Friends With Horses by Natalie Keller Reinert

Author:Natalie Keller Reinert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: women's fiction
Publisher: Natalie Reinert
Published: 2023-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Alex

POPPY WAS ANNOYED I wouldn’t take her to Briar Hill so that she could start genuflecting to Jules’s saddles right away, but when I told her she could go up to the training barn and play with her new horse before dinner, she cheered up considerably. In fact, she was more like a ten-year-old than a sulky teenager, hustling up to the barn with a bag of carrots which would probably all go to Summer Sunset. Lucky horse. He’d fallen out of the racetrack and into the lap of a girl who would lavish love on him all summer. That was the best-case scenario for any of them.

I watched her scurry up the barn lane from the breakfast room’s broad windows. A late summer dusk was falling over the farm, and on the pastures, grazing horses were falling into shadow. Alexander came out of his office and poured himself a drink, then joined me at the window. The ice tinkled in his glass. “What are we watching?”

“Poppy,” I replied.

He wrinkled up his nose and asked, “We’re letting her wander around in the dark?”

“We?” I gave him a skeptical look. “She’s been in this country for about twenty-four hours and she’s been with me most of them. Not sure what your input could possibly be.”

I wasn’t really annoyed that Poppy was my problem; I liked her, and anyway, I was foisting her off on Jules. But it seemed like the principle of the thing still had to be argued.

“Well, I was working, and you said you were taking her up there…” Alexander shrugged. “Seems like it’s working out just fine.”

“I think so,” I agreed, then I sighed. “She needs some new clothes. She’s not dressed for Florida and I’m not sure she has the right things to work outside all summer.”

“Take her to the tack shop and get her outfitted, then.”

“I don’t know what to buy her.”

“She’ll know what she likes. You don’t have to do anything but pay for it.”

“She won’t ask my opinion?”

“A teenager, asking for your opinion?”

“Listen, I don’t know how to have a kid,” I confessed, watching Poppy disappear into the training barn. “Is she even a kid? At fifteen? I’m so confused.”

“She’s nearly sixteen,” Alexander said. He took a thoughtful sip of his drink. “For a Whitehall, that’s as good as grown-up.”

“I don’t know if that’s sad or admirable,” I said.

“It is what it is,” he replied, and we left it at that.

Two days later, we loaded Summer Sunset—just Summer, by now—into one of the smaller farm trailers and drove him to Alachua Eventing Co-op. In deference to the season, Poppy was wearing new, lighter riding gear we’d outfitted her in the day before at a local tack shop. She looked different already; the pale Whitehall hair and blue eyes were accented by bright candy colors, and her dramatic black makeup had been replaced with a generous slather of SPF. She was a Floridian now, I told her, as she rubbed a white drop of sun cream into the skin of her nose.

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