Between them they exchanged short glances.
Neither of them wanted to speak.
The rider was a consummate professional, Jack Bird, and when the race was run, close to three o’clock, he didn’t let the horse out early, and the lead wasn’t quite enough; he was pocketed on the turn. When he asked him to give there was nothing left, and Clay listened but mostly watched her. He watched her distance of mile-long hair, the forearms above the table, and her face cupped tight in her palms; she was caught between wistful and miserable, but all she said was “Damn.”
* * *
—
They went to a movie not long after.
She reached over, she held his hand.
When he looked at her, she was watching the screen, but a tear was down her face.
It was such a strange thing that happened.
He leaned over and kissed her cheek.
It wasn’t a breach of the rules, though, and both of them somehow knew. He could taste its hurt and saltiness, then looked at her hand in his.
* * *
—
Later, they went to The Surrounds, and she lay down close beside him. She was ready to say some more now, a number she spoke like a grievance:
“Seventh.”
Seventh, an abject failure.
At one point he counted her freckles, and there were fifteen on her face, but so tiny you had to search. There was a sixteenth down on her neck. They were so much redder than her hair, that blood against bronzy sunshine.
“I know,” she said, “there are worse things,” and there were, there definitely were.
For a while she lay with her head on him.
As always, Clay felt her breathing; the warmth of it, the gait.
It seems silly to talk about breath that way—like stride, like length in a race—but that was how he described it.
For a moment he looked down.
Again, that sixteenth blood spot—he wanted to touch it, to let his hand fall, but found himself suddenly speaking. What only she could understand.
“Bonecrusher,” he told her, “Our Waverley Star,” and expected the girl to stir. “That was a two-horse war.” Then, “Saintly,” he said, “and Carbine…” He was talking about a certain race, and horses who had won it. She’d told him only once of it—the first time they’d walked the racing quarter. “And Phar Lap, the greatest of them all.” Then he swallowed and said, “The Spaniard,” and that one almost hurt; The Spaniard, the bloodline of Matador—but still, he had to go further. “Hey,” he said, and he held her; he brought her closer, briefly. He clenched her flannelette arm. “But your favorite’s never changed, I think—it’s always Kingston Town.”
And finally, a last beat longer.
He felt the checkered squares.
“God,” she said, “you remember.”
With her he remembered everything. And he would always know how she’d quickened, when she answered about the Cox Plate, in 1982. How fitting to be in that period, when Penelope came to live here—and Carey now said what the commentary said, which was “Kingston Town can’t win.”
He held her, parceled up there.
His voice, part-voice, part-whisper: