Rod Greer, he’s been at it forty-five years. There’s jockeys who aren’t jockeys anymore but they still gallop horses. There’s grooms who’ve taken a little time off and then gone back to the track. Trainers still own racehorses but now they hire someone else to do the training. Some have sons or daughters in the business. A few of the stallions I took care of still sire offspring. Those foals are running in races today.

By the time you’re my age you’ve had a lot of injuries. And where there’s injuries, you get arthritis. I got buggered up a few times but thought I escaped pretty good. Now I wake up on a rainy day and think, I remember this. I remember it right here.

A PARTICULAR LANGUAGE

When I tell Jerry stories about the racetrack he doesn’t say much. It’s hard for people who haven’t been there to understand. There’s a particular language you pick up on the track. I’d come home for the holidays and try to talk to my family, but nothing I said made sense to them. What? they’d say. Huh? What do you mean?

A racetracker doesn’t say We won a race. A racetracker says We win. It’s not proper English. It’s not We won. It’s not We will win. The race is over, it’s already won, but we say We win, we win, we win.

AFTERWORD

Kick the Latch is based on interviews recorded in person and by phone in 2018, 2020, and 2021. With Sonia’s permission, I transcribed those recordings and used them to write this book, which is a work of fiction. My gratitude to Sonia — and to my mother, who introduced us — is profound.

Kathryn Scanlan