He believed she would jump in that ring two weeks from now. But she was asking him how well he thought she would do.
“If you are going to be ready,” he answered, “you need to ride as much as your body can stand. So even though you are finished with Coronado for today, I would now like you to ride Sky.”
“Nope,” she said. “Not happening. Not riding Becky’s horse.”
“She rode yours,” Daniel said.
“This is different,” she said.
“I’m not asking you to jump her if you’d rather not,” Daniel said. “She needs a light workout, perhaps a half hour, tops. Or less.”
She was the boss.
Finally, Maggie gave in.
Daniel went to the barn to get Sky ready, brought her back out, helped Maggie up. Her left leg went into the stirrup first, but as she swung her right leg over and settled herself into the saddle, Daniel heard her exhale sharply in pain.
“Enjoy the ride you are about to have,” Daniel said, grinning. “I know that you will.”
“Pretty sure of yourself.”
“With this horse?” he said. “Yes. Very sure.”
Right away Daniel could see Maggie’s face light up with joy, as if in bright colors. Could see her posture suddenly improve and her attitude along with it. Saw her smiling for the first time in two days, as if abandoning for the moment she was not in competition with herself, and her own ambition, and expectations. Saw her effortlessly picking up speed. The joy Becky regained from riding Sky again full time had now passed to her mother.
“I’m going to jump her,” Maggie called out to him from the other end of the ring.
She looked over at Daniel.
“You knew, didn’t you?” she said.
He smiled and nodded.
After about ten minutes, she held up a finger. One more.
“Go for it,” Daniel said.
“This is why I came back!” Maggie yelled from the far end of the ring. “This horse makes you feel like you’re floating!”
As Daniel watched Maggie and Sky float one last time, landing the jump perfectly, he heard the sound of a slow, rhythmic clapping.
Becky was standing at the barn.
FIFTY-EIGHT
I STOPPED CLAPPING when I saw them both turn. Mom looked like a kid who’d been caught doing something wrong.
“Lucky I came back early,” I said. “Or by tomorrow I might have no horse to ride.”
I watched Daniel quickly help Mom down. She came walking over to where I was standing.
“Daniel asked me to ride her,” she said, turning her back to him.
Daniel started walking Sky back to the barn, dropping the reins, palms down toward me in a calming gesture.
“Slight change of plans,” I said. “Turns out I didn’t miss college as much as I thought I did. I had to find out the hard way that you can only watch so many seasons of Grey’s Anatomy.”
“That seemed like pretty sarcastic applause right there,” Mom said.
“What did you expect?” I said. “I sit in traffic on the turnpike for two hours then find you on my horse. I thought this was all about you being on your horse?”
Just Mom and me in the ring now. How many rounds had we gone like this? Hundreds? A thousand? But today’s conflict was a totally different vibe.
All I wanted to do right now was walk away from her and all the weirdness between us and change into my riding clothes and ride my own damn horse.
Except that today Mom didn’t just have her own horse. She had my horse, too.
“We really need to talk,” she said.
“Mom,” I said, “you might need to. I don’t. Maybe it’s a mom thing to believe that heart-to-heart chats fix everything except a broken leg. That’s not me.”
“Five minutes,” she said. “To clear the air.”
“The air’s fine, Mom,” I said. “It’s the situation that kind of sucks.”
“Five minutes, then,” she said. “Up on the porch. We always did our best talking there.”
That actually made me smile.
“Well, yeah,” I said. “But as I recall, what I mostly did was listen.”
I followed her up the hill to where the two of us had sat for so many talks. About Dad sometimes. Or about her and Dad, long after they’d gotten divorced. Or her wanting to know about a boy I’d just broken up with. Or was dating. Or a class I was failing. Or how I wasn’t working hard enough at my riding.
I thought: Now I’m working my ass off on my riding and it’s doing me a hell of a lot of good.