I tried not to look at his hand on the scarred blue wood. Since he’d been sick I kept a sterile kitchen and carried antibacterial spray in my pocket, but then he’d sit at grimy, gum-spotted tables, and cross the track as the wind blew dried manure in swirling gusts. I couldn’t spray everything, so I’d stopped fighting him about it. There had to be some trade-off for him, some reason for putting up with the painkillers and germ-killers and bone marrow–killers.

“Do you think the jockeys throw races?” I asked him.

There was a silence while he studied the odds board across the track. “I think a guy works awful hard to be throwing races,” he said.

“But if it earns them a chance to win,” I said. “If they take turns.”

He shook his head. “I guess it happens.”

“Would Connell do it?”

“I don’t think so,” he said.

My ex-husband had just ridden our fastest horse, a filly we called Rocky, to a surprising loss. My annulled husband—we weren’t married long enough to earn the “ex.” One of twelve kids from a two-room shack in Tennessee, Connell was the best kind of jockey: an athlete, addicted to nothing but racing, gentle with the horses and liked by the crowd. He was my height, too tall to make it in the South as anything but an exercise rider, so he came north, and when I met him he was the star of the Montana circuit. People would bet on anything he rode. That November I got myself up as a bride, but before the winter was over my new husband left for New Mexico. He couldn’t stand the cold, he said. I wasn’t invited. My father was sick by then, so I moved back into his house and swore off jockeys for good.

In the beginning I was just picking up slack, registering the horses for races when my father was in the hospital or when the treatments had tired him out, but it started to take most of my time just to keep us solvent. Even in remission he was tired, and the money wouldn’t be there when he needed full-time care. He said he would rather have the horses than full-time care, and I could never argue.

When Connell returned to Montana, my father put him up on our horses again. At first I thought he was getting back at me for marrying Connell in the first place, but then I decided he was being loyal to a man who had done him no wrong and who was good at what he did; we needed purses to stay in business and Connell brought the horses home.