“No,” she said. Forced a smile. “But I will.”
“I’ll come back here after and watch you,” Gus said to me. “This situation sucks. But you both gotta find a way to turn the page tomorrow.”
He looked at Mom, then me, then back at Mom.
“The only thing you can do for Daniel right now, both of you, is ride your damn horses,” Gus said.
“Don’t say it’s what Daniel would want us to do,” I said.
“Wasn’t going to,” he said.
I felt my phone buzzing then. Pulled it out of my back pocket and felt myself smiling for the first time since Daniel had put Steve Gorton on the ground.
Heard the car pulling into the driveway then. Heard the knock on the front door. Said I’d get it.
I opened the door and my dad walked in.
“Heard somebody might need a lawyer,” he said.
ONE HUNDRED SEVEN
AFTER I’D LEFT the message for Mr. Connors, I’d called Dad, trying to explain everything that had happened, and what I was afraid might happen to Daniel. My words were flowing like a faucet I couldn’t turn off.
Dad had let me babble for about a minute.
“Tell me the rest when I get there,” he’d said.
“You’re coming?” I’d said.
“In the afternoon,” he’d said. “Just to even up the sides.”
Now he hugged Mom and did the same with Grandmother before she could pull back.
He walked across the room then and shook Gus’s hand.
“Heard a lot about you,” he said. Grinning, he continued, “Unfortunately, you’ve probably heard a lot more about me.”
Mom smiled.
“Don’t flatter yourself, Jack,” she said.
I made him a cup of coffee and then took him, step by step, through every detail.
When I finished, Dad said, “Let me guess: Nobody outside the tent saw anything.”
“It was down the hill and around the corner from where the golf carts are parked,” I said. “Daniel said that he didn’t see anybody else around.”
“So for now it’s his word against that asshat Gorton’s,” Dad said.
“Daniel’s not going to get deported because of this, is he?” I asked.
“Oh, hell, no,” he said. “The assault charge is bullshit. If it had been Gorton who popped Daniel and not the other way around the closest he would have come to jail is if he’d taken a wrong turn on the way back to Palm Beach.”
He got up now.
“Nice to see all of you,” he said.
Grinned at Gus.
“You’re even braver than I heard,” Dad said.
Mom made a sound that was half-sigh, half-groan.
I walked Dad to the door. He gave me another hug, and whispered “I got this” in my ear.
“Gorton’s a bad guy,” I said.
“Kind of my thing,” he said.
I walked him to the car, then hugged him again, just because it made me feel better about things every time I did. He said he was dropping his bag at the Hampton Inn and then heading over to the jail. Then I watched him gun the rental car out of the driveway, spraying rocks everywhere, mostly for Grandmother’s benefit, I was certain.
He called me two hours later, after I’d ridden Sky.
“There’s a problem,” he said.
ONE HUNDRED EIGHT
MOM AND I WERE WALKING the course early Sunday afternoon, Gus alongside us. As we counted our distances, he was talking to us, nonstop. Just not about distances.
“I’m gonna say this for the last time,” he said.
“I wish,” I said.
“Very funny,” he said. “But this isn’t about Daniel today. It’s about the two of you. You help yourselves today. Not him. There. Now I’m done.”
“It’s not going to be easy,” Mom said.
“Well, you need to figure it out fast,” Gus said. “If you don’t, you’re both going to get knocked out of this ring with all those points sitting there for the taking. And an awful lot of money.”
We finished the walk. Seamus and Emilio still hadn’t brought our horses up from their stalls. Mom was going twelfth in the order. I was going twenty spots later. Still plenty of time for both of us to start getting our minds as right as Gus wanted them to be.
Mom and Gus and I stopped to take one last look at the Grand Prix show grounds, starting to fill up with spectators, and also fill up with the electricity that always crackled inside and outside the ring this close to a big event. I looked up at the flags flying, heard the music from the live band, even saw Grandmother waving at me from the grassy area between the ring fence and the tent. This was supposed to be a great day for all of us.