Chapter 8 – Kev
CHAPTER EIGHT
KEV
The scent hit him as soon as he hopped out of Madigan’s truck and his feet touched the ground. Earthy, musty, nostalgic. Horse. The sound found him next, distant whinnying, closer snorts, hooves crunching over grass.
Strawberry Farms was lush and green, white fencing marking off several rectangular pastures housing horses of all different shapes and sizes. Grassy hills rose to the west, climbing to meet the steep, rocky face of the mountain range towering above them. Everywhere Kev looked, he saw land and sky and horse. Everywhere he looked, he saw reminders of the only place that had ever truly felt like home.
“Jen said to meet her at the main barn.” Madigan scanned the grounds, squinting into the early morning sun. “There are four barns out here. Which one is the main one?”
All four barns were painted red with white trim, weathered but well cared for. Some were smaller than others, but Kev pointed at the only one with an actual door. The one with country music playing through an open window. “That’s it.”
They hadn’t taken three steps toward the main barn when the actual door flew wide open, and Jen rushed out, followed by an enormous matted orange tabby cat that looked like it had seen some shit.
Jen wore a faded blue ball cap with her red ponytail threaded through the hole in the back, a plaid button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a pair of dusty jeans, even dustier work boots, and an electric smile. Kev thought she might be in her late forties or early fifties, and the lines extending from her eyes seemed so comfortable there. Like she was a person who smiled a lot. As a person who used to smile a lot too, it set him at ease in a way he couldn’t really describe.
“Hi, guys,” she said, reaching out to shake Kev’s hand, and then Madigan’s while the cat wove in and out of Kev’s legs. “Don’t mind Eleanor,” she said, and Kev thought Eleanor? That cat is not an Eleanor. “Barn cats are such hussies.” She laughed. “I am so excited you’re here. Seriously. I’ve wanted to do this for so long.”
In the pasture beside them, a white Appaloosa pony speckled with black spots let loose an ear-piercing whinny, sending the cat running.
“They’re hungry,” Jen explained with a breezy laugh. “I figured I’d wait until you got here so we could feed them breakfast together.”
Kev felt that thing wash over him. That profound tingling sensation of being in the right place at the right time with the right people. He’d felt it the first day he’d walked into Little Timber. He’d felt it the first time he saw Davis. He’d even felt it when he was twelve and had to move onto his grandparents’ farm. When his grandmother had taken one look at him, pulled him into her arms, and said, “It’s all going to be okay. You’re safe now.” Since he’d forgotten how to trust adults at the time, he’d fought against the sensation then. He embraced it wholeheartedly now.
“That sounds amazing,” he said. Because it did.
“What time should I pick him up?” Madigan asked. “I’ve got some errands to run in town, but I’ll head back up to Bluebird if you’ll be keeping him for a while.”
“Can I stay all day?” Kev asked with an eagerness he immediately smothered. “I mean, it’s Saturday, so we don’t have any trail work. And only if it’s okay with you, Jen. If not, that’s totally cool.”
Her electric smile turned one click shy of blinding. “Are you kidding? You can absolutely stay all day.”
“This is really great,” Madigan said. Only he didn’t say it. He croaked it, his voice thick with emotion.
Kev refused to look at him. Because when Madigan got emotional, everyone got emotional. He was like a one-man superspreader event for feelings. Even though Kev wasn’t sure if it was something his grandmother had said or something he’d just made up, the phrase there’s no crying in horse stuff popped into his head.
Clearing his throat, Madigan said, “Just call or text me when you’re done, okay?”
“Thanks, Boss.” Kev made a valiant attempt at a steady nod, but it was too late, the contagion was out, the emotions had spread.
Squeezing Kev’s shoulder, Madigan sniffed once. Then he cleared his throat a second time and made his way back to Lydia, knuckling his eyes dry on the way.
“Come on, Kev,” Jen said, blessedly all business as she turned around and led him toward the main barn. “We’ve got some paperwork to fill out.” The pony blew out another extremely pissed-off whinny. “And some very impatient horses to feed.”
“This is Clyde,” Jen said, pouring a scoop of sweet feed into an enormous buckskin draft horse’s bucket. “He’s huge, but he’s as sweet as they come.”
Lowering the wheelbarrow holding three kinds of feed back to the ground, Kev introduced himself. “Hey, big guy,” he said, scratching Clyde between his ears after the horse thrust his nose into his bucket.
“And this little ball of sass is Maggie.”
The Appy pony had abandoned whinnying in favor of whipping her head up and down like a maniac, occasionally adding a double-barrel donkey kick high enough to take a person’s head off.
“Jeez,” Kev said. “She’s intense.”
“Ponies, am I right?” Jen poured a small scoop of pellets into Maggie’s bucket. “She was my daughter’s first mare. Dumped her more times than I can count. She’s retired now, except for running all the horses in whatever pasture she’s living in, of course.”
“Big Alpha Mare Energy.”
Jen laughed. “Enormous.” After feeding the rest of the horses in the pasture, she turned to face him. “So, Madigan told me a little about you.”
Kev’s eyes went wide. “Oh, um?—”
“Nothing too specific,” she added quickly, dropping the scoop back into the wheelbarrow. “Just that you used to work on your grandparents’ ranch. You seem really comfortable around horses.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, relief washing over him that she only knew that much. That she wasn’t imagining him alone in an empty house or rolled onto his side on a jail cot or passed out on a mattress on the floor. “They had quarter horses mostly. We used them for moving cattle, some roping, trail riding, that sort of stuff. A rodeo every once in a while just for fun.”
“That’s great,” she said, adjusting her ball cap. “But, fair warning, what we do here might feel a little different.”
“Okay?” He picked up the wheelbarrow, walking beside her back toward the main barn. “How is it different?”
“I am so glad you asked,” she said with a smile he felt like a pat on the back. A little gold star. Like he’d asked the right question. Done the right thing. It shouldn’t have affected him so much, the validation. But it did. It always had. Maybe that was why he was so messed up. Maybe it was why he tried so hard to please. A person probably shouldn’t be as starved for simple praise as he was.
“A lot of the time, our relationships with horses are transactional,” Jen explained. “We tend to use them for some purpose that benefits us. Just like you said—sometimes we train them so we can show them or take them to rodeos. Sometimes we put them to work on ranches. Sometimes they’re destined for the track. The horses in this program”—she looked around her farm, at the three front pastures, some horses still eating quietly, others ambling toward their water troughs or out to the middle of the pastures to graze—“they’re all pretty mellow, calm, bombproof. Most of them have survived years of kids’ lessons and summer camps and tourist trail rides. Because of that, they tend to be good babysitters. But they’re also highly skilled at reading people.”
Kev nodded, suddenly worried about what some worldly old horse might think of him.
“If we’re willing, we can learn a lot about ourselves through the way they see us. This program is about relationship building, accountability, focus, trust, and honesty.” She met his gaze head-on with an unwavering blue-eyed stare. “Because I promise you, these horses will know when you’re full of shit.”
“I don’t want to be full of shit.” He winced at the words that should have popped up in a thought bubble above his head rather than straight out of his mouth. “I mean,” he hedged, “that all sounds really good to me. When Madigan told me about this place, I don’t know.” He ruffled his hair, fighting the heat trying to rush up his throat. “It felt…right. Like it was exactly what I needed.”
“You know what, Kev?” She gave him one of those smiles that was also kind of a frown. Knowing and proud. Like that one meme of Robert Redford nodding on a log. “I think you’re going to do just fine.”
He kicked at the dirt, the heat evading his defenses, shooting up to flood his cheeks.
“Let’s go feed the horses in the back pastures,” she said. “And then, would you like to go for a ride?”
“Really?” He thought he’d get to hang out with the horses today, maybe do a little barn work. But he hadn’t let himself hope for a ride.
“Really,” she said. “It’s going to be hot as hell this afternoon, so let’s get them out early.”
After spending twenty minutes doing a meditative practice Jen called mindful grooming, Kev not only had a very clean horse but also an unexpectedly calm mind. He’d never paid much attention to grooming a horse before. He’d always just brushed off the biggest dirt clumps, thrown on a saddle, and gotten to work.
Now, sitting on top of Clyde, walking down a wide treelined gravel road next to Jen, who rode a fine-boned black thoroughbred named Tom Collins, Kev said, “That was really different for me. The grooming thing.”
“How so?” she asked.
“I guess it was the first time I ever thought about what it was like for the horse.” He adjusted his helmet. He’d never worn a helmet before either and definitely would’ve preferred a cowboy hat. Not that he was about to tell Jen that after she’d thrust the helmet toward him with a steely this is nonnegotiable look in her eyes. “Like, here I am,” he said, trying to explain. “This person they’ve never even met before in their space, brushing their coat, picking up their hooves, moving them around. And I always expected them to just let me. I always expected them to trust me.”
“Pretty wild, huh?” she said. “But the wildest part is that they usually do just trust us. Horses will follow us through thunderstorms, across rivers, down mountains so steep or over jumps so high it literally puts their lives at risk. They’ll do all of that and more for us, trusting us the entire time. Whether we deserve it or not.”
Golden sunlight filtered through the trees, warming his face, his hands, chasing out the morning chill. Sunlight. Warmth. Golden. All the things Davis had been to him. “It kind of makes you realize how important it is.”
“How important what is?” Jen asked, studying him closely, listening intently.
He’d never had to do anything to earn Davis’s trust. She’d just given it to him. From the instant they’d met, she’d trusted him. She’d been his warmth, his sunlight. Until he’d turned his back on her. Who the hell turns their back on sunlight?
“To make sure you deserve it,” he eventually said.
Birds trilled to each other in the trees. The horse’s hooves crunched softly over gravel. And Jen said, “Thank you for sharing that with me, Kev. You’re a very thoughtful person.”
Before he could find the words to respond, to tell her she was wrong and that he was selfish and thoughtless, she asked, “Do you want to go faster?”
His first instinct was to say yes, absolutely, let’s go . Itching to escape this conversation, escape the guilt gnawing at his belly. But that was what he always did. The restless energy churning relentlessly inside him was always ready to jump, to move, to run. Even if he had nothing to run away from anymore. Nothing but himself. Nothing but his own fear of sitting still. Christ , he was tired of running. He was so indescribably tired.
“Can we stay slow today?” He felt self-conscious asking for it, too exposed somehow. But how exposed must his horse feel right now? At the mercy of this stranger on his back? And yet Clyde kept walking, kept putting one hoof in front of the other with his head low, his ears forward, his back swaying calmly from side to side under Kev’s saddle. Trust. “If you don’t mind.”
“Slow is good,” Jen said with a gentle smile. “Slow is important. Sometimes I forget that too.”
They walked in silence, the temperature rising rapidly as the two lanes of what Kev thought was probably an old logging road narrowed into a single overgrown trail.
“This is a good spot to turn around,” Jen said. “The trail gets pretty primitive from here on out.”
“Sounds good.” Sliding his reins to the left to turn Clyde around, urging him on with a squeeze of his heels, Kev saw a horse standing alone in a pasture at the back of Jen’s property, staring at him.
“Who’s that?” They hadn’t fed that horse, he would have remembered if they had. Because she was spectacular .
“Oh, yeah,” Jen said. “I forgot that I fed her before you got here. That’s River. She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”
River was a bay so dark she looked dipped in chocolate, with a thick black mane, a white blaze flowing like milk from her forehead down to her nose, white socks on her front legs, and a long white tail that billowed behind her in the breeze.
“She’s amazing,” he said. “Why is she all the way back here?” Why is she all alone? he wondered inwardly.
“She’s all the way back here,” Jen said, urging Tom Collins closer to River’s fence, “because once we put her in this pasture to deworm her and test her for Coggins, she refused to let anyone come near her again.” Jen pointed her chin down the fence, where Eleanor sat licking her paws, her fuzzy belly folding over the sides of the rail. “Anyone but the barn cat, anyway.”
“No kidding?” Kev couldn’t stop staring at the mare. Mainly because she wouldn’t stop staring at him.
“No kidding.” Jen’s laugh was a little sad. “She’s an American Mustang. My ex—” She cut herself off. “My estranged husband adopted her from a BLM corral years ago. It was part of some Mustang Makeover challenge. He competes—competed,” she corrected again, “in cutting competitions, and he thought she would be his next winner. Turns out, she didn’t want to be made over.”
Kev pressed his lips together while River swished her tail viciously at a fly trying to land on her flank. “I guess not.”
“I can’t really blame her,” Jen said. “The roundups of our wild horses can be horrific. Who knows what she’s been through, what scars she has that we can’t see.”
Kev’s left eye twitched, some old bruise deep inside him starting to ache. “She doesn’t trust us anymore.”
“No. She does not.” Jen leaned forward, resting her arms on her saddle’s pommel. “It’s too bad. She really is a gorgeous mare.”
“What will you do with her?” The thought that something else might happen to this horse, that some other place she thought was her home might be ripped away from her, made his fingers turn icy around his reins.
“Do with her?” Jen repeated, a question in her inflection as well as her creased brow. “I won’t do anything with her. She’s safe here, Kev. I’ll keep feeding her, giving her water, making sure she’s healthy. Buying her the occasional toy.” Pointing at a red ball with a tug handle in the corner of River’s pasture, Jen whispered, “She plays with that one when she thinks nobody’s watching.”
The tension hiking Kev’s shoulders toward his ears slowly eased. She was okay. She was safe.
“And maybe someday,” Jen continued, scratching Tom Collins’s withers until they started twitching, “she’ll let somebody try to earn her trust again. But it won’t be me.” She sat up and, with a self-deprecating laugh, said, “That mare hates my guts.”
Kev couldn’t imagine anyone or anything hating Jen. She seemed way too nice. And smart too. But horses could be weird. Like the way River seemed to stare straight into his soul. That was weird.
“Let’s head back,” Jen said as an excited grin flashed across her face. “It’s time for you to learn all about mindful chores.”