She was smiling. I wasn’t.
“So riders do let other riders win from time to time?”
Maybe it was the wine.
“Becky,” Mom said.
The tone meant drop it.
“You’d never do anything like that, right, Mom?” I said.
Gus was next to me.
“Everybody’s having a good time,” he said, almost under his breath.
“We’ve gone over this,” Mom said to me. “I didn’t let you win.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
The whole table had gotten quiet.
“Every single rider in the jump-off made the inside turn,” I said. “Except you.”
“Good grief,” Grandmother said, “you still haven’t dropped this, Rebecca McCabe? You know the old expression about beating a dead horse? For the last time, this goddamn horse died.”
“And for the last time,” Mom said to me, “why would I have let you win?”
“I know how much you want us both to make the Olympic team,” I said. “Maybe you decided I needed the win more.”
“Nobody wants to win more than I do,” Mom said.
“Maybe I do now,” I said. “It’s why I don’t want anybody giving me anything. Including you.” Now I drank more wine. “Especially you.”
“Enough,” Grandmother said, trying to glare me into silence before waving theatrically for the check.
I should have dropped this by now. Or never opened the door in the first place. But I was still being carried along by adrenaline. The kind Gus said you could hear. Suddenly Mom was, too.
“I am going to tell you what I told that little shit Tyler Cullen that day,” she said. “If you think I’d ever let anybody win, especially you, then maybe you don’t know me as well as you think you do.”
“Maybe I don’t,” I said.
I stood up, and pushed back my chair, nearly knocking it over in the process.
“Where are you going?” Mom said.
“I can get my own ride home,” I said.
She caught up with me in the lobby, as I was calling my Uber.
“You’re as stubborn as your father,” she said. “You got stuck on things when you were a little girl, and you’re still getting stuck.”
“Pretty sure it runs on both sides of the family,” I said.
She somehow forced a smile, and lowered her voice, so we didn’t make a scene out here, too.
“Honey,” she said. “No matter what happens, I’m still your mom.”
“No,” I said. “You’re an opponent.”
EIGHTY-NINE
IT WAS SUNDAY AFTERNOON, last day of the FEI World Cup finals, one of the biggest events left on the calendar, and not just because of the prize money. Three-day event. Speed course on Friday. A jump-off class on Saturday. They added up your points then. I’d always thought the scoring was way too complicated except for this: If you were the leader by Sunday and then went clean, there was no jump-off. You won. Everybody else lost.
And by Sunday afternoon, I was the leader.
This after a second in Kentucky and a third in North Carolina over the past month in World Cup qualifiers. The best Mom had done was get a sixth in Carolina. It was as if we were headed in different directions right now. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Just knew how I felt about my horse and me. And we were both bad ass right now.
Which felt good.
Very good.
Mom, Daniel, Gus, and I arrived at the schooling ring at the same time, with the final round about half over. Mom was in fifth place, which meant she’d go fifth from the end in the order. As the leader, I was going off last. I’d know what everybody else had done by then. I’d know exactly where I stood. And not just today. Because if I ended up winning today, I would move all the way up to fourth place in the Olympic standings. If the team were being selected today, I’d be going to Paris and Mom wouldn’t.
But there were multiple events to ride before team selection. We still had the Rolex Grand Prix, back in Kentucky, and then the last big event before they did pick the team, up on the show grounds in Long Island where the Hampton Classic would be held later in the summer, after the Olympics were over.
As Gus liked to say, this shit was getting very real now.
“Good luck today, honey,” Mom said before Emilio helped her up on Coronado.
“Back at you,” I said, and walked over to where Sky was.
This was pretty much our relationship now. Sentence or two at a time. No overt hostility. No more angry words. The heat was gone. More an undercurrent of coolness now. Or iciness. It seemed like years ago that I had found her lying there on the trail.