“You look like something’s on your mind.”
“Oh, baby,” I said.
Then I told my mother about her mother’s conversation with Mr. Gorton, and the one she’d just had with Daniel and me. She listened, no change in her expression, until I finished.
“Crazytown, right?” I said.
“They’re both right,” Mom said. “Mom and Daniel.”
She motioned for the water cup with the straw in it on the bedside table. I handed it to her. She drank deeply and handed it back. Even now, she didn’t miss a chance to hydrate like a triathlete.
“It’s not just another rider,” she said. “If Gorton goes out and gets some hotshot rider, that guy is going to want his own trainer. So then not only would I be gone, so would Daniel. And with another rider and another trainer, what’s left for Mom? Silent partner? Good luck to the lawyers trying to enforce that.”
I stood up now, needing to move, even if it was just to the other side of the bed.
“The important thing is that Daniel thinks you can do this and so do I.”
“Are you sure you’re not on drugs?” I said. “I know I’m a good rider. And since I know you and Daniel don’t lie about horses, I’m not going to, either. As much as I’d love to show Grandmother she’s wrong about me, I would be out of my league here.”
“Bullshit,” Mom said.
“Now you do sound just like her.”
“Just because we both call BS when we see it,” she said.
“So you’re telling me that after the worst year I ever had in riding I can start training with Daniel now and still be ready to ride Coronado in the Grand Prix in a few weeks?”
She tried to sit up straighter in the bed now. The pain flashed across her face like some sudden flash of lightning in the darkened room.
“Let me ask you a question,” she said when she had control of her breathing. “What do you have to lose?”
“Your shot at the Olympics,” I said.
“Our shot.”
“Either way,” I said, “you’re telling me I should do this?”
She closed her eyes and smiled.
“Hell, no,” she said. “I want to be doing this. I want to be in my own bed and asleep already so I can get up early in the morning and ride the living shit out of my horse.”
“Your mind is made up, just like that?” I said.
“I am not going to lie to you,” Mom said. “The day I’m out of here and see somebody else up on that horse, it’s going to hurt even more than I’m hurting right now. But it will hurt a hell of a lot less if it’s you.”
She told me that if I really wanted her advice, it was for me to ride the horse every day for a week, ride him as hard as I could, ride him in the ring and on trail rides, and see if I had a feel for him and he had a feel for me, because it always came back to that.
“Then you can decide whether you’re in or out,” she said. “I’m not sure you’ve been all in since we put you up on Frenchy.”
My first pony.
“You always said that the biggest mystery is how much of it is the horse and how much of it is the rider,” I said.
“Well, kiddo,” Mom said, “we might be about to find out.”
Then she said to leave her alone, maybe by some minor miracle she might get some sleep tonight.
ELEVEN
THE NEXT MORNING Grandmother sat at the kitchen table eating her usual breakfast of nuts and berries and oatmeal. I was having coffee and toast.
“Your mother said you went to see her,” she said.
“She wants me to ride Coronado,” I said.
“So I heard,” she said.
She sipped tea. I sipped my coffee, happy that I’d only taken a few bedtime hits of tequila, sleep having come to me more easily than I’d expected on one of the longest days of my life.
“If you don’t want me to ride Coronado, go find another rider.”
“It wouldn’t be difficult.”
“So what’s stopping you?”
“Your mother is stopping me!” She spoke even more loudly than usual now. “She wants the horse to stay in the family and she actually believes you can pull this off.”
“So does Daniel,” I said, taking a self-consciously defensive stance.
“Stop taking a goddamn poll about whether you want to do this!” she said, as if trying to out-shout me. “However you got here, you’re being given a chance to ride a goddamn Olympic horse all the way to the Olympics in Paris goddamn France.”