“You need the money as much as anyone,” Connell said. He pushed the cuffs of his jacket back to his elbows with two quick shoves, like we were going to fight, then tugged the cuffs down again. I watched his hands. I had loved his hands when I met him; they were deft and strong and sure.

“It has to be fair,” I said.

Connell shook his head a little. “Anything can happen out there,” he said. “Jesus. I thought you’d know that by now.”

“As fair as it can be.”

Connell shook his head again, tight-mouthed, and looked out at the track.

I drove home alone and tried not to think about what had happened or what might happen again. Instead I made plans to feed the half-wild barn cats, and water the plants, and call the doctors for the bottom line about my dad’s driving.

My father already knew about the win when I got there. I’d forgotten we had a reason to celebrate. He was at the door, smiling his old invincible, take-on-all-comers smile. He looked almost healthy, and happy, the way he was back in the flush years. “You win some, you win some,” he’d told me then. I sat next to him on the back deck and he clapped a freckled hand onto my knee.

“Wish I’d been there,” he said.

Out in the pasture one of the new fillies, a strawberry roan, caught up to its mother to nurse as she grazed.

“Connell says it’s all about money,” I said. “He says it’s just a business. Getting and spending.”

“He’s got it backward,” my father said. “The money stuff goes on so we can all watch them run.”

The yellow aspen quaked along the fence. The deck needed repainting and I picked at the flecks on the weathered wood. I tried to think of something that seemed important enough to say but not too sad to talk about, and could think of nothing.

The third weekend of the meet started well. My father’s white blood cell count was up, and he drove, in defiance of the doctors. He seemed not to fill up the driver’s seat the way he used to when he drove everywhere, a hundred miles an hour, and never got pulled over. We left early, heading into a pale sunrise, and somewhere on the winding road through the canyons it turned into a hot, dry day. I sat with my feet up on the dash, lead ropes and old race programs on the floor beneath me, and watched the mountains and the impossibly blue sky go by. I’d seen this landscape so much that most of the time my senses were glutted and one mountain range looked like the next. At other times, and this was one of those, it caught me by surprise and the blue was so vast and bright I couldn’t breathe.