Bright, Broken Things, page 6
Next, he checked his email, in case there was something from the farm, even though that was probably ridiculous. It was far too soon. But maybe she’d send a “thanks for coming, we’ll be in touch” message. She hadn’t. Should he send something to reaffirm his interest? It couldn’t hurt. He dashed it off quickly, proof-reading it three times to be sure it was okay before hitting send because Olivia Lachance was probably the type to take typos or grammatical errors personally. He’d hate to lose the job for something like that.
With Will gone, he didn’t know what to do with himself, too distracted to get back into the book he’d started. He kept his phone charging to be sure the battery was topped up, staying within reach and obsessively checking the screen in case he missed a call or email.
Picking chords on one of Will’s guitars, he thought about the piano in that apartment above the barn. It was a sign, wasn’t it? That old piece of furniture was calling him. Taunting him, even. He hadn’t played since he left home. And by home, he meant the house he’d grown up in; the one from which his father had evicted him long before he’d left Alberta.
What business had he had, really, asking anyone to marry him when he’d still been living under his parents’ roof, eating their food? If he thought he’d been supporting himself working weekends for Al while he went to school full time, he’d been delusional. And he had been, completely and totally, about so much. Idiot. He’d never really lived on his own, just occupied a glorified tack room for almost eight months. That hardly counted.
He was afraid if he hoped too much, he’d scare this job away, but he longed for what it offered. Not the wage. Not the benefits or the statutory holidays. But the space — physical and emotional — to become whoever he was supposed to be.
* * *
He was sure Will didn’t mean to wake him up, but he’d been sleeping so restlessly, he popped up from where he’d fallen asleep on the couch as soon as he heard the click of the door.
“Sorry,” Will whispered.
“That’s okay. What time is it?” He stretched, the words coming out in a yawn.
“I don’t know. Two? How’d the interview go?” Will asked.
“Good. Gorgeous farm, gorgeous horses.” He left out Liv and Emilie, though they certainly deserved the same adjective. “Even the possibility of a really nice apartment with the job.”
“Did you get it? Hire you on the spot? Tell them to call me. I’ll give you a glowing reference.” Will grinned.
“Tired of me already?” Nate laughed, waking up. He didn’t have to be up early so he could help Will decompress. “They’ll let me know. I really hope I get it, though. I really like the place, and the people. The farm manager seems like a good guy. The owner has two daughters who seem to be involved in the place.”
“There you go. That’ll get Cindy out of your head. Think there’s a job for me too? I can muck a stall.”
“The one sister’s too young and while the older one is definitely easy on the eyes, there’s a whole ‘look and don’t touch’ thing going on with her.” He grinned, thinking even looking needed to be a covert thing with Liv Lachance. “But that’s okay. Looking is enough. Touching just gets you burned.”
“Only if you hold on.” Will smacked him on the shoulder before wandering to the kitchen.
“Good point.” Nate set the throw aside and followed him.
“Want a beer?” Will asked, opening the fridge.
“Does beer go with butter tarts?” He lifted the styrofoam tray he’d left next to the sink.
“Don’t see why not. A maple-flavoured craft brew would be just the thing.”
“You have that?”
Will laughed, handing him one of the same old red, white and blue-labeled brown bottles. “I do not.”
“Canadian it is, then.” Nate twisted off the cap and touched the neck of his bottle to Will’s. “Are we celebrating something?”
Will shrugged. “Sure. Your job to be. Positive thinking and all that.”
“Can’t hurt,” Nate decided.
The ringing of his phone jarred him out of the more settled sleep his late-night beer with Will had allowed him — keeping him under till eleven AM, apparently. He grappled for the device and saw the number. There it was. The farm. This could only mean good things, right? Wake up, Miller. But that would take longer than he had. He wasn’t letting this call go to voicemail. When he answered, his voice was tentative, his throat rough.
“Hello?” he croaked. Great. He wasn’t hungover, but he probably sounded like a deadbeat.
“Is this Nate?”
He thought he recognized the female voice, the slightest of hesitations between this and Nate making him think she’d considered calling him Mr Miller again.
“It is.” It came more like his own voice, and he tried to inject the right combination of confidence and friendliness into his tone.
“It’s Liv Lachance from Triple Stripe. Would you be able to come one day for a working interview? If all goes well, the job is yours, if you want it. The apartment too.”
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Had she been standing in front of him, he’d have been tempted to kiss her, all that aloofness be damned. “Absolutely. Thank you.”
“Seven AM Friday? Just go to the training barn. That’s where everyone meets to start turning out.”
“Thank you.” He didn’t care that he’d said it already. Thank you was one of those things it never hurt to repeat.
Working interview? He’d ace that. The job was as good as his.
10
It wasn’t a leisure pool, but that didn’t stop Faye Taylor from stretching out on one of the nearby lounge chairs. “The summer is never long enough,” she sighed.
“I’m ready to go back,” Liv said, removing the elastic from her hair and toweling it dry before parking herself next to Faye to let the sun properly dry her off. It wasn’t a lie, but she could see the curve of Faye’s raised — and perfectly maintained — eyebrows above the rims of her sunglasses.
“Really?”
“Yes. Don’t you just want to be done with school? The only way to make that happen is to get on with it.”
“I suppose that’s true, though I’d have more incentive if I had any clue what I was going to do after I graduate.”
Faye didn’t rehash the fact that Liv’s future, on the other hand, was mapped out. All summer after galloping for her father’s private trainer, Roger Cloutier, she’d helped Roger’s track vet, Jake Monaghan. She didn’t get to do much — she drew up syringes and held twitches and scrubbed up joints before they were injected — but she learned so much, both from Jake’s generous sharing and from constant observation. That was what separated an exceptional vet from the average, wasn’t it? Seeing the nuances, the subtle deviations from robust health. When she graduated, though it was unspoken, it was assumed she’d have a place in Jake’s practice.
“You’ll figure it out,” Liv said.
“Or maybe I’ll marry rich.”
Unlike Liv, Faye could swing that, with her outgoing personality and easy fashion sense. She knew how to put on makeup — Liv had missed or avoided that mother-daughter lesson, never felt the need to teach herself, and Faye had long since declared her a lost cause. She always looked good in the flowy, feminine things Liv felt would be ridiculous on herself. And, most importantly, Faye could talk to anyone. Though Faye, best friend that she was, would never point out that Liv didn’t need to marry rich. Of course, Liv didn’t believe she needed to marry at all.
Her mother slipped through the sliding doors from the living room with a tray, not walking so much as gliding over to place a glass of something fizzy in Faye’s hand and a plate of home-baked cookies on the small table between them. Because, of course. Liv pressed her lips together in a tight smile before raising her water bottle to her lips. She tried to take hospitality notes from her mother. Left to her, there would have been no refreshments for her guest. She hadn’t inherited that particular gene from Anne Lachance. In fact, she was convinced all she’d inherited were physical ones: the dark hair, the bone structure, the slim build. Her grey eyes were her father’s.
“Thanks, Anne,” Faye said with a warm smile and slight lift of the glass before sipping. Anne nodded with a similar expression and disappeared back into the cool house. “Speaking of men…”
“Were we, actually?” Liv retorted. But it was a topic never far from her best friend’s mind. Liv reached for a cookie, which seemed like a good antidote to the subject.
“Emilie tells me…”
Here we go. Liv’s eyes were rolling before the sentence was out of Faye’s mouth.
“… you have a new employee. And, that he’s rather attractive.”
“She put it that way, did she?”
Faye snorted. “No. I think her exact words were, ‘omygosh Faye, you have to see him, he is smoking hot.’”
Liv had to laugh at Faye’s impersonation despite herself. “That sounds more like my sister. He’s not on the payroll yet. He’s doing a working interview today, just to be sure he knows which end of a pitchfork is which.”
“Perhaps we should go see how he’s doing?” Faye tilted her head slightly.
“I’m sure the current staff have that under control,” Liv replied wryly.
“You’re so boring. I already know he’d be perfect for you.”
Liv choked on her water, and sputtered, “This guy you’ve never met and none of us really know? How so?”
“He’s good-looking and likes horses. I can’t imagine you need any other boxes to check.”
“Don’t give up your career aspirations for matchmaking.”
“Didn’t we just agree I had no career aspirations? Clearly, he’s not rich enough for me, so it’s up to you.”
“When would I have time for a relationship?”
“You make time for the important things, sweetie.”
That one was way down the list. Like at the bottom, if it was even there.
“Besides,” Faye continued, “who said I was talking about a relationship? A late-summer fling is exactly what you need.”
Flings were Faye’s bailiwick, and usually involved more than willing young jockeys at the track who were resilient enough not to be wounded by her disdain for attachment of any sort.
“Right,” Liv said. “Let’s scare away the new guy right off.”
“You’re not that scary .”
She gave Faye a quick glance — that brief acknowledgement that her friend understood she was not whole.
To an outsider, their friendship would appear unlikely; the ultimate odd couple. She and Faye had met on Liv’s first day of high school in Ontario — on the bus. Liv had refused her mother’s offer to drive her, four months shy of being old enough to drive herself.
Faye, she learned, lived just down the road from the Lachance’s new farm on her own family’s farm, Northwest. Faye didn’t have much to do with the hands-on of the business. Fun fact: her new best friend wasn’t into horses. Once she made the connection — Faye was the daughter of Ed Taylor, a well-respected trainer who’d lost his life in a car accident earlier that same year, along with his wife and middle son — she knew Faye’s trauma.
“I’m sorry about your family,” she’d murmured, exchanging a cautious glance, catching a chink in the armour of this person she’d just met but already determined had barriers of her own. They became friends because of the mutual acknowledgement of the other’s darkness. It was a stronger bond than shared music taste or movie star fandom or whatever forged friendships between teenage girls. Faye had never said much about her parents’ and brother’s passing, and likewise, Liv had never offered to share the story behind her own family’s move to Ontario. It wasn’t the details that mattered, somehow.
“Are you going to the sale?” Faye asked in an unusual change of topic. The Canadian Thoroughbred Yearling Sale was coming up at Woodbine.
“I’m helping Jake scope horses all weekend so I’ll be around,” Liv said. An important piece of information for a prospective yearling buyer was the anatomy of the young horse’s throat. Horses that couldn’t breathe properly understandably didn’t make the best racehorses, so sales yearlings were examined prior to auction with a diagnostic known as endoscopy. She completely expected to be exhausted and tired of adolescent Thoroughbreds after the next few days, but she’d learn a lot.
“Dean’s looking at a bunch this weekend,” Faye said of her older brother who’d taken over training duties after Ed Taylor’s death. “I’m sure you’ll see him around.”
“Are you coming down at all?” Liv asked. Sale day was its own kind of social event for racetrackers, and despite Faye’s aversion to horses, the social side attracted her.
“Hmm, not sure,” Faye said, popping a cookie into her mouth. “I might still need to avoid what’s-his-name. Plus, first day of school, right?”
“See?” Liv said. “I can’t have any reason to avoid New Guy if he doesn’t crash and burn on the working interview today, because he’ll be living here. Awkward.”
Faye brightened. “He’s going to be living here? Oh, this just gets better and better.” Her grin was wicked.
“No one needs that kind of complication.”
Faye swung her legs, resolutely planting sandaled feet on the patio and drained the last of her spritzer. “Come on. Let’s go check this man out.” Then her phone rang, Faye looking decidedly irritated as she snatched it from the table and stared at the screen. She sighed. “Dean. Hang on.”
Liv dragged her fingers through her nearly dry hair and pulled it into what was a messy ponytail by reality instead of design. Ratty pool hair could only look a mess. She prayed she’d just been, literally, saved by the bell.
Sure enough, Faye sighed again after hanging up. “I’ve got to go home. The computer is giving Dean grief. Why am I the only one who can sort these things out?”
Liv shrugged and suppressed a grin. “I’m sure there will be other opportunities for you to meet New Guy if he passes today.”
“From what Emilie tells me, he should get advanced standing.” Faye rose and rifled through her bag for her car keys.
It was a relief not to have to succumb to Faye’s demands. She didn’t imagine Nate Miller wanted to endure any more ogling than he might already have suffered today. It wasn’t any more right to treat a guy like that than a woman, was it? Not that it was something she’d ever really thought about, but he brought it to mind.
She saw Faye out and went upstairs to shower. With only a few days left before classes started, and those likely to be dominated by her responsibilities at the sale, she wanted to get on Claire today, because who knew how consistent she’d be once school began? She had to face the reality that if Nate Miller had indeed “passed” today — and she couldn’t imagine he hadn’t — he might have to complete Claire’s education, no matter how much she hated the idea. School was going to come first, whether she wanted it to or not.
It was earlier than she wanted to ride, though. The staff would be bringing horses in and feeding. Finishing the day’s routine. Which meant, as likely as not, Nate Miller would still be around. She both didn’t want to seem like she was checking up on him and didn’t want to feel like the owner’s daughter, sweeping in after lounging by the pool, now coming to the barn to ride her horse. Not that he would know she’d been lounging by the pool. And she had been up since four, in at the track to help out and gallop, assisted Jake, then done laps in said pool before her brief interlude with Faye. But he wouldn’t know that, either. Still… she’d invited him for this working interview. Checking in was what she should do.
She timed it right, getting to the training barn just as they were gathering after the work was done, exchanging any last comments before they said their “see you tomorrows” or “have a good night” and headed their separate ways. It looked as if the novelty had worn off for the regular staff, and Nate didn’t appear traumatized, so that was a good sign. She suppressed a grin at that thought as she approached the group. I’m sorry, I can’t possibly work here. These women will not leave me alone.
“How’d it go?” she asked, zeroing in on him.
“Good, I think. The girls whipped me into shape.”
Did they have to giggle? She’d spoken too soon about the novelty, apparently.
“We’ve taken a vote,” Kyrie, who had been around the longest, spoke. “If you don’t hire him, we’re all quitting.”
Even she had to laugh, glancing at Geai. “You too?”
“I’m innocent of whatever those three are up to,” he said. “But if that happens, you and Emmy can’t go back to school because it will be up to the three of us to run this place.”
It wasn’t an endorsement — she’d grill Geai more on the day’s details after everyone had gone — but, “It sounds like my hands are tied here. You have Geai’s cell? Let him know when you want to move in.”
11
He set the guitar case next to the piano. The view out the big picture window grabbed him for a moment before he turned back toward the room.. “Thanks for helping out.”
“My pleasure,” Emilie said. She sounded like she was sharing an inside joke with herself, standing next to the couch with the last box. “Where do you want this?”
“I don’t know. Anywhere.”
There hadn’t been much stashed in the back of the Mustang, though it was probably more than he needed because he’d survived just fine on what he’d packed in his duffel bag. The only important things he hadn’t dug out were his helmet and boots, both of them old and worn. A new helmet probably wouldn’t be a bad idea — those things expired, apparently, and there was a good possibility of landing on his head, getting on yearlings — but he’d take those old worn boots over a shiny new pair any day. He loved those boots. They were part of him. He’d rue the day he’d have to replace them.
