Chapter 4
Kayla slammed the door and looked back at the little blue house where she’d spent half her childhood—before her mother and grandmother’s incessant fighting had led the latter to put a single-wide on the other side of the farm so she could get Leanne out of her house without losing tabs on Kayla. That had been the beginning of the end, and this felt like the same.
She was about to go back into hell—and this time, Trent wasn’t dragging her back kicking and screaming like he sometimes did. This time, she was going out of desperation. And that made it so much worse.
The smell of the club was as unique as a fingerprint. It was imprinted in her mind like a criminal record on file. Stepping through the back door of the club was like stepping into a run-down movie theater and watching scratchy, skipping scenes play on the screen. At fourteen, getting drunk with adults had felt like a privilege that she wanted. It had felt like freedom. Like everything else, that was a lie. Trent had used her false confidence and lack of inhibition to trick her onto the stage. The longer she stayed away from the farm and her grandmother’s good advice, the more she believed the lies that were spewed here.
These days, she spent more time on the farm than she did here, and coming back felt so very dirty and wrong. It gave her a new perspective on what had gone on here. At the end of a day on the farm, she had literal dirt under her nails, but it was earthy and washed off easily. The stain of this place wouldn’t wash off no matter how hard she tried. It wasn’t freedom at all. She’d become Trent’s slave. He’d never needed to put chains on her body, since he had already carefully installed them in her mind when she was too young to realize what he was up to.
The truckshe drove to Fort Myers had belonged to her grandmother, and even driving it to Trent’s bar felt wrong. Seeing it parked in the trash-strewn parking lot drew her up short even knowing she had parked it there. It was almost as if her grandmother was leaning on the tailgate with a disapproving stare. How could she explain how she’d wound up here? How she had sunk to such a level? She couldn’t, and that was why she hadn’t visited her grandmother enough to know that she had cancer.
She’d only found out when Mr. Morales had called her when Kay died. She’d fallen so out of touch, she hadn’t known her grandmother was even sick. The call came out of nowhere, and it still felt like a sucker punch. She’d just naively assumed there would be more time to make it right somehow…and then suddenly, there was no more time.
Footsteps shocked her out of her memories, and she startled, realizing she’d been standing in the dark parking lot staring at the old truck. She shot a look over her shoulder, expecting either Trent or a customer to have followed her back here. But it was just one of the other girls heading out for the night. Time to make her break.
Driving back home, she felt the opposite of how she’d felt with Evan. He made her feel safe, excited. Now she felt polluted, used, and broken. The contrast was glaring and made tonight even more painful. She couldn’t allow herself to see him again.
Safe at last in her driveway, she cut her engine, drank straight from the bottle, and listened to the peaceful night. How such tranquility could exist alongside the debauchery of the strip club she’d just left was a mystery to her. The throbbing club music still bounced around in her head like a bad dream lingering.
It was an ugly night no matter how she looked at it, so she decided she’d rather not look. The wad of cash she now had meant she could make her mortgage payment and her farm was temporarily safe, but she had sold her soul for it, and the loss was ever so obvious and gaping now that she was alone with it. She’d bought a bottle of Jim Beam on the way home and cracked it open at the end of her road, reasoning that she couldn’t get drunk and crash on the arrow-straight mile left to go.
She sat down on her stoop in the pitch dark under the broken porch light. Tonight, she didn’t want light anyway. She wanted to be hidden in the darkness until she drank herself into oblivion. She lived her life swinging wildly from panic to the numb fearlessness of despair, which was where both the Dancing Palm and the bottle took her. She’d allowed herself only two drinks at the Dancing Palm because she had to drive herself home. It wasn’t nearly enough to drown the Palm from her memory: the smell of stale booze and stale cigarettes that technically were no longer allowed, but somehow always made their way indoors, the jeers and cheers of drunken men dangling dirty dollar bills.
She was at least partly in the bag when she noticed a flickering light from the woods adjacent to her house. Her porch faced the adjoining five-acre lot, which her grandmother had left wooded, unlike the ten acres of pasture that made up the rest of the farm. Now it was a dense tangle of wild Florida jungle full of short, sharp scrub palms, papery melaleuca trees, hanging moss and live oaks. There had once been riding trails through it on which Kayla had led her grandmother’s young students on mini trail rides. Now they were so overgrown that she took trail rides down the road to the abandoned orange grove instead.
She couldn’t think how a fire could have started over there, but since her barn was less than 500 feet away, she got up to investigate. The old fence was in a tree line, rusted and sagging. It was easy to step over sober. Drunk and in the pitch dark, it was a bit more challenging.
When she finally had a clear view through the trees, she could see a ragged tent and a motorcycle on its kickstand next to a crackling campfire. Someone was squatting on her land.
There was a flash of anger that someone had trespassed on her land, followed by a clap of fear that she was out here in the woods alone, mostly drunk, and had stumbled upon some vagrant.
Movement in the tent startled her, and she drew back into the shadows as a mountain of a man emerged from the tent with the slow shuffle of a long, hard life. A long, silver ponytail wrapped in a half dozen black hair bands in the style of old-school bikers hung over his shoulder. When he reached for a can warming in the coals of the fire, the glow illuminated a weathered face that had seen too much sun and too much hardship.
She knew that face! He had aged, but she would know that face anywhere.
Another jolt of emotion rushed through her, a storm surge of murky water concealing all manner of flotsam bobbing up at intervals—a blink of happiness followed by the tangle of anger, shame, and a good splash of whiskey, but it propelled her forward.
“Canyon Bill?” she demanded without thinking.
He startled, losing his balance and his grip on the can, which went flying, wasting its contents on the ground.
“You’ve got a lot of fucking nerve to come back now!” she blurted, drunken anger bubbling up inside her. But didn’t that apply at least as much to her as it did him? She was trying to take over the farm that by all rights she didn’t deserve. As he struggled to his feet, she saw trembling hands, gnarled with arthritis, and it tamped down her fury.
“Lord God, Kayla, you damn near scared the life out of me,” he stammered. “And look at you, all grown up.” He stared at her, a mix of emotions playing across his face.
She recoiled toward the shadows again, trying to hide her stage makeup from Bill. She’d probably been fourteen the last time they’d seen each other.
“How long have you been out here?” she demanded, hating the quiver in her voice.
“I just got in tonight. I didn’t want to wake anybody up. I was hoping to see your grandma.”
“You’re about three years too late. She’s dead.”
It was blunt, and she said it with an attitude. She’d meant to keep the anger between them as a shield. He recoiled slightly from her words as if she’d struck him. He looked toward the house as if he didn’t believe her and her grandmother would be coming along in just a moment. Then, as if the weight of the world were hanging on his shoulders, he sank down next to the fire. She knew the feeling. She remembered receiving the same news, complete with the knowledge that she had also been too late. It brought back the rush of grief against the back of her throat, the never-relenting pressure that she had to push away and swallow down, lest it come bursting out of her.
“I’m mighty sorry to hear that,” he said quietly after a moment.
He was a big man, tall and broad as a bear, but age and remorse made him look less powerful. She remembered him as a usually jolly, fun-loving man with an edge. She’d never seen him as he was now, apparently struggling to comprehend that she’d just told him the only woman he’d ever loved was gone. It took the blaze of her anger toward him down another notch but didn’t snuff it out entirely.
“You might as well keep on riding,” she said with a bitterness that he didn’t entirely deserve, and she didn’t entirely feel.
He was no blood kin to her. He’d never been legally married to Kay or adopted Kayla’s mother, despite being her grandma Kay’s only lifelong partner. Surely some or even most of her anger was more rightly directed at her own absentee father, whoever he was. If Kayla’s mother knew, she had never told. But to Kayla, Canyon Bill was the living embodiment of the rambling man who couldn’t be trusted to stick around, and his comings and goings had wounded three generations of Daniels women. Even still, he had been the only male figure in her life, and she did love him. Maybe the absence of her grandmother made her love him even more, or at least need him more.
“You runnin’ the place now?” Canyon Bill asked her.
He looked at Kayla as if she were the last thread of hope to hang on to above a pit of despair. She prayed she had retreated into the shadows enough that he couldn’t see the body glitter on her skin. It was exactly why she’d never come back to see her grandmother. The shame of what she’d done was a thing she wore…whether it was glitter and eyeliner or just the sting in her heart that she was sure would show on her skin just as clearly.
“Well, I’m trying to,” she said.
“Need some help?” he asked. She’d just told him the love of his life was dead, and his first impulse was to help her? Well, she didn’t deserve that either.
“I can manage.” Right now, her life was no different from the rusty, broken barbed-wire fence. The leaking roof, the rotting wood. Everything was broken. This farm, just like her heart, had sat empty while local vandals had made off with literally anything that could be scrapped for cash. What they hadn’t taken had been battered by the brutal southwest Florida weather. Her grandmother’s trails through the woods in which she now stood were grown over and had been reclaimed by the jungle. Every cent she managed to earn went to the mortgage, and she was still behind on payments. There was no money for upkeep or repair. She only knew how to fix stuff with duct tape. Some of Bill’s old tools had survived the pillage hidden in the back of the shed, but she didn’t know how to use them, so there they sat, rusting in the humidity. Yeah, she was managing, all right. She was managing to run everything straight off the rails.
At a loss, Kayla stormed off into the night before she said more things she would regret, forgetting the broken-down fence and how drunk she was. Her feet tangled, and she pitched forward into the dark. Her hands broke her fall, but what she felt was sand, immediately followed by the sting of fire ants.
“Fuck!” she screamed into the night. Her dramatic exit ruined, she lay in a heap on the ground, slapping at stinging ants. As if it couldn’t get any worse—or more ironic…
“You all right, Kayla?” she heard Canyon Bill asking from the dark.
“Great. Fine. Never better,” she replied, pulling herself up, trying to scrape ants off with her foot and tripping again.
She dragged herself back into the house, scratching at burning ant bites. In her bathroom mirror was a girl she didn’t want to see. She shook her head, scrubbed the evidence of the Palm from her body, crawled into bed disgusted with everything, and slipped into dreamless oblivion.
Impossibly too soon, the morning sunlight seeped into her skull, igniting a throbbing headache that seemed to take on the rhythm of the sound of a distant hammer. She peeked out her bedroom window and saw Canyon Bill hoist a new board and begin to hammer it in place. Two sections of her round pen had fallen into disrepair after being kicked by a client’s horse. She’d bought the lumber, but then found she wasn’t strong enough to hold the board in place by herself to fix it. Now Bill was doing it.
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.”
Joey was the only horse who hadn’t run to the other side of the pen, and now she ran her hand down his neck. He was probably two hundred pounds underweight, and his neck no longer had the strong arch of muscle that it once had. “Is he going in the auction?”
“Yeah.” Toby answered.
In her grandmother’s memory, she felt positively compelled to get this horse out of this dangerous squalor and back home to the farm he’d spent his life on. If she could feed him up, he might even be a good trail horse again. She had really come back to the farm out of desperation, not hoping for redemption. But here was a possible bit of redemption staring her in the face, with one blue eye and one brown.
“Could I possibly buy him now? I’ll go get my trailer. I just know…I know she wouldn’t have wanted him here like this.” Her voice cracked a little, and she bit her lip, praying.
“I ain’t supposed to make any deals this early in the week,” Toby countered, but he looked at her face, and she was doing an awful job of hiding her emotion. Her cheeks burned as she begged for an old broken-down horse, but she was past the point of pride now. She just had to get Joey out of here, and she would do anything to achieve it.
“Please,” she said. “Don’t put him in the auction. I don’t have a ton of money, and if I get outbid, I’ll lose him. She wouldn’t want him here, Toby. Please just let me get him.”
“We can’t save them all,” she heard her grandmother say. But she was NOT leaving this one.
“All right. How old you say he is?” Toby asked.
“He’s twenty-four.” She glanced at the horse, praying he wasn’t foundered or otherwise crippled already. She could barely come up with the meat-market price for this horse, but after that, she was going to have to pray for another miracle. Praying for miracles had become a regular thing for her anyway. What was one more?
“At that age, I reckon he’d be on the meat truck anyway. Let me see what we’re into him for.”
“Thank you! Thank you so much!” she exclaimed, feeling her shoulders relax suddenly.
He glanced away, uncomfortable, and she knew she had to rein herself in. She was embarrassing the stoic old auction man.
“I’ll go get my trailer. I have cash at home. I’ll be back in a half an hour.”
He nodded and unlatched the door of the pen in a wordless order for her to get out of there before he left. She slipped out by him and started down the hall.
“Half hour!” she called again over her shoulder. She had to force herself not to look back at the horse. She fought to leave him there at all, against a deep terror that somehow he wouldn’t be there when she got back. Or that Toby would change his mind or name a price she couldn’t match.
She hammered home in her grandmother’s old Chevy Silverado, then hitched up the old stock trailer. These had survived the plunder of the farm by being left with Mr. Morales for her to collect.
She made it back to the fairgrounds in record time. Another wave of relief crashed over her when she saw Toby waiting outside the holding pens with Joey’s lead in one hand, and the sale paperwork in the other. “We’re not into him for much,” Toby said, looking at the ground. “Two fifty and we’ll call it even.”
Clearly, he was doing her a favor, but a man like him wouldn’t want attention for it. She counted out the cash without comment out of respect and appreciation. Old Toby was a good man. He helped her load Joey into her trailer and latched the gate with a slam and a wink.
“You take good care of yourself now. Don’t be a stranger.”
“I won’t. Thanks, Toby. From me and Gram Kay.” And that was one name drop she didn’t feel bad about. She’d done so much wrong, but this one thing she had made right in her grandmother’s memory. He touched the brim of his cowboy hat in acknowledgment. She saw him in her mirror, watching her drive off. So, there were good men left in the world.
She’d only gone to the fairgrounds in the first place hoping to scare up more business for herself. Instead, she spent money on a horse she didn’t need and now had to feed. He was almost certainly in need of overdue vet and hoof care, and that would cost her even more. The dread of how she was going to have to handle that problem was momentarily smothered when she carefully backed Joey out of the trailer in front of the barn.
Joey looked around, flared his nostrils, and nickered to see who would answer. Some of the horses in the barn nickered back, and he tugged at the lead rope to go inside. She could sense his relief to be home in the eagerness with which he marched back into the barn of his youth.
He was coated in filth and looked like he might have a fungal infection from standing out in the rain. She tied him up in the wash rack and began to spray him down. As the grime washed away, revealing the bright white and chocolate patches, she could see he was thinner than she had thought. It wouldn’t be cheap to feed him back up. Assuming his teeth were still good enough to chew. If not, there’d be a dental vet bill as well. More money she didn’t have.
When he was clean, she put him into an empty stall instead of the pasture. She didn’t know how long it had been since he’d had fresh grass and she didn’t need a colic bill on top of everything else. He pawed in the fresh shavings and dropped down. But instead of rolling like she expected, he seemed to simply immediately fall asleep. She watched him sleeping peacefully in the clean stall and took a fortifying breath.
“I’m sorry, Gram,” she murmured. “I’m gonna make it right.” Joey was here. He was safe. Hopefully, somewhere, her grandmother knew. That was all that mattered.