Ingersoll was the daughter of one of the town’s most respected families. With fine blonde hair swept over her low forehead, her round blue-gray eyes and knobby nose, her wide neck and button chin, she wasn’t a classic beauty. But she had an angular jawline and plush lips, so she was thought of as the town beauty nonetheless. She was popular and personable, she was believed to be smart, and she was at the top of the social food chain. JW, on the other hand, was a scrappy seventeen-year-old horse trainer, a loner in school with middling grades, who worked to make extra money to support himself during the long stretches when his dad was away on the road.
He thought about the moment of their meeting. He was delivering a mare from Fredrickson’s Barn to Olson’s Stables, which was the more upscale horse barn that catered to lake people from the Twin Cities. Everybody was trying to figure out ways to make money off the lake people. The Main Street businesses had even started selling North Woods–themed kitsch and faux antiques to attract vacationers.
He remembered hauling Fredrickson’s old blue horse trailer into Olson’s gravel lot, the truck’s rusted fenders flapping like an old person’s jowls. He slowed to a stop in a cloud of yellow dust near the mouth of the red-and-white barn, by far the most successful boarding facility in the area. Its main door stood open to the sun, and its broad center aisle shone with the muted wood planking and bright silver bars of horse stalls. Bales of pine shavings were stacked on pallets just inside, and a delivery worker was loading his forklift back onto the end of his truck. JW turned to let the mare out and saw Carol and her friend Mary Beth walking toward the barn.
“Hey,” she said, with a little wave and a smile. Such personal acknowledgment was unexpected. But in that one wave the notion that he could have this most desirable of girls shot through him. He could immediately imagine her smell, the feeling of her fine arms and hands, her hair on his face. His mind raced. Olson needed a younger trainer like JW, he told the stable owner when he checked in the horse. It would help bring in the girls.
“Where the girls go, the families go,” JW said. Olson knew it was true. Horses had mostly become a girl thing in recent years, and so Olson took JW up on his offer to work a week for free to see what he could do. By July it had become a full-time summer job. He’d taken the girls off barn nags and put them on two of Olson’s fancy show horses. He promised he wouldn’t let the girls screw them up, and he worked with them in the riding ring out by the road, where two pretty girls bouncing on horseback brought in even more clients for the stable and its talented young trainer.
By August, when Mary Beth went on a family vacation to the Wisconsin Dells, Carol came for private lessons. He took her on long trail rides through the thick grasses along the riverbed. They talked about life and their classmates as the water flowed by, thick and brown. Most of the time it was Carol doing the talking, and JW thrilled to feel her thigh brushing against him, or to direct her hand placement with his own.
By the beginning of the school year they had become a couple, throwing the town’s social balance out of order. She told her friends that he was really smart, but despite what he would come to think of as her down-to-earthness, her crowd was one of speedboats, water skis, and downhill skiing trips to Spirit Mountain—or even Aspen—in the winters. Her friends were the children of the top executives from the paper mill and the former mine manager. JW had grown up in a four-room house, and the farthest he’d been was Fargo. Yet somehow—after a few weeks of gossip and consternation—he became cool, a token of their open-mindedness, and the social stratification of early high school began to fall away.
He and Carol continued riding. He loved her sleek blonde hair, her plush pink lips, and the strange gray-blue pools of her round eyes. At night they had exuberant sex—in the tack room, in an empty stall thick with pine shavings, in the changing rooms of horse trailers. He loved the sound of her gasping, rhythmic sighs.
In the spring he was invited to the Ingersoll home for dinner. Arguably the nicest house in town, it was a classic brick and clapboard two-story colonial with mini-mansion touches—the small, white-columned front portico, twelve-pane double-hung windows, and white painted shutters. The interior had an enormous wood-paneled family room hung with brass rubbings from England and a high trompe l’oeil ceiling painted like a summer sky. Mrs. Ingersoll kept fresh flowers in vases and plastic on the pale sofas in the living room.
Carol and her younger brother, Evan, who was twelve, sat opposite JW at the Queen Anne dining table, with Carol’s parents, Bob and Mary, on either end. He remembered the light streaming through the lacy living-room curtains and falling across the ashen blue carpeting. Mary’s knife clicked faintly against her china as she quizzed him, the expanse of the living room opening up behind her. “Have you given much thought to what you’re going to do? For a career.”
“A little bit,” he replied. “Right now I’m thinking about training horses.”
“He changes it weekly,” added Carol.
He felt his face redden at this betrayal.
Mary smiled and went back to her carrots. “Well, sooner or later you’ll have to pick one and stick with it, I suppose.”
“I know,” said JW.
“You could be a horse trainer,” Bob said from the other end of the table. The French doors to the sunroom stood open behind him. “But there isn’t much money in it.”
“Yeah,” said Evan, “Like loser money.” Carol elbowed him.
“There’s ten dollars an hour in it,” JW said to the boy, suddenly defensive. He glanced toward Mr. Ingersoll. “Maybe that’s not that much for a grown-up.”
“Well, that’s pretty good for a kid, especially these days,” replied Bob, eyeing Evan. “But you can’t do it forever. And you probably want a better lifestyle. Have you thought about that?”
“Not really.” JW was adopting the aw-shucks air of a hayseed, something he did when he was nervous, but he kicked himself for it and sat higher, adjusting his grip on his silverware.
“The key to making real money is to do something that helps people control their destiny.” Mr. Ingersoll poked the air with his fork for emphasis, then went in for another bite of chicken.
“I guess I can see that,” said JW.
“Take your father,” Mr. Ingersoll went on. “He puts up cell phone towers, right?”
“Sort of. He drives around and sells the leases.”
“Even better! He helps people control their destiny by giving them power. He helps famers make money off those leases, and he gives people power to make their lives better by having the convenience and safety of a cell phone. Do you see?”
“I guess.” JW had never really thought about his dad like that before, and he didn’t think many other people did either. His dad was a traveling salesman who drank too much.
“You see?”
“You give people choices,” offered JW agreeably. He felt like a rube being polished up for the fair.
“Exactly! Choice is freedom. You work in a business that expands their ability to better their own lives. Horses used to do that. Then it was cars. Now it’s cell phones.”
JW nodded and smiled “That’s an interesting observation,” he said. Carol crossed her eyes at him from behind her drumstick, as if to communicate that she’d heard these sorts of lectures many times. He was starting to forgive her.
“Maybe you should consider taking a job at the bank this coming summer,” offered Mary. “That helps people control their lives. Bob could introduce you to the president.” She glanced at Bob, who shrugged and nodded.
It wasn’t like they had told him to do anything, JW thought as he drove home from Minneapolis. Yet in many ways the strange keitos of chance and emotion running through that dinner had laid the foundation for where he was now. The Ingersolls had set an expectation for the boy who was by chance dating their daughter, a certain standard he had to maintain. And so he took a summer job as a teller at the bank, letting his former