Kate Sherwood - Dark Horse 01 - Dark Horse (11 page)

Robyn nods. “Tomorrow’s my day off, so I guess they’ll be at the barn most of the day… you could talk to them there.” She stands, too, and walks over to Dan. “I was thinking of going out to see Justin. It’s been a while, and I thought… I thought maybe I should….”

Robyn tears up almost instantly and turns away. “God, Dan, I’m sorry. If I feel like this, how must you feel?”
“No, Robyn, don’t be sorry!” He reaches out and gently turns her to face him. He tilts her face up and uses his thumbs to brush the tears away, but they’re instantly replaced by new ones. “Everybody loves him, I know that. It’s not easy for anybody.” She buries her face in his shoulder, and he brings his arms around her, rocking her a little. “You’ll be okay. We’ll all be okay.” He hopes that if he says it enough, he’ll start to believe it too.

It’s not long before Robyn pulls away, and Dan finds that he misses the warmth of contact after she’s gone. “Sorry,” she mutters. “I’m good now…. Hey, if this is your last night here, I’m gonna make dinner for us, okay? Anything in particular you’d like?”

Dan laughs. “Robyn, who do you think you’re talking to? I know what you cook… I’ve got a choice between tofu stir fry, tofu spaghetti, or that tofu-chickpea-potato thing… which is really good, actually. Have you got the ingredients for that?”

Robyn’s eyes are still red, but she raises her head jauntily. “As a matter of fact, I do.” She takes his hand and pulls him toward the kitchen. “You can chop up the onion—I’ve cried enough for one day.”

They cook and eat and go to bed early, and the next morning Dan wakes up and showers, makes coffee for Robyn, and then heads to the barn before he can change his mind.

He pulls up and opens the door of the truck, and takes a deep breath of the horse-y air. He wonders what it says that the smell of manure makes him feel at home. Most of the horses are already outside, and Dan walks over to the paddock where Monty and some of the other geldings are picking lazily at the short grass. Dan whistles and they all look up… and then go back to their grazing. Apparently they didn’t miss him as much as he missed them. He ducks through the wood-slat fence and walks over to Monty.

Once he gets close, Monty raises his head and looks at Dan with a warm eye, and then takes a few steps forward to meet him. Monty snuffles at Dan’s pockets and then hangs his head over his shoulder so that Dan can lift his hands to scratch both sides of Monty’s neck at once. “Hey, buddy. How’ve you been?” Dan has always talked to horses. Justin said it wasn’t strange to
talk
to horses, but it was a little strange to ask them questions. But then he’d kissed the back of Dan’s neck and wrapped his arms around Dan’s chest, so it really didn’t seem like a criticism. “Do you want to go for a ride, buddy? Huh? We can’t go today, but tomorrow, I’m back. We’ll go up along the ridge, maybe. Does that sound good? And you can splash in the mud down by the pond too. It’ll be an all-terrain day, my friend!”

Monty snorts a little and backs up enough to be able to rub his forehead gently against Dan’s chest. Dan answers the request by bringing his hands up and rubbing Monty’s face vigorously. The gelding’s coat is clipped short, but he’s still shedding a little, and his face is apparently itchy. Monty leans into it, and angles his head so that Dan hits all the right spots. Finally, Dan slaps Monty’s neck to let him know the massage is over, and then turns back toward the barn.

At some point during Monty’s scratch-fest, Karl and Molly have apparently become aware of Dan’s arrival, and they’re standing by the fence waiting for him. That’s not bad, Dan decides. There are more distractions outside. Still, he’s not exactly looking forward to the conversation.

He walks toward them, squinting into the morning sun. He aims for the fence a panel down from where they’re standing and ducks through, then walks over to stand next to them, all three resting their arms on the top rail and watching the horses.

“Congratulations on the sale.” Dan finally says. “I didn’t hear a number, but Chris seemed to think it was a good price.”
Karl nods and clears his throat. “It was an excellent price.”
“Well, they’re excellent horses.” Dan replies. “Monty’s gonna be totally bald if he keeps shedding like that, but, otherwise….”
Molly laughs a little. “Well, as long as it doesn’t happen before midnight tonight, we’re okay.” She turns toward Dan a little, but he keeps staring out at the horses. “We wanted to thank you, Dan. For taking the job, making the deal happen….”

Karl interrupts gently. “We didn’t want Chris to tell you. We didn’t want you to feel at all obliged. But he said you needed to know all the information, that we’d gone wrong the last time by not telling you enough, not keeping you in the loop.”

Now it’s Dan’s turn to interrupt. “No, wait, it didn’t happen that way. Evan bought the horses because he wanted the horses. I told him I’d think about the job, but I didn’t commit to anything. I didn’t even say I’d do this month until after he’d already bought them.” Dan glances over at the others. “Seriously. I didn’t… they’re just good horses, and he wanted them.”

Karl and Molly exchange skeptical looks, and Dan sees them. “Don’t you think they’re good horses? I mean, he’d be crazy to
not
want them, right? And it’s not like he’s short on cash—and he’s got a pretty good plan for making the business work, I think.”

Molly raises an eyebrow, and Dan feels like an idiot. “I mean, obviously I don’t really know much about the business stuff. It was all spreadsheets and whatever… but a guy like Evan, he’d know what he was talking about, right?”

“Dan, I’m sure you could judge his plan! I wasn’t surprised by that, I was just… you seem to have spent a fair bit of time with him.” Molly gives him an inquisitive look, and Dan feels defensive again. Can she really think that he’d cheat on Justin, with Evan or anybody else?

“Not that much time, really.” Dan knows his voice sounds cold, and he really doesn’t care. “But he did mention that he’d talked to you about working out here for the next month, just keeping things running as they were.”

Dan doesn’t really like people thinking he needs charity. “Well, I’m sure we’ll be fine either way. Robyn’s staying, and she knows the system as well as anybody, so we can just hire some general laborers if we have to. I figured you might be busy packing up the house and finding a new place. But if you want to stay, of course the jobs are yours.” He pauses for breath. “I told Robyn she could do more riding, so we’d have to shuffle around a bit to share out the barn chores, but… yeah, if you want another month, that’d be great.” He hopes that was balanced enough. His spine is crawling at the thought of having conversations this awkward every day, but he knows that Karl and Molly would be really useful, and he knows that it would be rude to not give them the option.

“Well, we are going to be pretty busy getting the house packed up….” Dan starts to talk, to say it’s no problem, but Karl raises a hand to stop him. “But we’d like to see it through here, as well. I mean, this place is our life’s work. Those horses—I know you worked hard on them, Dan, but we did, too, and… well, it just doesn’t seem right, somehow, to have them all still here, without us being involved somehow.” Karl sounds a little choked up, and Dan is reminded that they had always planned to leave the farm to Justin. They’re sad to see it go, but that’s nothing compared how they must feel about the reason they’ve had to sell. “So, if it’s okay with you, we’d like to keep working here until the horses go.”

Molly steps around Karl and puts her hand on Dan’s forearm. “We’d really like to have some more time with you too. We know… we
know
we didn’t treat you fairly, deciding about Justin without talking to you. It honestly… we just had one terrible, horrible night of talking, and by morning we’d made up our minds. And once we’d decided, we couldn’t go back, couldn’t go through all that again.” Molly is crying a little, and Dan only hopes he can keep himself under control.

He looks out at the horses for a minute and doesn’t talk until he knows that his voice will be level. “I understand. And I don’t really disagree with the decision. I’m sorry I yelled at you about it.”

Karl is crying now too. “We’re going to lose our son. We know that now. We just—” Karl makes a move as if to hug him, but Dan jerks back a little. He didn’t plan to. He doesn’t want to hurt them, but….

This isn’t fair, Dan thinks. They can’t say he’s family, and then treat him like he’s not, and then try to say he is again… he needs to maintain control over this, needs to remember that they’re emotional and not thinking about what they’re saying.

He takes a small step backward. “No, of course not. You’re not losing me.” He plasters a smile on his face. It doesn’t matter what he says, it just matters what he feels, and he can keep himself from feeling anything for them if they’ll just stop crowding him. “It’ll be good to work together. No problem, everything’s good.”

Molly looks like he’s said exactly the wrong thing, but he really doesn’t know how to help her. He tries for a subject change. “I was thinking that Sunshine should probably get some more time on hills— work on her fitness, help her get her legs under her. Robyn could probably do that a few days a week, right?”

Karl and Molly look a little stunned by the new topic. Dan knows that the segue wasn’t exactly smooth, but he really can’t handle any more crying, so he charges on. “Is Casey still sore in front? We’re going to have to get a good farrier for him. Next time Scott’s here, maybe we could ask if he knows anybody out in California. In the meantime, though, is he sound to work?”

Karl takes a moment, but he manages to get back on track. “Uh… yeah, maybe, as long as we keep it light.”
Dan continues making plans with Karl, and eventually Molly joins back into the conversation. They agree to keep the work schedules as they were, although all three of them will make a point of spending more time on barn duties in order to free up some of Robyn’s time for riding. It seems a bit weird that Dan will be shoveling more shit
after
getting his new job than he did before, but he’s not willing to go back on his offer to Robyn, and the Archers seem to understand.

Once everything is figured out, he leaves them and heads back to town. He knows that Karl and Molly weren’t totally satisfied with the conversation, but he’s really not sure what he could have done differently.

He calls Becky in California and is blown away by her efficiency. She has already arranged to have a variety of office equipment shipped to Louisville. He just needs to give her an address and the delivery will be there in a couple of hours. She collects information on names of the staff, and asks him to collect some basic inventory information on what’s in the barn. Dan agrees to it all without too much thought.

He also calls his boss at JP’s and asks to be taken off the schedule as soon as possible. Seeing the horses again that morning had made it clear to Dan that he was always going to want to work in the horse business, and with Kaminski paying him, he doesn’t need to worry about making it from paycheck to paycheck, so the bartending job is no longer necessary. His boss isn’t thrilled. It was only a couple days earlier that Dan had been asking for more shifts. But bartenders are not known for their long-term reliability, so the man doesn’t seem too shocked and says that Dan doesn’t need to come in at all anymore.

Then Dan drives to the University of Louisville and finds the bookstore. He’s intimidated even walking into the place, but he finds a helpful sales clerk and asks for the textbooks for the first year business program. She asks a few questions and helps him find what he’s looking for, and he walks out a few minutes later with three hundred dollars’ worth of heavy, boring-looking books. He’s not really looking forward to reading them, but he doesn’t want to mess up with his new responsibilities.

He’s tempted to go out to Willowbrook with them. If he’s just reading, it doesn’t really matter where he is. But he remembers his resolution to stop visiting so often, so he goes to Robyn’s instead, picks up his stuff and heads out to the apartment over the barn. It doesn’t take long to move back in, especially since he leaves most of his belongings packed up. Then he takes the least offensive-looking book and heads downstairs to find a seat at the picnic table. The book might be boring, and his life might still be a little unsettled, but he can see the horses from where he’s sitting, and the sun’s warm on his shoulders. Sometimes, you just take what peace you can find.

D
AN
is surprised by how smoothly things go over the next couple weeks. There are a few awkward moments with Karl and Molly, but it’s not nearly as bad as he’d thought—as long as they have horses to think about, they’re all able to work calmly together. Robyn does well with her new responsibilities, and Dan finds that
parts
of the business textbooks are actually fairly interesting.

He has a couple of phone conversations with Linda Davis, Evan’s executive assistant, and finds her warm and charming, not at all the hyperefficient robot Evan had suggested she was. Dan wonders if the poor woman has had to adopt a cold persona around her employer just to keep his enthusiasm under some sort of control. She keeps Dan up to date on the construction schedule in California, and then calls to see if they can arrange a time for him to come out to inspect the site and help them with hiring.

“I’m not even sure if I’m going to be coming out with the horses, though,” Dan reminds her. “Right now, I still need to be here.” It feels ghoulish to clarify the reasons behind his indecision, seems ugly to say that he will only move to California if Justin is dead. He doesn’t even like to think about the implications of that himself. Now that he’s admitted that he wants the job, does that mean that he has a reason to want Justin to die? Dan has a growing understanding of why the Archers wanted to make sure that money wasn’t a factor before they made their decision to let Justin go.