grooms show up to feed dinner and top off waters for the Ellis horses. The hooves banging doors, the terse Cut that out! exclamations, the rattle of pent-up water being released from a bent hose and into a water bucket: soothing, universal barn sounds that let me feel at home. It was late when I left. The shadows stretched across the lawn and reached the barn, cooling the sun-drenched aisle at last, as I walked the quiet streets back to the cottage. I hoped Kerri had thought to buy beer.

  She was making dinner when I came in, letting the wood-framed screen door slam behind me, bouncing off the warped door-frame. It was like walking into a sauna. Searing air was infiltrating the living room, wafting out of the tiny kitchen in the back of the house; the air conditioner set into the front window was silent, gazing dolefully into the wisps of honeysuckle reaching back into the side yard. “What is this shit,” I muttered, and pushed resolutely into the sizzling kitchen.

  “Alex!” Kerri was ridiculously enthusiastic. “I’m making supper. But,” she continued dolefully, “I burned the rice on the bottom of the pot, so it might be crunchy.”

  “There were pots? And rice?”

  “You didn’t ship this stuff up?”

  I turned the burner off with a snap. “Nope.”

  We looked at the pot of rice with some consternation.

  “Well,” I said finally. “These can be washed and we can use them after that, I guess. It is a furnished house. But on days like this? When it’s ninety degrees? We’ll order in or go out. This house is too hot for words. What's with the AC? I flipped it on when I was here earlier. Tell me it isn’t broken. I will die if it’s broken.”

  “It isn’t broken. I turned it off because I opened the windows.”

  I waited.

  “When I burned the rice. It made a lot of smoke.”

  I sighed. “Okay. Let’s close this place up again and get it cooled off.”

  Kerri moved around the living room, closing windows, humming a little tune. A Closing Windows Tune, probably. I guessed I hadn’t gotten to know her very thoroughly when she was a groom in my broodmare barn, someone I talked to for maybe five or ten minutes in the course of a workday, and I could see that living with Kerri was going to be interesting, a challenge on top of all the other challenges I had set for myself this summer: becoming a world-class horse trainer, living with my husband on the other side of the world, that sort of thing. She seemed as completely clueless in the house as she had seemed a genius in the barn back in Ocala, so that should be fun. I wasn’t much of a housekeeper either. I had had a housekeeper to be the housekeeper, actually.

  “Let’s go out,” I decided. “I want a salad.”

  “Just a salad?” Kerri had evidently forgotten that she had just proposed we eat a pot of burnt rice for dinner.

  “Come on. You haven’t lived until you’ve had this salad. All of the above, plus more. It's at this place downtown …” I turned on my heel and went right back out the front door, trusting that Kerri would have the presence of mind to grab the car keys.

  I ordered a Moscow Mule at the restaurant, because I liked the name and I felt like I needed something to turn this summer around. “Do you think it’s named for a donkey-mule or a shoe?” I asked Kerri for something to do, and she looked satisfyingly contemplative. If nothing else, I could amuse myself by making her think.

  “A donkey-mule,” she determined finally. “This town thinks more about animals than shoes.” And while I wasn’t convinced that was true, judging by the fashion parade determinedly clunking down Broadway in spike-heeled shoes and fat wedges like medieval chopines, it seemed like a fair enough assessment.

  “Okay,” I said, once the bourbon started to do its job and I felt like I could face the future with some degree of readiness. “So here we are. Tomorrow we have the stalls to set up and the horses coming around midday. We bathe everyone, we graze everyone in the sun, we make them happy. Then we get down to business on the next day. I’ll line up an exercise rider and a hot-walker to show up and help us out, and we’ll be training starting at five.”

  Kerri nodded, suddenly businesslike. She looked more
like the serious girl I remembered from Florida, standing at a broodmare’s head while the vet looked the horse over. “What are mornings going to look like?”

  “Every day is going to be pretty much the same. Get in, throw everyone a scoop of oats, pull water buckets. Then while they’re eating, set tack.” I paused for a sip and remembered my first morning as a gallop girl, finding my name on a whiteboard, with magnets labeled with horse names lined up next to it: set one, set two, set three, six horses in all. Six horses, just like now, but I wasn’t riding now. I was training. “We take a saddle cloth, a saddle, a bridle, and a training yoke and hang it over the stall door, the dutch door we don’t ever close. Keep it out of reach of teeth or it will end up in the stall. We only have two saddles, so the first two horses will get saddles and the others get a towel. That way when the rider comes, he can see at a glance how many horses he has, and plan the rest of his morning accordingly. He’ll probably pick up rides from someone else when he’s done with our horses.”

  “Do we have six bridles? Does everyone get their own?”

  I shook my head. “Three. A ring bit and two dee rings. Personal Best goes in the ring bit.” I thought. “And the fillies. The other ones can go in the dee. Keep the yoke with the bridle and that will be fine.” She looked a little lost and I thought for a moment. “The yoke is basically a running martingale,” I explained, and she nodded.

  The salad arrived then, green and red and white on a chic rectangular plate, and I took a break from lecturing Shedrow 101 and dove in. I’d first had this salad on a week-long trip to Saratoga that Alexander and I had made two years ago, and it had been a dream of mine ever since. Kerri was similarly engaged with a plate of fried chicken. We were a couple of amorous eaters.