He doesn't say he's glad I'm here. Doesn't make the cheerful noise people make when they're managing someone skittish. He just looks at me evenly, and I like him for it immediately, and I don't know why.
"Come on," he says. "I'll walk you through."
He names the horses as we go. Ranger. Duke. A big roan named Cisco. A gray mare called Nell. I keep a careful foot of space from each stall door. He doesn't comment on it.
"This is Bonnie." He stops at a bay mare at the end of the aisle. "She's who you'll be working with."
I don't know how he decided that she would be my horse for the visit. Maybe he is like the sorting hat from Harry Potter and just goes off vibes, or maybe the owners already decidewhen accepting my booking. Probably the second, but he does seem faintly mysterious. That might just be my single hormones talking, though.
Bonnie looks over the stall door at me. Brown eyes, long lashes, a kind of patient attention that reads as assessment. She stretches her nose toward me.
I flinch hard. Step back. My heel hits the aisle board, and I make a small, humiliating sound.
"She likes you," Carson says. No change in his voice. "That's how she says hello."
"Right." My heart is somewhere in my throat. "Great."
"Eight o'clock tomorrow. Come by."
"Okay."
He nods once and goes back to his bench. I walk back out into the warm evening air and keep walking until I'm on my cabin porch with both hands on the railing, doing controlled breathing the way my old therapist taught me, which I've always thought is slightly ridiculous until right now.
The stables are visible from here, one rectangle of golden light where the barn doors are still open, and I stand there watching it like it might do something if I look away.
I haven't touched a horse. I've gone in, stood in the same aisle with them, stayed upright and not run, and managed to make only one humiliating noise in front of a man I'd like to impress for reasons I'm not examining yet.
It isn't nothing. It is, in fact, a start.
I sit in the porch chair until the light changes and the stars come out and the Hill Country settles into dark, slowly convincing my nervous system that the horses are still in their stalls and not coming to get me.
two
Carson
Iamusuallyupat five on a good knee day.
Spring damp gets in, so most mornings it's four-thirty. Lying still stops being worth it. I feed the horses in the quiet I've learned to like. Six years of it, and I still notice it, which probably means something.
Carl had offered me the job two weeks after my last ride, when I am still walking with a cane and have nothing but a truck and whatever prize money I haven't already spent on entry fees and motels. He'd pulled up alongside me at the feed store in Saddlehorn and said did I want to come work at Wild Vista, said it the way you'd offer a man a cup of coffee. Nothing in it but the question.
I'd said yes before I thought about it.
He hadn't made a thing of it. Just put me to work with the horses and let me find my footing. It takes a few months, and then it feels permanent in a way I haven't expected. The rodeo circuit life leaves marks. Not just the knee. The way you learnto pack light and move on. The way every relationship you try to keep gets thinned out by months of absence until there's not enough left to hold. Lauren had tried longer than most. I give her that. But I'd taught her that waiting for me is pointless, and by the time I am ready to stay put, she's built a life that doesn't have space for me.
That's not her fault. That's the particular kind of guilt you don't get to be angry about, because you did the thing.
I don't think about it much.
This morning I'm thinking about Josie.
I've had hundreds of nervous guests. The ones who booked beginner riding on a whim and showed up to find out they actually hate horses. The ones who quit after twenty minutes. The ones who gritted through it and came back changed. I can categorize people in five minutes: scared but motivated, scared and stubborn, scared and using it as permission to stay small.
She is something else. The flinch is full-body, involuntary. The kind that comes from something real in the past. And then her jaw sets. I watch it happen, that hardening in her expression, the way a person squares up for a fight with themselves. She is furious at herself for flinching. Anger directed inward, at her own body for betraying her.
I tell myself to stop thinking about her.
She shows up at five to eight.
