Love Story(29)
Author: Jennifer Echols

The bottom line was that horse races were never sure things. That’s why people bet on them. And all the information available to me about these horses was available to everyone at the track. All I could do with my background was give it the proper weight. I muttered, “This is nothing Manohar’s friends wouldn’t know if they’d just done their homework.”

“It’s a fraternity,” Hunter said. “They want the easy way out. You are the homework.”

As he spoke, something loomed large in the corner of my vision. We both turned back to the paddock in time to see a groom lead the next thoroughbred past, an enormous bay with black points. This horse looked like strength and speed, the veins standing out in his chest as his muscles strained with the effort to keep himself from bolting over the paddock fence, through the crowd, and out into the parking lot just for kicks. He was the kind of horse I would have been afraid of back home.

“That is a beautiful horse,” I murmured at the same time Hunter breathed, “That is a beautiful horse.”

We glanced at each other. He smiled at me. Despite myself, I smiled back.

“You telling the boys to bet on him?” he asked.

Shaking off the chill that had washed through me when he smiled at me, I consulted the brochure again. “Not with that jockey.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Who’s supposed to be the horse prodigy here, me or you?”

“You’re going to get Manohar blackballed,” he said, but he wasn’t looking at me. It wasn’t like Hunter to let on that someone didn’t have his full attention in a conversation. I followed his gaze to a blood bay colt with a white blaze. The horse looked out of his league in a race like this.

Then I realized Hunter wasn’t looking at the horse. He gazed at the groom, a lanky, white-haired African-American man. I figured this out when the groom’s eyes passed casually over the crowd and stopped on Hunter. His eyes widened, his jaw dropped, and then he broke into a big grin.

Hunter grinned, too. He lifted one finger from the fence in greeting.

The man realized he was still leading the horse. Down by his side, he flattened his hand, motioning for Hunter to wait.

Hunter nodded.

Then, as the man led the horse past us and made the turn in the paddock, he circled his finger at his side, asking Hunter to meet him back in the stables, I guessed.

Casually Hunter straightened and stretched his arms over his head. “I’m going to slip around back and try to talk my way into the stables. I doubt it will work, but you never know.”

“Is he a friend of yours?” I asked. “Did your dad work with him when you lived here?”

Hunter glanced at me in surprise. “Yeah. I hoped I might run into him, but I never thought he’d recognize me.”

I nodded. “Because you were only twelve when you left?”

“Yeah.” His eyes followed the groom and colt out of the paddock. “He looks exactly the same.”

“Go ahead.” I nodded in the direction the groom had gone. “I’ll cover for you. I won’t let the others know you’re human.”

He gave me a look I couldn’t read. He bent down, ducked under the wide brim of my hat, and kissed my cheek.

And then he was gone, sashaying through the crowd milling around the fence, holding his blazer slung over his shoulder with two fingers.

8

I watched the rest of the horses parade around the paddock, perused the tip sheet carefully, and told the boys which horse to bet on. I gave them my warning that horse racing was not an exact science and that my knowledge of the sport might give them an edge or lead them straight to the poorhouse. Nevertheless, they bet on the horse I picked, the horse won at twenty-five to one (everybody else at the track had bet on the impressive bay), and afterward the boys did not listen to my words of caution anymore.

By the lull before the last post time of the afternoon, the boys had gotten drunk and greedy. They’d insisted I pick the trifecta for them, which meant the horses that came in first, second, and third, in order. If I hit it, it would pay unbelievable odds, precisely because hitting it was nearly impossible. They were so excited that they wandered out of the stands and down to the fence where they could cheer on their horses right next to the track. I was glad. When they lost their entire winnings for the afternoon on this one race, I didn’t want to be around.

But Manohar and Summer had forgotten all about betting. They had gotten drunk and fallen in love. They’d talked with their heads close together all afternoon, and from what I could overhear, none of it had anything to do with horses. Huddled close and holding hands on the armrest between their seats, they didn’t seem to notice when Hunter stepped into our booth and tossed his blazer over the back of a seat, his temples shining with sweat as if he’d done some work in the stables.

“Did you see who you wanted to see?” I asked, watching the tractor tow the gate to the starting line.

“Lots of old friends.” He smiled to himself.

I looked up at him, then back to the field in front of us, which was filled with warm sunlight and the slanting shadows of evening. “This track is huge. When you first came to Churchill Downs, did it seem small?”

“I never saw much of it,” he said. “I was back in the stables, not out on the track.” But maybe he realized that he sounded like a recording stuck on replay—we both did, reminding ourselves of what we used to be and what we’d done to each other—because he took a breath and went on, “We had our own house here on Long Island. We rented it, but it seemed like ours. And we went into the city a lot. In Louisville we lived on your grandmother’s farm and that’s all there was. Churchill Downs seemed tiny in comparison, yeah, but so did my whole world.”

“So tell me something, stable boy,” Manohar called from his seat. “I’ve been puzzling through this. If you stole Erin’s birthright on graduation night—”

Hunter opened his mouth to protest, but Summer broke in. “Let him finish, Hunter. We’ve both been wondering about this.”

“—how did you get admitted to college so quickly?” Manohar asked. “You’ve cast yourself as an innocent who happened to be handed Erin’s fortune—”

I snorted. Then realized I should not have snorted while wearing an elegant autumn hat.

“Exactly.” Manohar pointed at me. “To be admitted, Hunter must have applied to school ahead of time, when you did, Erin. So the corporate takeover was premeditated.”

“That’s not what happened,” Hunter said. I couldn’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses, but he sounded angry. “I’d always planned to come to school here. I’m from here, and I wanted to get back here. I got a scholarship. The same one Erin got, actually. But it wasn’t enough, and if it hadn’t been for Erin’s grandmother, I would have been stuck in Kentucky.”

“Unless you worked your way through school slaving forty hours a week in a coffee shop,” I cut in. “God forbid.”