Love Story(48)
Author: Jennifer Echols

Hiding sounded like an excellent idea, but it wasn’t what I’d had in mind. “I need money,” I said.

He stopped eating and eyed me from across the table. The look he was giving me

I had never seen this look from him before. I wondered if, for the first time, I was seeing that father from Hunter’s story. I had thought Tommy was a happy-go-lucky old soul who would give me the shirt off his back, but perhaps I’d gotten that impression only because I’d never asked him for anything.

Quickly I clarified, “I want to work for you today. Could you use an extra stable hand? Pay me what you used to pay Hunter.”

He raised his eyebrows, chewed and swallowed before he responded. “It’s your grandmother’s money, you know.”

“At least I will have earned it.”

In his grunt I heard acquiescence but also impatience at humoring the poor little rich girl. I might have told him never mind, he didn’t have to satisfy my whim. But I did want to spend the day at Churchill Downs. And I did not want to spend it in the owner’s box with Hunter and my grandmother.

In the darkness I helped Tommy load a brown stallion and a dun filly into the trailer. We drove back up the empty interstate and through the neighborhood of nineteenth-century houses in the style of my grandmother’s. At the orange stain of sunrise across the gray sky, we pulled slowly through the gate at Churchill Downs, all white-painted wood with twin spires towering over the grandstands.

Then we started work. I fed horses, watered horses, groomed horses. I didn’t exercise them because this close to their races, the trainer wanted specific experienced people riding them, sensing problems. I did, however, lead horses to and fro, and when a stallion reared up and kicked in protest at going back into the Blackwell Farms trailer, I was the one who leaped forward to grab the reins and talk him down. I acted automatically. It was only fifteen minutes later, when the truck leading the trailer pulled away and Tommy squeezed my shoulder, that my heart pounded at the danger I’d been in. An hour after that I realized I hadn’t been wearing a helmet.

Groups of agents and buyers and my grandmother’s assistants wandered into our farm’s section of the stables and out again, talking business over bourbon in clear plastic cups, lighting cigars after they’d walked away from the hay. I used to be part of these groups. I would hang at the periphery with other tipsy teenage heirs to horse farms, often Whitfield Farrell. I expected to see my grandmother in one of these groups. Repeatedly I peeked under a horse’s belly to look for her without looking like I was looking. I never saw her. Around noon I did, however, see Hunter.

He grinned with a middle-aged agent and my grandmother’s elderly lawyer, both powerful men, handy to know if you were pretending to take over a venerable business that had been in someone else’s family for five generations. They stood in the warm sunlight that had finally burned through the clouds. He took a sip of bourbon and watched me over the rim of his cup.

And then he was laughing at something the lawyer had said. He’d joined the boys’ club with a great personality, good looks, and no effort at all. I wasn’t sure anymore that he’d been watching me over his cup. He was in the sunlight, after all, and I was in the darkness. He couldn’t see me.

Staying on my feet and taking care of horses all day would have hurt enough, but my bruised hip started to throb, and my shoulders ached from holding the spooked horse steady. I noticed other stable hands sipping sodas and smoking cigarettes beside the vast parking lot, but I never asked for a break, and Tommy never suggested I take one. I suspected he was giving the princess exactly what he thought she wanted.

Just before the last race of the day, after we’d sent our best horse to the paddock to be shown off, Tommy jerked his head toward the track, telling me to follow him. In the sunshine I shed my Blackwell Farms jacket and tied it around my waist. We found a space at the white fence where we could see the track—nowhere near the finish line, which was in front of the grandstands, but with a great view of the fourth turn. He bought us both a hot dog at a cart. I bit into mine immediately, giving him my thanks with my mouth full. I hadn’t eaten since he’d fed me that morning.

As I ate, I watched him down huge bites. The whole hot dog took him four. Hunter did not eat like this. Hunter could eat a hot dog with a knife and fork and make you think everybody ate it like that on Long Island.

“What is it?” Tommy asked me. A dab of mustard clung to the corner of his mouth.

I handed him my napkin as a hint. “Were you in love with my mother?”

The half smile stayed in place on his lips. He and Hunter were both good at smiling through anything. But I saw his reaction in his eyes. He winced a little, crow’s-feet deepening and then relaxing in a split second.

“I didn’t have time,” he said, wiping his mouth.

“So it was lust,” I said.

He squinted at me. “Nnnnnn

Maybe. She was beautiful. She was also very funny. Like you. And your daddy didn’t treat her right. Like he doesn’t treat you right.”

It was my turn to wince. I hadn’t forgiven Hunter for dragging me down here on that pretense.

“That was a lot of it,” Tommy said. “She needed me. She said she needed me. The drive to rescue the damsel from the dragon is real strong, and real hard for a man to resist. That story never ends well, and I knew that going into it.”

I looked out over the track. We faced the back of the starting gate. Grooms were leading horses into it one by one. Our farm’s horse did not want to go. Nose inside, he braced his back feet outside the gate so they couldn’t close him in. Two of our grooms put their shoulders against his ass and pushed. I asked Tommy, “Why didn’t my grandmother fire you?”

Tommy watched the show at the gate, too, or seemed to. “Why didn’t she ship that filly off for dog food?”

“Because the filly meant no harm.” I recited what Tommy had explained to me when I was older and ready to listen.

The grooms managed to shove our horse inside the gate and snap the doors in place behind him before he could kick their heads off. They walked away mopping their brows with their sleeves as other grooms approached the gate with the next horse in the line-up.

“Honestly,” Tommy said, “I think she kept me on because of Hunter. She knew this was a good place for him. She’s always liked Hunter.”

“She sees herself in him,” I said. “They’re both manipulative and crazy like a fox.”

“There’s that,” he said flatly, staring out over the track, as if my grandmother and Hunter did not bother him at all. Or as if they bothered him very much. Both emotions looked the same on Tommy.

I asked, “When Hunter and I lived here, did you tell him to stay away from me?”

Tommy turned quickly toward me. By the time I looked over at him, surprise was gone from his face, but I’d seen that sudden movement.