Aly's House by Leila Meacham

after, not because he held his injuries against them, but because he could never ride again. “Me working around horses would be like an alcoholic working in a liquor store,” he once explained to Aly. “Too much pain, too many memories.”
    He had come to them the month she was born. Her father had hired him to be on hand to drive her mother to the hospital in case he wasn’t around. He hadn’t been, and Willy had been the one careening around corners and running red lights in the wee hours of the morning to get her mother to the emergency entrance in time for delivery. Annie Jo and Willy had been the first to wave and smile at her through the nursery room glass, and so it had been ever since. They were always the ones to whom she took her triumphs and tragedies.
    Well, she thought, at least at Cedar Hill Willy had a home for a while. Once she found a place for Sampson, she would concentrate on one for Willy.
    Several hours later, Aly sat seething behind the wheel of her sports car parked in front of the Newton Riding Stable. She’d just been informed by the owner that he had no room to stable another horse, even though Aly had spied two empty stalls with blank nameplates. “What about those?” she had asked, pointing to the end of the stable.
    “They’re reserved for two boarders coming in at the end of the week.”
    “Which boarders?”
    “That’s none of your business, young lady.”
    “My father put you up to this, didn’t he? He called you and warned you that I’d be out, looking for a place to keep Sampson. You’re afraid that the bank will call in your loan if you rent a stall to me, aren’t you?”
    The nervous shift of the stable owner’s eyes confirmed to Aly that she had correctly appraised the situation. She’d had the same experience at the other stable.
    Now what was she to do? Where could she go for stable space? Which farmer or rancher was not in hock to the Kingston State Bank? The only resident she could think of was Matt Taylor, still referred to as the Connecticut Yankee even though he had come down from New England a quarter of a century before. Hardworking, frugal, and solvent, he owned Green Meadows, one of the finest horsebreeding farms in the state and a neighbor to Cedar Hill. Money changed hands between him and her father because the profits from the farm were deposited in the Kingston State Bank and the bank paid Matt interest on them.
    But Matt was bidding for Sampson. Why would he want to rent a stall to her when he found out that she, too, had made an offer for the horse. He would be sure to figure out that the sale was contingent on her securing space for him. Aly put the sports car in reverse gear. Right now she had no other choice but to sound Matt out about it. The worst he could say was no. Dadblameit! She knew the reason for her father’s interference. It wasn’t the loan. He wanted nothing to prevent her going to college. Aly would have preferred his usual indifference. She’d had more experience with it and had learned how to deal with the pain.
    She found Matt in his office, a spacious, comfortable room with large plate glass windows overlooking barns, stables, paddocks, and grazing fields. Green Meadows had produced a number of racing champions, and its stock was noted to be sound, sturdy, and healthy. Aly respected and liked Matt Taylor, a heavy-set man in his early forties who was never too busy to play host to schoolchildren on field trips.
    The breeder had never lost his Eastern accent, and his quick clear speech with the hard consonants fell sharply on Oklahoma ears. When she arrived, he was shouting into the phone. “You can tell Benjy Carter that I have no intention of bailing him out of jail on this drunken charge, not this time! You can tell him for me, his former employer, that he can rot in there for all I care.” He banged down the phone and scowled at Aly.
    “Benjy Carter at it again, Mr. Taylor?”
    “Got picked up driving on the wrong side of