The Season Read online

  Not fucking likely.

  Two

  In Which Megan Ekes Out a Pyrrhic Victory

  THERE IS NOTHING MORE COMFORTING THAN THE warm scent of a horse, especially your own horse, one that loves you unconditionally and will let you hang around his neck without complaint. As I pushed my face deeper into Banjo’s coat and inhaled deeply, my breath naturally downshifted from a heaving sob to a manageable wheeze. I highly recommend this when your life is in tatters.

  I had gone to the barn to hide and think. It was Saturday, so Silvio and the other ranch hands would be off, and I would be alone with my guy Banjo and the dozen other horses there.

  Though it burned and I would never admit it, Mom was right about the national team thing. That ship had likely sailed—if you don’t make the Under-20 team, your chances of making the Under-23 team are practically nil, and if you’re not on that team, well . . . enough said about ever playing with the big dogs. Worst of all, I had choked at the regional tryout and never showed the coaches my best stuff. Sure the other girls were good, but they weren’t better than me. I don’t even know what happened. It was a maelstrom of bad judgment and rookie mistakes, like the one I made today. I yearned for another shot, and Coach Nash was my lottery ticket—she was a two-time NCAA Coach of the Year and was way connected to the national team. Only if I played like a rock star this season would I maybe, just maybe, get another chance next summer. Days like today didn’t help, and now Mom wanted me to quit for a whole season? Does she know me at all? I wondered, and not for the first time.

  Ironically, the odds of making the actual Women’s National Team, the one that plays in the World Cup and the Olympics, were the same as being selected a Bluebonnet deb—essentially nil. Twenty-three women in the whole country are on the top national squad at any given time, and there are only seven or eight Bluebonnet debutantes a year.

  You can’t ask to be invited. You can’t buy your way in. You’re selected by a secret club of very rich and influential men who value tradition above all else. So if your mother debuted, it gives you a leg up. An aunt can help; a grandmother too. Julia and I were serious legacy. When Grandma Rose Alice died a few years back, the headline of her obituary in The Dallas Morning News was about her selection as a Bluebonnet Debutante, 1964. Everything else about her life—parents, college, husband, kids, charities, and social clubs—came after. The subject of our debut started in kindergarten, but until today’s juggernaut I’d thought we’d agreed that Julia would do it and I would skip it.

  Through my snuffling, I heard the tick tick of the diesel engine, the driver’s door thumping shut, then the barn latch closing. I hid behind Banjo’s neck as the quiet crunch of footsteps on straw grew closer. Long before I heard his voice I knew it was Dad.

  “Thought I’d go for a ride. Wanna come?” His voice was perfectly noncommittal.

  “I guess,” I said quietly, trying not to let on just how hard I had been crying.

  While Dad saddled Jasper, and I readied Banjo, there was the rustle of blankets, the creak of leather, an occasional snort, and the clop of hooves, but neither of us spoke—we just went about our business. Before we mounted up, Dad grabbed a shotgun off the rack in his truck, checked the load, and slid it in my saddle holster. This wasn’t my gun—mine was a Remington 870 Wingmaster Competition, a real beauty Dad ordered custom for my thirteenth birthday. It was a pump-action twelve-gauge with a front bead sight on a twenty-inch barrel and an eight-load magazine, weighted just a little forward for better tracking. The wood was dark cherry, the barrel and fittings black steel, and the Aberdeen brand was engraved on the stock. But Dad’s gun from the truck would do if we startled a rattler, and I was flattered he’d let me handle it.

  We set out from the barn, walked out beyond the corral, and loped up the first rise. Dad always stopped here to have a look, and I pulled up beside him.

  “Nice up here,” he said, after a moment.

  “Yeah.” And it was.

  McKnights have been ranching cattle on the Aberdeen since 1873, the year my great-great-great-grandfather Angus arrived from Scotland to make his way in America. Lanky, gap-toothed, with hair the color of a copper penny, Angus packed only guts and grit when he left Clackmannanshire, and he chose Dallas by chance while standing in the train station in St. Louis. A man he’d never met and never saw again told him he’d find good grass and steady water there. Angus liked the look of him, so he bought a ticket and arrived to little more than a rail junction beside a muddy river, but to the south were rolling hills of fine, tall hay fed by plentiful creeks, and Angus plunked down his life savings for two hundred acres, a steer, and four heifers.

  Those two hundred acres were four thousand now, and a thousand head, give or take, wandered through the lush grass, brush cedar, live oaks, and gurgling creeks down below us. As I looked at my dad, hand on his pommel, gaze fixed on an endless prairie dotted with cows all bearing the original AR brand, time stopped and it could have been old Angus sitting beside me. That land, the never-changing land, created a deep, primeval connection. For Dad and every McKnight before him, cattle ranching was not a job—it was a calling.

  “Hyah!” he belted, and gave Jasper his head. The horse broke into a canter, and Banjo instinctively followed, and soon we were at a gallop, the ground a blur beneath us and no reason or ability to talk above the clattering hooves. We jumped ditches and ducked under tree limbs and rumbled up and over hillocks, only stopping when we reached the far western boundary.

  Here the endless prairie ended. Beyond our fence lay El Dorado, a manufactured development bursting with Spanish- style houses butted together like cans of beans on a grocery store shelf. The streets with their picturesque names—Avenida de las Flores, Lomo Alto, and El Camino Real—evoked the land’s long history as a working cattle ranch, but the main boulevard and side streets, once cobblestone, were now black asphalt as smooth as a pool table. The development had absolutely everything you needed to forget the past and embrace the future: brightly lit cement sidewalks with code-mandated fire hydrants standing guard over storm drains; power lines and fiber optic cable; playgrounds; a fitness center; a picnic area with gas grills—bring your own propane tank and just plug it right in. There was a water park with a lap pool, a wading pool, and a splash pad. And the spiderweb of dusty trails used by cows for a century was now a network of paved hike and bike trails with strategically placed benches beneath live oaks brought in from a tree farm.

  We watered the horses from a creek and caught our breath. A family of four biked by on the other side of the fence, the two young kids on training wheels, the entire family in shiny, sturdy helmets.

  “Howdy,” Dad said quietly, and tipped his hat.

  “Hello,” they called back. “Great day, huh?”

  “Sure is,” Dad replied. The children stared back at Dad like he was a rotary phone.

  Dad surveyed the houses across the fence.

  “Got another call the other day,” he said to me after they’d passed.

  “Yeah? Have you called him back?” I teased.

  “Nope,” he admitted, sheepishly.

  “Does Mom know?”

  “Not yet.” Same old, same old.

  “Dad,” I said, a tad more serious, “why does she want to sell?”

  He paused before answering.

  “It’s stressful and she knows we can’t compete anymore. For a decade or better we’ve been supporting the cows, and not the other way around.” This was a standing joke between my parents. As debt piled up, Dad would occasionally sell off a small piece of land to get square with the bank for a time. But he never reduced the herd, and Mom would periodically wax poetic on the idea that we would finally be left with only the house and a few acres—but a thousand cows.

  He looked over the fence.

  “’Sides it doesn’t take an MBA to see it’s better to ranch houses than cattle these days.”
>
  “So . . . it’s the money?”

  “Sort of—it’s our future, and yours and Julia’s.” He looked over at me. “She just figures if we’re gonna fold eventually, might as well do it with some chips still on the table.”

  “Gonna take up golf?” I said, with just a little sass.

  “Might take up drinking full-time.”

  We turned the horses toward home but let them walk.

  “You gonna call the guy back?”

  “Nope.”

  I took in a huge breath through my nose. Let it out. Took in another and savored. Switchgrass and bluestem mainly, but layered with swirls of dirt as rich as Swiss chocolate. I picked up hints of lemon mint, bluebells, saddle leather, and sweat. All baked together under the Texas sun, it was the spice cake of my childhood. Nothing would ever smell better.

  “Well, I hope we never sell,” I said.

  “I know.”

  I knew as well as Dad that the money struggles of the last twenty years were not quite what Mom signed up for when they married, and he didn’t begrudge her financial peace of mind. Rather, he honestly feared life without meaningful work. He was a cattle rancher, and it was all he knew. Sure, he might sell the Aberdeen and get a bag of money and buy a house in the right zip code, but what the hell would he do all day? Dad was country, not country club, and always would be.

  We were nearly back to the barn, and Dad still hadn’t broached the inevitable subject. I knew he hadn’t come out here just to ride, and as we got closer I wondered how he would come at me—would it be “Embrace your opportunities” or the more classic “Do as you’re told” approach?

  But after we’d hung the saddles and blankets and tack and fed the horses, he came at me with the one surefire, no-fail approach I could never refuse.

  “Megan, you know how much I love you, and that I am pretty much unable to function when you’re unhappy,” he began, standing by the barn door. “And I’ve got some sympathy for the careless way all this was thrown at you. . . .”

  My heart sank and I braced for impact.

  “These last few years, since you girls left, your mother and I . . . we’ve been, well . . . let’s just say there will be no peace around here unless your mother wins this one. So I’m asking you—begging you really—as a favor to me, to do this debutante thing.”

  Oh God, I thought, is he going to cry? Oh please don’t cry! I suddenly realized there was more going on here, much more.

  “Is it really that important to her?”

  “You have no idea.” He actually kicked at the dirt with his boot.

  “Why?”

  “Try and understand,” he said. “She sees it . . . as your birthright. She worries that you’ve been cooped up out here in the country your whole life, away from society, such as it is, and you’ve missed out on . . . well, I’m not sure what. But if you don’t do this thing now, there won’t ever be another chance like it. And whether it matters to you or not, she’s invested, and . . . you can’t just throw it back in her face. It’s just not the way to handle something like this.”

  Frantically I searched for an exit, but none appeared.

  Dad’s a tough guy. I can’t remember him ever asking me for anything. And now he was begging me to do something he knew I detested as a personal favor, to take one for the family team. I realized then that he was desperate like he had never been before, and that his “there will be no peace” explanation was only the tip of some enormous iceberg of entangled negotiated settlements that likely spanned my parents’ entire married life.

  Resigned, I played my sole remaining card.

  “I won’t give up soccer, Dad. I’ve only got one more year left.” I gave him my super-earnest “You can’t ask that of me” look. “I can do both. I’ll just have to work harder.”

  “That seems fair,” he said, and I heard myself exhale, unaware until I did that I had been holding my breath.

  “I’ll offer terms to your mother.” He gave me that rueful smile I loved so much.

  “Good luck,” I croaked.

  Dad waved as he walked toward his truck, a mud-stained F-350. He put the shotgun back on the rack and then, with the door half-open, he looked back.

  “Hey—thanks.” Straightforward. Honest. That was Dad.

  I choked back tears as he drove off.

  Three

  In Which Megan Reveals a Good Deal More Than She Intended

  I WAS FLYING DOWN MOCKINGBIRD LANE ON MY BIKE just inches from a red light at Fairfield when I realized the black sedan beside me was an unmarked patrol car. I clamped both brakes and the back tire skidded in gravel and I ended up sideways ten feet into the intersection. I put a single Coach slingback sandal down on the gooey asphalt, backed up, and casually glanced at the cop beside me. He looked over, and chuckled. Really, who could blame him? It’s not every day you see a girl on a mountain bike in a Ralph Lauren dress, three-hundred-dollar sandals, and a bike helmet crowned with a giant plastic tiara plastered with rhinestones.

  Sweating like Seabiscuit in the final furlong of the Preakness, I blinked at the clots of mascara clouding my vision and worried my heavily made-up face might suddenly fracture and descend in a mudslide of Malibu proportions. Positive I looked demented, but determined to show a brave face, I smiled sweetly at Officer Jenkins in his air-conditioned cruiser and he, being a generous sort, turned away.

  I had, of course, planned to blow through the light without a second thought, but a split-second calculation told me the time spent defending a ticket from Highland Park’s finest was greater than the duration of the light, so I dutifully paused. That is, if you call jackknifing your bike halfway through an intersection “pausing.”

  Unable to stop myself, I checked my watch. Again. 4:43 p.m. Yikes.

  Just how, I wondered, had I found myself so very late and so very stuck to the seat of my bike? The painful answer was that sadly, all my wounds were self-inflicted. Beginning early that morning I had made a critical error in judgment.

  “No, you take the car,” I said stupidly at 5:20 a.m. Julia and I shared a blue Subaru Forester. It wasn’t flashy, but it was dependable, and Dad chose it based on its impressive safety record.

  “You sure?” Julia murmured. Standing in her doorway, I nodded. Turns out sleep deprivation really does affect decision making.

  “Practice ends at four, and the orientation isn’t until four thirty,” I said. “That’ll give me time to shower, dress, and make it over to the club—it’s only a few blocks.”

  That Tuesday marked the unofficial start of the Season. Julia and I and the other girls were invited to tea at Turtle Creek Country Club with our governess, Ann Foster. She would look us over, tell us what to expect and how to behave.

  “You won’t be hot?”

  “The weather’s cooled off,” I said breezily. “And practice is just a walk-through and drills. Besides, if anything does happen, I don’t want us both to be late.”

  “Okay,” she replied, falling back onto her pillow. “I’ll save you a seat.”

  Stifling pangs of jealousy—I never get to sleep in—I closed her door softly, went downstairs, and rode to the gym, my sandals hooked over the handlebar and my then unwrinkled, immaculate, and bagged red dress billowing out behind me like Superman’s cape.

  Alas, things did not go as planned. First, it was hot—blast furnace hot. Summers in Texas are always steamy, but by September the weather usually backs off from freaking unbearable to nearly tolerable. But not that day. By 2 p.m. the temperature hovered at 102 degrees, with rain forest humidity.

  Then a series of sloppy passes and general buffoonery sent Coach Nash over the edge, and the whole “drills and a walk-through” was replaced by running the stadium stairs.

  “Push it, push it, push it!” Coach Nash screamed as a pack of girls climbed up, up, up. At the top I turned left and sprinted f
or the next aisle. Then down, down, down the stairs. Up one flight, down another. Rinse and repeat. “It’s overtime, you’ve been running for two hours, you’re exhausted, and so are they. Now it’s just about will. Who wants it more?”

  “Not any harder than climbing Mount McKinley,” I managed to wheeze to Cat as we climbed the top section, using three breaths to get out the seven words.

  “At least it’s cold in Alaska,” Cat gasped back.

  Word. The metal bleachers were scalding hot to the touch, the stadium was damp as a terrarium, and the sun roared down like a blow torch. When Coach finally released us at 4:15 I was drenched. Worse, my core was hot as a pizza oven.

  I entered the shower at 4:19 and blasted myself with ice-cold water for five straight minutes. This wasn’t nearly enough to cool off, and as I stood in front of the mirror at 4:28 applying mascara, beads of sweat popped out on my beet-red forehead. I left the locker room, unstuck my dress from my moist ass, and stole a quick peek at my watch. 4:37—I willed myself to stay calm.

  “Your highness! Oh your highness,” Mariah squealed as I turned the corner by the bike stall. Lindsay and Lachelle immediately started blowing on pink-and-white “princess” kazoos and genuflecting while Cat stood at attention and set off a child’s confetti cannon. It went off with as much oomph as a good fart, and the confetti flew up six inches before falling pathetically in the grass.

  “Fail,” Lachelle said.

  “Right? So lame,” Cat said, looking at the empty canister. “This thing cost four ninety-nine.”

  “Funny, guys, thanks,” I said. I wasn’t that surprised by the Prank Brigade, as news of my debut had spread quickly through the team. As I unlocked my bike, Cat ran over and handed me my bike helmet.

  “Your crown, milady,” she said, and then she too bowed before breaking into peals of laughter.