Grandmother was staring at me.
“You’d seriously be willing to do this to get one more chance on Coronado?” she said.
“One hundred percent,” I said. “Daniel’s right. I can win on this horse. I should have won today.”
The living room windows were open to let in the night air. One of the horses in the barn gave a loud whinny, but no one spoke.
It was Mom who finally did.
“Becky’s right,” she said. “It was never about the money with you, any more than it was with Dad.”
She gave her mother a long look and said, “What would Dad say if he were around?”
“Now who’s not being fair?” Grandmother said.
“Me,” Maggie Atwood said. “Because we both know the answer.”
“Clint Atwood would have poured himself another whiskey and then said we were going to let it ride,” Grandmother said.
She slowly and deeply breathed in, let it out even more slowly.
“God forgive a fool like me,” she said now, then looked directly at me. But she was smiling.
“We let it ride,” she said.
THIRTY
Gorton
“WHAT DO YOU mean the old bat changed her mind?” Gorton heard now on speakerphone.
He was driving east on Southern Boulevard, on his way to the bridge that took him from mainland to island and finally his home on Ocean Boulevard. What he and his friends jokingly called “the hood.”
“That’s what the little wiseass just informed me,” Gorton said.
“Our Becky,” the man said. “You’re telling me that they passed up the money?”
“That’s right.”
He thought he was going to make the light before the bridge, didn’t, saw it go to red and the drawbridge begin its slow rise toward the sky.
Perfect, he thought. Just perfect.
My morning just keeps getting better.
“So what are you going to do?” the man said.
“I know what you’re going to do,” Gorton said. “You’re going to win the goddamn Grand Prix.”
“If it’s not me, it’ll be somebody else, but never her,” the man said. “That was a total choke job yesterday. As easy a distance as there was on the course. It would have been like Secretariat’s jockey finding a way to lose.”
“Long shots have hit before,” Gorton said. “Not just horses. Even my Jets won a Super Bowl once.”
A silence settled between the two men. Bridge was still up.
“You saved yourself some money today,” the man said. “You take complete control of the horse in two weeks, correct?”
“But that little punk talked to me—to my face—like I was one of her grooms,” Gorton said, then paused. “Remember that movie with Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson where Nicholson lost his shit in the courtroom?”
“A Few Good Men.”
“Those people screwed with the wrong Marine today,” Gorton said.
He sat there drumming his fingers on the steering wheel as the bridge finally started to come down. Still seeing the look on Becky’s face. The one who’d landed on her ass the day before acted like she won something today. Now every member of that family had treated him like some sort of schmuck.
“Like I said, you just need to stay cool.”
“You know what makes me lose my cool?” Gorton said. “People telling me to stay cool.”
“Hey, I’m on your side,” the man said.
“Then call me back with something I can use against them,” Gorton said, “just in case I need to.”
He was about to end the call when the man said, “Wait, I just thought of something.”
“What?”
THIRTY-ONE
IT WAS SUNDAY morning, less than a week to go until the Grand Prix qualifier, Daniel and I in the tack room, Emilio outside putting a saddle on Coronado.
Daniel wouldn’t have Sky and me jump at all when we were close to showing. He’d only had me jump Coronado at Atwood Farm after Mom got hurt to give me a chance to know the horse.
“I keep thinking that if I win, I win more than a hundred thousand,” I said. “If I lose, we all lose a million bucks.”
“Ve con dodo,” he said.
“That one I don’t know.”
“Let it ride,” he said.
I didn’t have to win on Thursday. Just needed to go clean and be in the top forty riders and make it to Saturday.
I went around the long course clean now, then waited on Coronado while Daniel set up the kind of jump-off course we’d encounter next week in the International Arena. Get around clean on the long course, in the time allowed, and you qualified for the jump-off. Half as long and twice as tricky, like riding full speed through a maze.