Nicholas Evans - The Horse Whisperer

As she came out from paying, someone called her name and she looked around and saw Diane getting out of her Toyota at the other row of pumps. Annie waved and walked over.

'So you do sometimes give yourself a break from that telephone after all,' Diane said. 'We were beginning to wonder.'

Annie smiled and told her she had to bring Grace into town three mornings a week for physical therapy. She was going back to the ranch now to do some work and would come back in at midday to pick her up.

'Heck, well I can do that for you,' Diane said. 'I've got a bunch of things to do in town. Is she up at the Bellview Medical Center?'

'Yes, but honestly, you don't want—' 'Don't be silly. It's crazy you driving all that way.' Annie demurred but Diane would have none of it, it was no problem she said, and in the end Annie gave way and thanked her. They chatted for a few more minutes about how things were going up at the creek house and whether Annie and Grace had everything they needed, then Diane said she'd better get going.

On her way back to the ranch Annie puzzled over the encounter. The substance of Diane's offer had been friendly enough, but the manner in which it had been made was something less. There had been just the faintest hint of accusation, almost as though she were saying that Annie was much too busy to bother herself with being a mother. Or maybe Annie was just being paranoid.

She traveled north and looked out over the plains to her right where the black shapes of the cattle stood out against the pale grass like the ghosts of buffalo from another age. Ahead on the blacktop, the sun was already making pools of mirage and she lowered the window and let the wind blow her hair back. It was the second week in May and at last it felt as if spring had really come and wasn't just kidding. When she swung left off 89, the Rocky Mountain Front loomed before her, topped with cloud that seemed squeezed from some galactic can of chantilly. All that was missing, she thought, was a cherry and one of those little paper umbrellas. Then she remembered all the faxes and phone messages that would be waiting for her when she got back to the ranch and realized a moment or two later that the thought had eased her foot on the gas pedal.

She'd already used up much of the month's leave she'd asked Crawford Gates to give her. She would have to ask him for more and she wasn't looking forward to it. For despite all his talk about how she should feel free to take off as much time as she needed, Annie was under no illusion. In the last few days there had been clear signs that Gates was getting restless. There had been a series of small interferences, not one of them on its own enough for her to make a real fuss about, but which, when viewed collectively, signaled danger.

He had criticized Lucy Friedman's lounge lizard piece which Annie considered quite brilliant; he'd queried the design team over two front covers -not in a heavy-handed way but enough to make an impression; and he'd sent Annie a long memo about how he thought their coverage of Wall Street was slipping behind the competition. That would have been okay, except that he'd copied it to four other directors before even speaking to her. But if the old bastard wanted a fight, so be it. She hadn't phoned him. Instead she wrote an immediate and robust reply, full of facts and figures, and copied it to the same people plus, for good measure, a couple of others she knew to be her allies. Touche. But God, it took such a lot of effort.

When she drove over the hill and down past the corrals, she saw Tom's yearlings running in the arena, but there was no sign of Tom and she felt disappointed, then amused that she should feel so. As she came around the back of the creek house she saw there was a phone company truck parked there and as she got out, a man in blue coveralls came out of the house onto the porch. He wished her good-day and said he'd fitted the new lines.

Inside, she found two new phones beside her computer. The answering machine showed four messages and there were three faxes, one of them from Lucy Friedman. As she began to read it, one of the new phones rang.

'Hi.' It was a man's voice and for a moment she didn't recognize it. 'Just wanted to see if it worked.'

'Who is this?' Annie said.

'I'm sorry. It's Tom, Tom Booker. I just saw the phone guy leaving and I wanted to see if the new lines worked.'

Annie laughed.

'I can hear they do, one of them anyway. I hope you don't mind him letting himself in.'

'Of course not. Thank you. You really needn't have.'

'It's no big deal. Grace said her dad sometimes had trouble getting through.'

'Well, it's very kind of you.'

There was a pause and then, just for something to say, Annie told him how she'd bumped into Diane in Choteau and how she'd kindly offered to bring Grace back.

'She could have taken her in too if we'd known.'

Annie thanked him again for the phones and offered to pay for them but he brushed it aside and said he'd leave her to get on with using them and hung up. She started to read Lucy's fax again but for some reason found it hard to concentrate and went off to the kitchen to make some coffee.

Twenty minutes later she was back at her table and had one of the new lines rigged up for the modem and the other exclusively for the fax. She was just about to call Lucy who was in a new fury about Gates, when she heard footsteps on the back porch and a light tapping on the screen door.

Through the haze of the screen she could see Tom Booker standing there and he started to smile as he caught sight of her. He stepped back when Annie opened the door and she saw he had with him two saddled horses, Rimrock and another of the colts. She folded her arms, leaned against the door frame and gave him a skeptical smile.

'The answer's no,' she said.

'You don't yet know what the question is.'

'I think I can guess.'

'You can?'

'I think so.'

'Well, I kind of reckoned seeing as you've just saved yourself forty minutes driving down to Choteau and then some forty more driving back and all, you might feel inclined to blow a little of it on taking some air.'

'On horseback.'

'Well. Yeah.'

They looked at each other for a moment, just smiling. He was wearing a faded pink shirt and over his jeans those old patched leather chaps he always rode in. Maybe it was just the light, but his eyes seemed as clear and blue as the sky behind him.

Truth is, you'd be doing me a favor. I got all these eager young colts to ride and poor old Rimrock here is feeling kind of left out. He'd be that grateful, he'd take real good care of you.'

'Is this how I get to pay for the phones?'

'No ma'am, I'm afraid that's extra.'

The physical therapist who looked after Grace was a tiny woman with a shock of streaked curls and gray eyes so large they made her seem permanently surprised. Terri Carlson was fifty-one and a Libra; both her parents were dead and she had three sons which her husband had given her in rapid succession some thirty years ago before running off with a Texan rodeo queen. He'd insisted the boys be called John, Paul and George and Terri thanked the Lord he'd gone before there was a fourth. All this Grace had found out on her very first visit here and on each subsequent visit Terri had taken up where she left off so that now, had Grace been asked, she could have filled several notebooks on the woman's life. Not that Grace minded in the least. She liked it. It meant she could simply lie on the workout bench, as she was doing now, and surrender herself entirely not just to the woman's hands but to her words as well.

Grace had protested when Annie told her she'd arranged for her to come here three mornings a week. She knew that after all these months it was more than she strictly needed. But the therapist in New York had told Annie that the harder you worked at it, the less likely it was you'd end up with a limp.