We finished our first glasses with giddy speed, and in no time the waiter was by our side, topping us off, excitedly asking what else he could bring us. At the table next to ours, two couples were politely picking through a three-tiered seafood platter heaped with lobster and crab and oysters. My mouth watered.
“We want that,” Tina said, indicating with a jut of her chin.
The waiter glanced behind him. “That’s the large. For your party size, I’d recommend the small.”
“I’m not that hungry,” I added, though I hadn’t eaten breakfast. I had no idea how much a large seafood platter cost, but it had to be a lot.
Tina ignored us both. “Large, please.”
The waiter dipped his head deferentially and returned the deep emerald bottle of champagne to the ice bucket.
“My husband was allergic to seafood,” Tina said when we were alone again. “Sometimes I thought about getting a bunch of shrimp”—she mimed mincing them up—“and making a paste. Stirring it into his morning oatmeal.”
I stared at her. She was laughing, but she wasn’t kidding.
“I know you heard me crying last night,” Tina said. “You curled into me after.” She was wearing big diamond posts in her ears, and every time she tucked her hair behind her ears, as she did now, her lobes shot laser beams that forced me to turn away from her. “It was sweet,” I heard her say. Then, a little shyly, “Don’t you want to know why I was crying?”
I did, but still my stomach roiled with fear. Whatever Tina was about to tell me, I sensed it would change something between us. In my cowardice, I hedged, “I know you were nervous about today.”
Tina let her hair fall over her ears so that I could look at her painlessly. “I don’t cry when I’m nervous.”
* * *
Tina grew up outside of Dallas, in an affluent neighborhood called Highland Park. Her family had money—not oil or real estate money, but enough to send Tina to private schools and pay for horseback riding lessons. Tina had a natural seat, and on weekends she competed in local shows, counting the strides between jumps on Andalusians with braided manes, wearing starched white button-downs pinned with blue ribbons. She was ten years old the first time Ed noticed her in the ring.
Ed’s daughter was the lead instructor at the barn, and Ed owned the barn. He was the most successful industrial and office builder in the state, and he’d bought the sixty-acre horse farm as a high school graduation gift for his daughter, who competed professionally for a few years before retiring in her late twenties and opening the stables to the public. Her name was Deborah, and she was the meanest person Tina had ever known. She once made Tina take her horse out back and beat his hind leg with a switch after he refused a brush fence and got Tina disqualified from her class.
Ed would drop by the barn with bags of carrots for the horses and cigarettes for the instructors. All that hay and wood everywhere, the animals trapped in their stalls, and horse people smoked like you wouldn’t believe. Tina never saw Deb eat, only smoke and drink whiskey that she kept out on the barn’s kitchen sink, next to the bottle of leather polish.
Tina welcomed Ed’s visits because Deb held her tongue around her father. Ed would sit on a bench outside the ring and watch Tina warm up with a long rein in canter, and Deb would refrain from shouting at her Lean back before you fall off and break your neck and can never brush your pretty blond hair again as Tina approached the fence. Tina rode for seven years and never once took a fall. You were not considered a real rider until you were thrown, and Deb might have respected Tina more if she’d just let it happen, and no doubt Tina would have been a better rider if she weren’t always choking up on the reins to avoid the inevitable, but Tina could never bring herself to let go. It drove Deb crazy. She called Tina a princess, a pampered baby who was afraid of getting dirty and getting hurt.
One day, after a tense hour in the ring, Ed approached Tina as she was hosing down her horse. I hope you don’t mind that I’ve been coming around so often, he said, patting the horse’s neck, but I don’t want to see you take a spill. Ed chucked her chin with a knuckle, the gesture brief but establishing—a commencement of something. Gotta protect that face of yours. Tina focused hard on guiding a white stripe of sweat from the horse’s flank to his hoof. Later, after she quit riding, she learned it was a sign of excessive labor when the horse’s sweat foamed white, and she cried for all those times she’d unwittingly rode a living creature so close to collapse.