Show Barn Blues Read online

  I nodded. “Maybe she does.” Kennedy was pulling down the stirrups, measuring the lengths of the leathers against Maddy’s height, making a guess and adjusting them by a few holes on each side. Maddy watched raptly, her face fascinated where a few minutes before it had been stony and closed-off. “Might work out for everyone if she does. She sure looks like a born instructor.”

  Colleen nodded. “I’ll still be watching her like a hawk, though,” she said after a moment, and she gave her a wrist an absent little rub.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “Did you see? Did you see that riding lesson? I had her trotting by the end of the half hour! She’s a natural! What a perfect little hunter she’s going to make. I can see her doing small ponies for at least a year before she outgrows it. Maybe two. Her mother’s short. That is her mother, right? Is she going to buy her a pony? How serious is she?”

  I sighed and dropped Ivor’s reins, letting the stallion stretch his neck. I’d been hoping for some nice flatwork tonight, getting him in touch with his dressage side so he’d be a little more tractable when we were jumping. He’d been practically running away with me in our last few jump schools, pulling hard and running into the bit on the curves between fences. Show jumping was supposed to be fast, sure, but not out of control. I liked a pretty, rigidly controlled ride. The Germans were my heroes.

  There was no concentration to be had while Kennedy was in the ring, draped over Sailor’s bare back like a kid at summer camp, chattering excitedly about the riding lesson I’d let her teach.

  Let her teach — hah! She’d saved my ass back there. I’d had zero connection with Maddy, and that girl had been ready to let loose on me with all the terror of the spoiled child. I’d had no idea Colleen let her youngest run so wild. It must be because she was the only girl, and so much younger than her sons, I supposed. Or maybe it was just because Colleen wasn’t good at controlling personalities as strong as hers — Bailey had certainly made his preferences very clear to her from time to time, and she’d just sat back and let him misbehave. It was one of the reasons I had looked forward to giving him a very thorough tune-up while her wrist was still bound up.

  “You did very well,” I told Kennedy now. “You’re definitely a natural at teaching children.”

  “I haven’t been around kids in ages,” Kennedy gushed rapturously. “I love their little brains. They’re such sponges, they just soak up the knowledge. They don’t argue, either, they accept everything you tell them as the gospel truth. It’s so much easier to mold a child rider than an adult rider.”

  “Is that so.” I ran my fingers through the steel-gray strands of Ivor’s mane. It needed pulling again; I swore that horse’s mane grew unnaturally fast. I’d put it on Margaret’s list — her no-nonsense attitude worked best with Ivor’s changeable, demanding personality. He usually came back from a Margaret grooming with his tail between his legs and his nose in the dirt, begging me to forgive him for whatever wrong he’d committed to deserve such a fate. Maybe she’d cure him of this rushing problem he’d suddenly developed.

  Kennedy was still talking. “I took five girls to the Pony Finals at the state horse show and we brought home champion, reserve champion, third, sixth, and eighth. Not bad, huh? I mean granted it’s no Winter Equestrian Festival, but the competition was pretty stiff! Grace, I don’t know, I think this is maybe what I’m supposed to be doing.” She paused and looked my way. “Grace?”

  I hastily wiped away the skeptical expression I’d been wearing. “Pretty impressive results, Kennedy!” Was she thinking about giving up her office job and going back to teaching kids to ride? I had been daydreaming of having her teach and lead riding lessons for me, but there was no way I could pay her anything like what she was accustomed to making in the real world. Still, I didn’t want to discourage her. Maybe there was something I could scrape from the corners of my beleaguered bank account. “Must have been fun,” I went on cautiously. “I can see why you would miss it.”

  “Come on, Grace,” she said, which meant she knew exactly what I’d been thinking. “You know it’s true. Maybe I burned myself out before, but maybe that’s because I wasn’t doing it your way! With boundaries, and rules, like you said. Maybe I could do it again, get it right this time. Maybe you could help me out.”

  “How can I help you out?” Her words made me wary. I wasn’t prepared to be the answer to her problems. I wasn’t here to be anyone’s salvation but my own. Casting about for extra time before I answered her, I asked Ivor for a few wobbly lateral moves without picking up the reins. He crossed his forelegs crookedly, and tripped. The grace of a ballerina, I thought with a wry shake of the head. “Kennedy,” I said. “Let’s slow down. You already have a good job, and up until a few days ago you were very happy with your trail riding. You want to give up a steady paycheck and go back to teaching, where your salary depends on the weather and who decides to show up for lessons that week? You want to give up your fun rides and go back to competing? That’s a pretty big change of heart and lifestyle to happen overnight.”

  Kennedy rode up beside us, her face serious, and I reined back to let her have her say. Ivor dug his face down against the bit. Rude. I was going to beat this horse to death if he kept up this nonsense. Not really, I loved him. But still. “Kennedy,” I said wearily. “You are literally having a quarter-life crisis. You are turning thirty and realizing that when you were a kid, you didn’t plan on having an office job and a pleasure horse. You’re thinking that there’s no glory in that. But let me tell you, you’re happy with what you have. You really are.”

  Kennedy shook her head, and her eyes were aglow with conviction. “Oh, Grace, I wish you were right. But you have to understand…” she paused, looked down at the horseshoe tracks studding the clay of the arena, as if she didn’t want to meet my gaze anymore. “I’ve tried to do this before. I keep trying to come back to the horse business, and I keep failing. Although the last time, really, it wasn’t my fault.”

  A-ha! I looked up at her, smiling mischievously. I remembered the suspicion I’d had the first time I watched her ride without reins, and a scrap of gossip floating around the boarders’ tack room. “You were the princess at the dinner show!”

  She nodded, and then looked up with a sudden smile on her face. I could see it then, just as I had the day she’d dropped her reins and started trotting around the arena with her arms above her head — the showmanship, the sudden glamour, the gleaming smile. “It was so fun. I cried and cried when the place closed down.”

  A failed princess, exiled from a bankrupt kingdom. That was actually kind of sad. “At least you owned your horse. Didn’t the other ones go to auction?”

  “It was a private auction,” she said quickly. “No one went to slaughter. No one sold for less than two grand, actually.”

  “That’s good.” It had been in the newspapers, but I hadn’t paid the sale much mind. I didn’t need a circus-trained Arabian in my barn. Did anyone? Apparently so, if they’d all sold for good money. Everyone was looking for something different in the horse business. Takes all kinds, and all that. “So it turned out all right. And you went back to your job that pays you actual money, instead of princess money, which I assume was not gold coins?”

  “Not even close,” Kennedy sighed. “But it’s just not fulfilling, being away from horses all day. I miss them all the time. Why do you think I was coming so early or so late when my job was keeping me too busy to come during regular hours? I can’t stay away.”

  I looked up at the ceiling and heaved a sigh of my own. “What is your job, anyway?”

  “Oh, I’m in finances. Financial blah-blah-blah manager.”

  That did sound boring. In fact, it sounded kind of terrible. “I’m so sorry,” I said, grinning to take away the sting.

  “Me too. So help me out,” Kennedy said seriously. She was sitting sideways on Sailor now, both legs hanging over his right side. Sailor ducked his head and ran his nose through the clay, looking for bits of grass or h
ay that might have blown into the arena. He ignored his rider’s childish antics better than any school pony I’d ever seen, better even than Douglas, who was just plain too old to care. I considered them for a moment. With Kennedy’s natural affinity for children, and her obvious ability to train a completely bombproof horse, I might be looking at a whole new line of business for Seabreeze. A very lucrative business.

  The show pony business.

  “How’s your savings account?” I asked her. “You’re going to need to live on it for a while.”

  Kennedy’s face lit up like a child’s on a particularly bountiful Christmas morning.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  With her notice given and Rodney alerted that we would take five trail horses, two ponies, and his entire client list, Kennedy had already gone online and ordered business cards. Children’s Riding Programs Manager, Seabreeze Equestrian Center, the stiff little cards announced in regal Roman font. I admired them with her, holding them up to the sun and pronouncing them suitably professional.

  “I knew someone who used Comic Sans because he said kids reacted well to that font,” I told her, looking at her sidelong from the raised ivory card, and Kennedy pretended to gag and die from horror. I smiled. She was actually funny, and nice to have around, now that she wasn’t spending all of her time putting my clients in harm’s way and ignoring the barn’s posted hours. I found I liked her.

  It was a good thing I liked her, because Kennedy took to spending every waking hour in my company. Her constant presence bothered Anna, who was still having trouble accepting Mason wasn’t going to be her big show horse after all, and who wanted to be my special little barn buddy since she was my working student. I gave Anna extra riding lessons to make up for it, all of which Kennedy watched, chin in hands, taking it all in, and then reviewed with me in the office afterwards, asking copious questions about lesson plans, student progress, benchmarks.

  Now and then, the hero-worship got annoying.

  “You know, you told me you were a successful instructor before, and I believed you, but now that you’re constantly asking me how to teach I’m starting to wonder if I should’ve checked your references first.” To be fair, I had checked her references in a Google-search manner of speaking, finding newspaper confirmation she had been the starring princess at Horse Country Dinner Theater, and seven years ago her students had taken the top three spots at the Indiana State Fair Pony Finals. There was even a picture of her standing with the three girls and their gleaming white ponies, smiling their faces off. I’d figured that was all the confirmation I needed that her stories were true. But she was acting as if she’d never taught a day in her life.

  “No! It’s not about that!” Kennedy looked alarmed. She dropped the pen she’d been using to take notes. “I just want to be sure I’m teaching your way. This is your riding program, after all.”

  I shook my head. “Listen, Kennedy — you’re going to have your own teaching style, and you’ve already proven that’s a good thing by the way you connected with Maddy. Just do your thing, be safe, and if we have to discuss anything in the future… we’ll worry about that.”

  Kennedy nodded. She folded up the notes she had been taking and slipped them into her jacket pocket.

  “You going to look at ponies later?” None of the ponies we’d be getting from Rodney would be of the show caliber we’d need. The trail horses would do double duty as school horses until I started up the trail rides in spring, but of course, they were hardly A-circuit material either. We would need some classy ponies before these kids were ready to hit the horse shows. I’d put Kennedy on the job of tracking down a show prospect we could put some mileage on and then sell to Colleen once Maddy was ready for her own pony. It would be better than sharing the commission with another trainer on an older, expensive pony with show experience, especially in a few years when Maddy outgrew it and we could sell it on instead of retiring it. If Colleen delivered on her promise of PTA moms with pigtailed daughters, I’d just rinse and repeat. Ponies for everyone!

  “Around five.” She pulled out her phone and consulted the notes she’d made on it. “At Dennis Lowery’s place.”

  “That’s about an hour away. You’d better get going.”

  “Aren’t you coming?”

  “I have riding lessons. So don’t make any final decisions, and don’t let Dennis tell you that he has six other buyers lined up. He doesn’t. That’s just Dennis.” I’d known Dennis Lowery for twenty years. Back before the hotels and houses moved into the neighborhood, he’d been boarding and training just up the road with fifty stalls — a small empire. They used to go on trail rides, I remembered — sometimes riders would just pop up in the parking lot, Dennis laughing at the head of the line, playing trail-boss. That was back before I rebuilt the farm, before there I’d added the covered arena, before my stalls and my parking lot were filled with European imports. Dennis was old Florida, a cowboy with a good brain for business, and when the new neighbors moved in, he’d bought a Welsh stallion and a few mares and started breeding show ponies. Now his old place was a golf course and his business was up in Lake County, where he continued to sell ponies for more than they were worth.

  “I’m serious now,” I warned. “Dennis is going to try to fool you into making an offer for twice what that pony is worth.”

  “It’s a Swansdown pony,” Kennedy said doubtfully. “Gray, already jumping courses, auto lead changes. It’s worth a fortune anyway.”

  “Swansdown, Farnley, whoever its daddy was, trust me — he’ll ask for more than it’s worth. The problem is, everyone else in town already knows his game. He’s going to see you as fresh blood. We don’t need this pony. It’s practically finished. There’s no point buying a made pony for Maddy before she’s even had her second riding lesson. We have the time to do that work ourselves. So if it’s worth it, great. If not… just leave it alone.” I got up from my desk. “I’m going to ride Bailey for twenty minutes before Colleen comes for her ride. He’s still being kind of an asshole. You hop on the computer and see if any other prospects are in the neighborhood. Look for some more youngsters, too, if you feel comfortable starting them over fences.” I figured we could always find room for ponies. I could stick them out in a paddock or something.

  “Of course I do!” Kennedy’s face lit up. “I’d love to start some babies!”

  “Well, good, because they’re cheaper.” I had been examining my bank account, trying to figure out how to finance this new business segment. The best option, to attain the best ponies, would be to sell Hope as soon as possible, but I’d already paid for several shows with him. If he pinned well at those, he’d be worth that much more. We could float along with one almost-finished pony for Maddy and a few greenies which would be ready when other students were ready to buy, and maybe we could pick up one or two more youngsters come next summer, when breeders were starting to take stock and put some horses on sale.

  That would give us plenty of young ponies for Kennedy to train up into show ponies, and when students were ready to buy, we’d have the stock ready for them. No reason to send them elsewhere and split a commission.

  Kennedy’s taking charge of the children and ponies would leave me free to worry about the current show season until the end of March, and then start the trail rides when everything settled down in the spring. I’d have three businesses then, I thought. Adults, children, trails. It was exciting to think about. I was beginning to realize I had been waiting for something new and interesting in my life for a long time. After a while, even the show circuit had grown rather stale. We all got the show barn blues.

  I left Kennedy to her computer horse-hunting, humming happily as she clicked through pages of fine print, typos, and awkward horse photos, and went thumping down the stairs to the barn. November had rolled in with plenty of chilly days and gray skies, not unlike a more northern clime, and the horses were starting to grow wooly coats. I could hear the whine of clippers from a wash-stall, where Margaret was givin
g someone an early haircut. Ivor whinnied to me from his stall, poking his nose through the stall bars, and I gave him an absent-minded stroke as I passed. He lifted his lip and snapped his teeth with an audible clack. I stopped and looked at him, and the stallion retreated into the back of his stall. He knew that look.

  “You’ve been a real bastard lately, you know that?” I told the gray horse, and he put his head down and rubbed it against one boney knee, to let me know he didn’t care what my opinion was, as long as he was out of my reach. I shook my head. I had Ivor in some pretty big classes in the next few weeks, and with his attitude lately, we were heading for an equally big crash.

  I made my way further down the aisle, and was greeted by Bailey, kicking his stall door. The sliding door shook on its runners. I smacked the bars with my bare hand and he jumped backwards. “What is with you animals lately?” I snapped. Between Bailey and Ivor, I was looking at nonstop insurrection. Naturally he was being an idiot today, of all days, when Colleen was planning on her first jumping lesson since her spill on the trails. “I’m going to have to give you more than a ‘light warm-up,’ ” I told him, and he snorted hard, blowing snot all over the stall door.

  I shook my head and went in search of Anna or Tom to get him tacked up. Behind me, Bailey resumed his bashing of my expensive stall door.

  I looked into the row of wash-stalls and Margaret switched off her clippers. To my surprise, I saw the horse cross-tied there, half-shaved like a show poodle, was Douglas. We didn’t usually pay much attention to Douglas, as long as he was healthy and had his hooves picked every day. “You’re clipping him?”

  “Well, look at him,” Margaret said defensively, waving the massive clippers for illustration. “He looks like a Highland cow.”