The trainer cost three hundred dollars an hour and still couldn't get the mare around the second barrel.
LaVonne Watts watched from the top rail of the practice pen at the Sumner County fairgrounds with her hands folded on her knee and her mouth shut. It took some doing. She had been biting her tongue for three straight days.
Down in the arena, her granddaughter, Brynn, came into the pattern at a lope on a palomino mare named Sugar. Around the first barrel, clean and tight.
Across the pen toward the second. And then, three strides out, the mare's head came up, her ears went sideways, and she ducked out to the right and blew past the barrel like it wasn't there.
Again.
"Stop," the trainer called. "Bring her back."
The trainer's name was Brock Sterling. He was thirty-four, from outside Stillwater, Oklahoma, and he had sixty thousand followers on his phone who watched videos of him fixing barrel horses.
Brynn had been watching him since she was twelve. When her mother drove her two hours down to his clinic in February and Sugar was still ducking the second barrel after three days, Brynn had begged him to come up to Kansas for private sessions before the high school rodeo season started.
He was here now. At three hundred dollars an hour.
He was good with horses. LaVonne could see that from the rail. Quiet hands.
Patient. He'd changed Sugar's bit on Monday.
He'd put a tie-down on her Tuesday to keep her head from coming up. On Wednesday, he'd had the vet out to check her back and her hocks and her teeth.
The vet said Sugar was sound as a dollar.
Sugar still ducked the second barrel.
LaVonne was seventy. She'd run barrels on the Kansas rodeo circuit for twenty-two years, from the summer she was fifteen to the summer her knees told her she was done.
She'd won the state finals twice, in 1973 and 1979. She'd trained her own horses on a farm south of Wellington, and she still had the saddle and both buckles in a glass case in her front room.
Brynn had looked at those buckles a thousand times.
But Brynn was fifteen. And to a fifteen-year-old, a buckle from 1979 might as well be from the Civil War.
"Grandma," Brynn had said at breakfast that morning, not unkindly, "things are different now. It's a whole different sport. The horses are faster. The training's totally different. Brock's got, like, a system."
"I'm sure he does, sugar."
"He's coached three world champions."
"I'm sure he has."
Brynn had looked at her across the table. "So you're not going to say anything, right? At practice? Please?"
LaVonne had promised.
Brynn brought the mare back to the alley. Brock walked out to the second barrel and stood beside it with his hands on his hips, thinking.
"It's something in her past," he said finally. "Some bad experience on a left-hand turn. She's anticipating. We'll go back to the walk and rebuild that turn from the ground up. It might take a couple of months."
"A couple of months?" Brynn's voice cracked. "The Sumner County rodeo's in three weeks. It's the first one of the season. I've been training for it all winter."
"I know. I'm sorry." Brock looked genuinely sorry. "Some horses just need time."
Brynn's mother, Jen, stood by the fence with her checkbook in her hand and a face that said she was adding up how many more sessions a couple of months would be.
LaVonne didn't say anything. She'd promised.
But she'd seen it. She'd seen it on the very first run, an hour ago, before Brock had even finished his coffee. She'd seen it on every run since.
It wasn't the horse.
Brynn made one more run before they quit for the day.
LaVonne watched her granddaughter instead of the mare this time. She watched Brynn come around the first barrel with her eyes up and her chin up, looking across the arena to where she was going.
Good. Beautiful.
And then, three strides out from the second barrel, she watched Brynn's eyes drop.
Down to the barrel. Right at it.
Brynn's chin went down with her eyes, and her shoulders came forward, and her weight shifted, just a little, onto the horse's front end. Three strides out, the girl was staring at that barrel like it was a rattlesnake.
And Sugar, who was a good honest mare and did exactly what her rider's body told her, read that weight shift the only way a horse could read it. Something's wrong up there. And she ducked.
LaVonne had done the same thing herself, at sixteen, at the county rodeo in Winfield, on a sorrel gelding named Duke. Her daddy had seen it from the stands. He'd fixed it with one sentence.
She climbed down off the fence. Her knees complained.
Brynn was walking Sugar out in a circle with her face red and her eyes wet. LaVonne caught her bridle as she came by.
"Brynn, honey," she said quietly. "Can I tell you one thing?"
Brynn looked down at her from the saddle. For a second, LaVonne saw her own face at fifteen, stubborn and proud and scared to death of looking foolish in front of somebody she admired.
"Grandma," Brynn said, "you promised."
Behind her, Brock Sterling was walking over from the barrel, and he'd heard every word.