Rocky meditatively kicked one wrapped rear leg out behind her, shifted her weight and kicked the other. She looked sleek and calm. We’d bought her mother from our trainer as a favor; the trainer was disgusted with the mare, but my father liked the look of her, and she paid off in Rocky, a straight-legged filly who’d climb into your lap if you let her. The mare died at Christmas a year later, and my father didn’t speak for days.

I put an arm around Rocky’s neck and she nibbled at my tank top.

“I thought she should have won last week,” I said. “The other horses are hit-or-miss but I count on her to win.”

“They knocked her into the rail,” Connell said. “She’ll win today.”

“Well,” I said. “It’s a tougher field.”

“You want her to win?” he asked, and he gave me a hard look. He hardly ever made eye contact with me since he’d come back. He was usually looking at a horse or off into the middle distance, expecting weather.

“Of course,” I said.

“Then she’s going to win.”

I felt embarrassed, more than I’d felt at his hearing I was angry, more like I used to feel when my father knew I was hanging around the paddock at the end of the day, waiting for a jockey.

Connell shook an aerosol can of PAM cooking spray, brushed off one of Rocky’s front hooves and sprayed inside the shoe, to keep the mud off. The announcer called the loading of the eighth. We rinsed Rocky’s mouth with a garden hose because we couldn’t find the syringe, and the trainer’s wife showed up on a stocky gray mare to lead her across the track. In the paddock, a jockey from the seventh race hosed off his white pants while another in splattered silks waited.

Rocky was on the outside again, so she would load last and wouldn’t have to sit in the gate with wraps on her ankles. Everything seemed good. Connell was supposed to save her in the first third of the race, then let her go. The old helpless feeling came on as I watched him get ponied onto the track and toward the gate. Nothing to do but wait.