“No,” Becky said, “meaning…”
“No meaning I’ve decided to cash out,” Caroline Atwood said.
“Cash out?” Becky said, as if she hadn’t heard correctly.
“Sell our share of the horse.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
AFTER ALL THE bombs I’d had dropped on me lately, this was the big one.
“You’re joking,” I said to Grandmother.
“Do I sound as if I’m joking?”
I gave Daniel a quick sideways look. If he’d known this was coming, he was a better actor than DiCaprio. Then I looked over at Mom, frozen in place on the couch.
Her reaction was no reaction at all.
She knew, I thought.
“Gorton and I had a long talk on the phone after he got back to Palm Beach,” Grandmother said now. “He admitted that he’d given us a month, but after what he saw today, if Becky rode Coronado in the Grand Prix, any possible outcome was bad. We’d lose time that we really don’t have. Or the horse could get hurt, at which point he’d be worth a bucket of spit. And if that happened, I might as well have burned the money we put up for him.”
“And you agreed with him,” I said.
My dear grandmother sighed.
“I told him I couldn’t disagree,” she said. “I’m the one who’s sorry, I guess.”
“You don’t have to apologize, either,” I said.
“Like you say,” she said. “It is what it is.”
“But it doesn’t have to be!” I said. “It was a crap ride. But it was one crap ride. I thought I had a month, not one damn day.”
“I haven’t told you all of it,” she said.
“We’re all listening,” I said.
“He offered a million dollars, right now, to buy me out,” she said. “Buy us out and give him what he wants, which is full control of the horse.”
I heard a sharp intake of breath from Daniel.
“I’m going to accept,” she said.
I looked over at Mom now.
“Jump in anytime,” I said.
“There’s more to this,” Maggie said. “Mom showed me the books today. She’s afraid that we’re going to lose the barn. She gambled when we bought Coronado that once I started winning on him, that would attract new riders and new families to the barn. But it hasn’t happened. And now I can’t ride Coronado.”
Grandmother said, “Listen, I know that the value of the horse could go sky high if he does make it to the Olympics, whether we end up with a gold medal or not. But I did gamble everything once. I can’t afford to do it again. None of us can. Not with an offer like this in hand.”
Daniel took a step forward.
“We only had a week to get ready,” he said. “You know this world as well as anyone, jefa. A week is not enough time to make a serious decision.”
He paused and said, “I promise things will be different in the Grand Prix.”
“You can’t make a promise like that,” Grandmother said. “And neither can my granddaughter.”
“Things will be better,” Daniel said.
“Or much, much worse,” she said.
“I know you have a deal with that slug,” I said. “But forget about that. We had a deal, Grandmother. You and me.”
“Deals get broken all the time in this business,” she said. “The days when my late husband operated on a handshake are long gone.”
“Holy…holy,” I said. “You’ll be giving him exactly what he wants, before we get anywhere near the Grand Prix. We lose. He wins.”
“And gives us a parting gift of a million dollars,” she said. She steepled her hands together, almost like she was praying.
“I met with Andy yesterday,” she said.
Her accountant.
“And Andy told me that we’ll be lucky to make it to the end of the year if we continue trying to live on the margins,” she said.
“What’s the word you always use to describe Steve Gorton?” I said. “Transactional? You sound as transactional as he does.”
“Becky, that’s not fair,” Mom said.
“Yes,” Grandmother said, “it is.”
“We’re just asking for a little more time,” Daniel said.
“He told me to take the offer or leave it,” Grandmother said. “If there’s another disaster at the Grand Prix, we’re out a million, and he takes complete control of the horse. It will be as if we lost Coronado twice.”