“Still nothing?” she said.
“I’m fixing to call him myself,” I said.
“No,” she said. “When he knows something, he’ll call.”
“How can you be so calm about this?”
“It’s just a cruel deception,” she said. Then she grinned. “I’ve been watching you,” she continued. “You look like you’re in the ring already.”
“Sometimes I wish it were a boxing ring,” I said.
“Fight fight fight,” she said.
I grinned back at her.
“You sound like a cheerleader.”
“About all I can handle these days,” she said.
Just then I saw the double glass doors to the fitness center open, and Dr. Richard Howser walked through them, looking around until he spotted Mom and me.
He walked over to us, his face, as usual, showing nothing. He also never screwed around, even when he was Dr. Doom, about to deliver some particularly shitty news.
Please don’t let it be bad.
Then he smiled.
“The horse is fine,” he said.
Now he was the one I wanted to kiss.
TWENTY-TWO
“A MILD INFECTION,” Doc Howser said, “caused by dirt getting inside the cut. You could probably get away with giving him just one day off.”
We decided on two. Back in the ring, not doing any real jumps, using ground poles for distances, Coronado was perfect.
Now it was Saturday afternoon, our first competition together, the $10,000 Jumper in the International Arena.
My class was scheduled to start at one o’clock. I had been awake since five in the morning, the hour I’d sometimes get in after a party night. Now I was wide awake. Tried to go back to sleep. Couldn’t. Daniel and I would head over to the show about eleven and since I was going thirtieth in the order, I wouldn’t be in the International Ring with Coronado until after two.
He was probably still sleeping.
My brain was running hot.
Trying to step lightly so as not to wake Mom or Grandmother, I got out of bed, walked to the window that looked down at the barn. The wall was hung on both sides with ribbons I’d won on Sky, a handful of times beating out Mom and some of the other top riders.
I’d trade every single ribbon on this wall, I thought, to win just one today.
What had Mom always said?
One chance to make a good first impression.
I snuck downstairs now and made myself my first cup of coffee, brought it back upstairs. Waited for the sun to come up.
I knew when it finally did the day would move like that television commercial. Life would come at me fast.
Just not yet.
I looked at the clock on the nightstand.
Still just five fifteen.
Only my heart was going fast. Running as hot as my brain. How was I going to handle these feelings when they maxed out in the ring? When it was showtime?
Get a grip, bitch.
Yeah, right.
I put on jeans and a T-shirt, went downstairs, fixed myself another cup of coffee, silently let myself out the back door. I walked down the hill to the barn, only to be near the horses. Let them sleep, even if I couldn’t.
I stood at the fence near the in-gate, placed my cup on top of one of the posts, and thought back to when I was six years old, getting up on Frenchy for my first ride around the ring. Loved my first pony then the way I loved Sky now.
I’d only walked Frenchy before that day.
But that day I was going to ride her. Really ride her. Mom hadn’t thought I was ready. Grandmother had insisted that I was. I’d screwed up my six-year-old courage and got around on jumps as low as Grandmother and Mom could make them.
I had been as scared then as I was now.
You’re not a little girl anymore.
I stayed long enough down at the barn to watch the sunrise. Then I walked back up to the house. Longest morning of my life still stretching out ahead of me.
TWENTY-THREE
DANIEL AND I were walking the course with the rest of the riders and trainers, pacing off the distances between jumps.
Half hour until the round started. It felt by now as if I’d been awake for about a month.
“Well,” I said, “this shit is about to get real.”
He grinned.
“Were you always this much of a poet?” he said.
“Goddamn right,” I said.
“Relax,” he said.
“I am relaxed.”
“You are about as good a liar as you are a poet,” Daniel said.
We reached the middle of the course then, staring down the double combination before the last jump. What Daniel called the main event. Six strides leading into the first jump, then room enough for just one stride before the second one. In that moment flying and landing in a small space, then flying again. After that it was something right out of the movies. Fast and furious to the finish.