Matt & Zoe (16 page)

He saw me and I saw him and I left in a big hurry. Not long after, my phone started ringing, over and over again. I didn’t answer.

Chase was a mistake in the first place. He wasn’t a soldier—a college dropout who had wandered on his own into Asia, eventually settling in Japan, where he found a job teaching English at a private school in Tokyo. It was a nice job if you could get it, I suppose. He didn’t get paid too much, but he was able to live in Tokyo rent free. He was good looking, with an easy going attitude. He was a prick.

“What do you think, Zoe?”

Crap.
I snap back to the present when Matt’s voice cuts through. Nicole is looking at me with an eyebrow arched. I don’t know if the guys noticed my exit from reality, but
she
sure did.

I don’t even bother to try to cover it. “I’m sorry. I was away for a moment. What were we talking about?”

Tyler bursts out laughing. Of course he would. I smile a practiced, fake smile. A smile they won’t see through. Because I’m off balance now. I join in the banter for a few minutes. Nicole goes off on another story about being a cop at UMASS. She has no end of interesting stories, and some of them might even be true.

More than once as we eat, I find myself looking at Matt. Something about him seems different. I’m not sure what it is about him. He’s more—I’m not sure what word I’m looking for—he’s more
self-contained
than most men I’ve known. It’s not that he’s emotionally distant—many guys are, but he doesn’t come across that way at all. He
does
come across as a very private person. Self-contained. He described Tyler as his
best friend.
The two of them don’t seem all that close. Guys who have been friends a long time share a lot of in-jokes. They insult each other and laugh and have a certain easy air about them which is unmistakable. If I had to guess, I’d say Tyler doesn’t know Matt at all.

I decide then and there, I’m going to find out a lot more about Matt Paladino.

Chapter Ten

Who are you again? (Zoe)

When the alarm goes off the next morning, I groan a little. My head hurts from one too many glasses of wine.

Nothing to be done for it. The horses don’t care if I’m hung over. I have to get moving.

I’m out of bed and having a cup of coffee by 6:45, and Jasmine joins me a few minutes later. Then we walk together, wordlessly, to the barn.

It’s not cold enough yet that the horses can’t pasture on the grass, but it will be soon. And hay costs money that I don’t have. So out into the pasture they go. I check the stalls. All three need to be mucked out this morning.

“You’re okay leading them out?” I ask.

Jasmine doesn’t sneer, but gets pretty close. I fit the halters on each of the horses, then I pass Mono’s lead to Jasmine. I follow behind her with Nettles and Eeyore.

Mono looks eager to go, prancing a little bit. I was twelve at least before I was handling horses the way she is. She’s a natural, and she loves it. When Mono stops to eat the lawn instead of going on to the pasture, she pulls him up like a pro.

Once we get to the gate, Mono raises his head and tail high and blows a loud snort, then paws at the ground. He’s ready to go. I steer the other two horses into the enclosure, but I keep a close eye on Jasmine as I release Nettles and Eeyore. Mine are much more docile than Mono.

She reaches up and unhooks the lead and steps back. He wheels around, knickers at the other horses, and takes off at a gallop. Eeyore and Nettles follow, whinnying behind him.

It’s crazy—I never wanted to be like Mom, living my life around and for horses. In fact, sometimes I resented the hell out of her horses, because it seemed that they got far more of her love than I did. But—something about them—I’ve missed them. I’ve missed this. And I never would have guessed that was even possible.

We head back together and wordlessly begin work in the stable. She cleans the water buckets while I muck out the stalls. I’m so intently wrapped up that I don’t hear a car outside. I nearly jump when someone coughs behind me. I spin around in shock, my heart thumping.

Oh.
It’s a woman—forty-five maybe, wearing an expensive coat and pants and shoes which don’t look suitable for the inside of a stable. Beside her is a pensive looking ten year old girl.

“Oh—hello….”

She begins speaking in a quick, businesslike tone. “Hi. Is Lucinda around? What time should I come pick up Mary? No one was here last week when I got here—”

“I’m Zoe Welch. Who are you again?”

The woman stops talking but looks impatient. “I have to be going. Can you just let me know where Lucinda is—”

I cut my eyes to the girl—Mary?—and say, “She’s not—”

Jasmine cuts me off. In a factual voice, she says, “She’s dead.”

The woman’s eyes widen in shock. “What? Oh my God! What happened?”

“Car accident,” I say. “And you’re here for?”

“Mary’s lesson, of course.” The mother looks nearly offended that my mother is dead. I want to punch her in the throat. Mary, meanwhile, looks like she’s going to burst into tears.

Jasmine says to me, “Mom has a small group of girls on Saturday mornings.” Then she says to Mary, “Come on, Mary. Walk with me down to see Mono?”

The little girl nods and takes Jasmine’s hand. Both girls run off.

I take a breath, trying to focus myself on not committing any violent acts this early in the morning.

“I don’t know what your arrangement was with my Mom.”

“Your Mom? I’m so sorry.” She actually looks genuinely sorry. She seems to sink into herself, as if whatever hot hair she had inside propping her up had been released through a slow valve. She says, “I used to bring Mary here Saturday mornings. But I guess—”

“You still can, for now,” I say. “I don’t know if I’m going to take on all of her work, but I can for the next couple of weeks until things are sorted out.”

“Are you qualified?” She looks skeptical.

“I’ve been riding since I was younger than they are. And I assisted my mom for years before I went off in the Army. You can leave her.”

The woman looks inappropriately grateful. I think she has somewhere to be, and looks at this as a babysitting engagement. Fine. Something about the girl just made my heart sad.

The woman makes her escape. It makes me wonder how many other students there are, and where they were last week? Where was I? It’s all fuzzy. Did they knock on the door and we just slept through? I can’t remember. What I
do
know is that I need to clear the fog out of my brain and get moving.

I walk out of the barn and scan the yard. Jasmine has a bail of hay on the back end of the garden wagon, a four-wheeled cart made out of a steel. She’s showing Mary how to stuff the feeding nets with hay for the night. I approach the two of them.

Mary is still sniffling. “Hey, you guys,” I say in a low voice. “So—is the normal drill same as it used to be?” I look at Jasmine with the question.

She says, “Chores, stalls, everything, then lessons. Usually there’s three or four girls.”

I nod. “Okay. Well, we’re almost done in the barn. I’ll go sweep up while you finish bagging?”

“I got it, Zoe.” Jasmine’s voice has an edge to it as she says the words. I expect her to roll her eyes next.

I shrug. She does have it. So I walk back toward the stable and begin to sweep. I find myself doing with aggression. I’m gritting my teeth. Mary’s mother—she never even introduced herself—immediately raised my hackles. Her perfect suit and perfect shoes, her self-centered initial reaction to my mother not being there, all conspire to fill me with rage. I sweep harder and harder, grinding my teeth and trying to contain the red hot emotion that surges inside of me. I feel as if my face is contorted, my forehead hurts and I’m struggling to keep my chin from trembling and I’m horrified to realize that I’m crying.
Crying.
I don’t want to cry, I don’t need to cry, I need to stay strong for Jasmine and how the hell am I going to do that if I can’t even keep it together?

I drop the broom and walk toward the back of the stable, staring up at the corrugated metal ceiling with its streaks of rust along the edges and—

“Zoe? Are you okay?”

I spin around in horror.

Matt Paladino stands in the door of the barn, his face a mix of concern and … what? I don’t get his expression. His eyes are wide and brown and focused on me like laser beams. He moves toward me and says, “Are you all right?”

“Of course I’m all right,” I say, but the tears running down my face—
still
running down my face—reveal the lie. I don’t want him to see me like this. I don’t want
anyone
to see me like this. I step back into the darkness of the stable, but he steps forward.

“Zoe? You’re crying.”

Gritting my teeth, I say, “My parents just died.”

He walks closer. “I know. And I know how much that hurts.”

My shoulders sink and I turn away from him. “Go away, Matt.”

He doesn’t go away. Instead he approaches even closer. Then he puts a hand on my shoulder. That’s all it takes. I let out a sob, then another, then he pulls me to him. I manage to keep my arms up in between us, my palms flat against his chest, but he wraps his arms all the way around me. And I cry.

He whispers in my ear. “It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay.” I know he’s lying. I just cry harder.

“I’ve got to pull myself together,” I cry. “My mom’s students are coming. I think.” I sniff and hiccup. I
hate
this.

He says in a low tone, “You go in and clean up. I’ve got this for now.”

Relief and embarrassment flood me at the same time. I back away and run into the house and scrub my face.

Now kick (Matt)

When Zoe runs inside, I do the only thing I can. I keep one eye on the girls outside and begin shoveling the stall which she’d been working on. I was never a stablehand or anything like that, but I know horses and what needs to be done with them. Growing up like I did, that sort of knowledge is ingrained.

Carlina’s dad—who had insisted I call him
Uncle Nick—
once said to me,
It’s all about your relationship with the horses, Matty. They’ll break anything. They’ll get into anything. But they also love you if you love them. Which means you gotta take care of ‘em.

I gave up that life a long time ago, but this I can handle.

Jasmine and her friend come back into the stable and Jasmine lets out a little cry. “Mister P!” She runs over and hugs me.

I smile. “Hey, Jasmine. Who is this?”

Jasmine says, “This is Mary. She takes riding lessons.”

“I see. And what have you two been up to?”

“Stuffing hay bags,” Jasmine says in a tired voice. I half expect her to roll her eyes. I’m familiar with it. Horses are grazing animals—designed to eat slowly and steadily. Throw a bale of hay in front of them and they’ll eat it too quickly. Instead, most stables stuff hay inside bags, where the horses have to chew it a little at a time as they pull the hay through the mesh bag. Back when I was learning to ride, Carlina’s father Nick used to make his hay bags from discarded netting once used by the big-top acts.

I move into the next stall over, carrying the muckrake. “You shovel and I’ll sort.”

“Okay,” Jasmine says.

We get to work clearing the stalls of refuse. A moment later Zoe returns, looking composed. She raises an eyebrow when she sees the two girls shoveling, then shrugs and begins working on the third and final stall. “Soon as we’re done in here we’ll get going on the horses, okay?”

Jasmine grins.

“Mary,” Zoe says. “Who have you been riding?”

Mary doesn’t answer right away. In fact, she looks like she might crawl underneath the wheelbarrow.

“She mostly rides Eeyore,” Jasmine says. “Mary’s still new.”

“That’s fine,” Zoe says. “Everyone starts somewhere.”

A few minutes later we’ve finished with the stalls and the floor of the barn. Everything is swept clean and dry and the barn smells of fresh sawdust.

“All right,” Zoe says. “Let’s head out to the paddock.”

Both girls take off running. I walk at Zoe’s side, but don’t say anything, preferring to absorb the warmth. But as we get about halfway to the paddock, where I can see Zoe’s three horses grazing, she asks me, “So, what brings you back here today?”

I cut my eyes over to her face. She looks good—fresh, her hair loose, no makeup on. I don’t have a very good excuse.

“Come on,” she says.

I shrug. “Honestly, it’s because I wanted to see you. Last night wasn’t enough.”

She snorts. “So you come and find me falling apart. That’s fantastic.”

“Everybody is entitled to fall apart sometimes. And you’ve got plenty of reason.”

She opens the gate and says, “Slip in there quick, sometimes Mono tries to nose his way out.”

I follow her instructions, knowing that no matter how strong I might be, I would never be able to stop a thousand pound horse if it was determined to go somewhere.

She slips in beside me. It takes a few minutes, but we get the horses together and saddled up. Zoe double checks behind me—as I would were our positions reversed—but she finds no fault with how I saddled Nettles.

“You going to tell me now where you learned so much about horses?”

I shrug. “I grew up with the circus,” I say.

She snorts and shakes her head. There’s nothing quite like the truth to misdirect people. With an exasperated tone, she turns her attention to Jasmine.

“All right, kiddo, let’s get you saddled up.”

Zoe leads Mono to a position next to a three-foot step ladder and Jasmine climbs up, then into the saddle. She doesn’t give the slightest hesitation, no matter that the horse is huge for her.

“Take him out slow,” Zoe says. Jasmine listens, riding Mono out at a slow trot.

As Zoe gets Eeyore positioned next to the steps, she says, “You love to keep some mystery around you. Why is that?”

“I’m just a very private person,” I say. Zoe helps Mary into the saddle as we talk. “Besides, I’m a public school teacher. You kinda have to stay private.”