Page 11 of Rolling Thunder

She dragged herself out of bed, poured a giant mug of iced coffee from a pitcher in the fridge, and stalked outside in her pajamas to confront him. By the time she arrived, the fence was fixed and Bill was nowhere to be found. Throwing up her hands, she stomped back to the house to put on riding clothes.

Fortified by still more coffee, she headed back down to the barn, pulled Rocket out of her stall, and cross-tied her for grooming. She pushed up her sleeves and considered the horse before her. Evan had branded Rocket a man-eater, but Kayla had to convert her into a rideable horse. She set down the rubber currycomb and fished out a bristle brush to dust the horse off. A black blur caught her eye. The dog was back, and once again, she stole Kayla’s curry as a toy and dashed merrily back and forth with it in the barnyard. Of all things she didn’t have time for today. But after so much thievery, she’d been practicing for this moment.

“Hey, little dog, want a cookie?” she asked cheerfully, even though right then she wanted to strangle her little four-legged friend.

The dog stopped, floppy ears perked, looking up at her with the silliest and most endearing eyes Kayla had ever seen. Kayla’s rubber currycomb was cocked sideways in the dog’s mouth, hanging out like a cartoon cigar. “Here’s your cookie,” she said softly, fishing one out of a bag of dog treats she had stashed in the barn for just this occasion.

The dog ran up to her and dropped the curry. Kayla covered it with her boot before handing the dog her treat, because she’d already learned the hard way that the dog could swallow a cookie at warp speed, grab the stolen loot, and be off again before Kayla could react. So far, Kayla had lost two other currycombs, a hoof pick, and her barn scissors to this mischievous little thief. What she did with all of it was a mystery. She’d never found the things that went missing. The old man at the feed store probably thought she was losing her mind, buying a new currycomb every week.

“Ha! I outsmarted you, you little devil,” she said to the dog, retrieving her grooming implement and putting it on a shelf, where she hoped her little kleptomaniac pal couldn’t reach it. The dog cocked her head, wagged her tail, and looked up at Kayla with just a hint of whites showing under her eyes. Kayla sighed. She couldn’t even pet the dog because if she reached for her, the dog darted away to avoid being caught, ending her big adventure.

“Go home. Now that I know you have one,” Kayla ordered her. Instead, the dog sat down, and wagged her tail again. “Fine, don’t go home.”

Kayla went back to grooming the horse. She led Rocket out into the arena, knowing she had to ride and have her put up before the worst of the heat set in. Neither man nor beast could survive the midday southwest Florida sun during its two seasons: hot summer and fucking-hot summer.

This time, as Kayla prepared to mount, Rocket looked at her suspiciously, but without the fire of terror. Kayla rubbed her neck, acknowledging the change.

“You’re all right,” Kayla murmured as she swung on. As the horse walked off calmly, Kayla shifted to rub her neck again, but Rocket misunderstood and scooted forward a few steps, expecting the lash of the reins on her flank. When it didn’t come, she calmed again. She was trying to trust Kayla. Kayla was honored, but also worried, because she still had to convince Rocket’s young rider to be much more careful or else there would be no resolution. Rocket would be sent to the auction, for a chain of events that was entirely not her fault. The injustice of it made Kayla all the more determined to help the mare.

When she finished in the barn, she went up to the house to email the horse’s owner and report on her progress, hoping they would opt to leave her there for another week of training. That would get her a lot closer to the next bank payment…but it didn’t pay her electric bill…it didn’t fix the damn broken porch light. She had to go to the feed store, and that would put her further in the hole. If she couldn’t get another horse or two in for training, she was going to have to call Trent again.

It was that sobering thought that drew her off course on the way home from the feed store. The dirt road to the fairgrounds beckoned her with promise.

The Collier County Fairground was hallowed ground to rodeo people and Kayla alike. Her grandmother had been a local celebrity in her day. People gathered around to ask her advice, and especially to watch her ride.

The long dirt driveway ran about three-quarters of a mile around starter arenas, roping arenas, and finally, the one with the big lights and the grandstand. There were a few people schooling horses, getting ready for the Friday night rodeo.

Kayla didn’t know them by name, so instead of stopping at the schooling arena, she tacked a flier to the huge bulletin board by the grandstand. Being Kay Daniels’s granddaughter had gotten her a few calls already. But scoring training clients from her grandmother’s coattails left a sour knot in her stomach. It was what her grandmother had wanted her to do, so she was glad that she was doing it, but the guilt she felt for not being there for her grandmother at the end was an overwhelming dark blanket that covered any good thing that happened now.

There was some action at the sales barns at the very back of the property, so Kayla cruised down out of habit. There was another bulletin board down there where she could leave her number. The last Friday of every month was a rodeo and an auction. She and her grandmother had often scouted the sales barns for horses to give lessons and trail rides. Her grandmother had a skilled eye for picking a good horse, like finding a gem in a pile of rocks. The auction was often a sad and scary place for a horse to wind up. Too many were dumped by uncaring owners who didn’t want to treat an injury or care for an animal in old age.

“We can’t save them all,” Kay Daniels had said gently to a young heartbroken Kayla as she led her away from huddled groups of despairing horses.

Standing in the dusty hallway of the run-down barn whose open-air post-and-rail walls were coated in cobwebs and thick dust, Kayla felt like she could practically see the ghost of her grandmother gliding along in that ever-graceful way she had, glancing into each holding pen.

In a trance of memory, Kayla followed along behind the apparition of Gram Kay under the bare bulbs that lit the barn as the sun began to set outside. The rodeo drew enough dangerous young cowboys that Kayla’s mother would have undoubtedly found one to run off with for the weekend, leaving Kayla in her grandmother’s care. Thus, she spent half her childhood perusing the holding pens before the auction with her grandmother.

The barn was dim and the ammonia tang of unmucked stalls burned her eyes. But the fourth holding pen drew her attention, and she stopped to look. There were a few horses standing together near the back wall, and her breath caught in her throat like she’d been punched. It couldn’t be. She leaned over the top rail, scrutinizing a brown-and-white paint horse. She mentally traced each mark on the horse, which she knew by heart, having spent most of her life with him.

“Joey?” she said softly, finding her voice unexpectedly scratchy. He lifted his head and looked over at her, one eye blue and one brown. He was old and thin, but it was him.

He would be exactly twenty-four, and she would know because they were the same age. People weren’t supposed to go into the holding pens, but she shrugged off that knowledge and let herself in, carefully approaching. Even if it was Joey, he might not be the same horse she remembered. Hard living changed everyone.

No ears were pinned; no one threatened her. One horse shifted restlessly away, but the paint horse nickered at her. She would know that sound anywhere. A tidal wave of emotion hit her, choking her, pouring out as hot tears that blinded her. Still, she touched him and worked her way around to the opposite side to find the freeze brand on his offside to confirm.

“Oh, Joey,” she choked out, palming tears off her face and rubbing his neck. He bent his head toward her and nuzzled her. “How did you wind up here? Gram would never have let this happen.” Those words applied to so many things in her life. And closely following that was the realization that if she had been there at the end for her grandmother, she could have prevented Joey from winding up here. Just another of the many different ways she had failed in her young life.

“Help you, miss?”

She jumped so much that she startled the horses, and they scooted away, clustering at the other end of the pen. She spun around and saw Toby Thornton peering in at her. She hastily scrubbed at her face again, embarrassed to be caught breaking the rules of entering a holding pen and crying her eyes out with a bunch of broken-down horses.

“Hi, Toby, I’m….I’m sure you remember my grandmother, Kay Daniels?”

His face softened perceptibly. “Everybody around here remembers Miss Kay.”

She nodded a little. Of course. Again, that sour knot of wrongdoing…name-dropping her grandmother to get out of trouble…when she hadn’t even been there for her in her dying days.

“I’m sorry, I know I’m not supposed to be in here. It’s just that this was her horse.”

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