Death By Bridle by Abigail Keam

Maybe there were problems and I just looked the other way. I don’t really know except that I was happy for the most part.
    “Now Jake and I have nothing in common. We can’t even agree on what TV show to watch, but I ache for Jake the way I never ached for my husband. All I seem to think about is the heat of his skin when touching mine, how the back of my neck tingled when I caught him looking at me. This neediness for him runs so deep inside me that sometimes I think I won’t able to take the next breath. He kissed me one time and I thought I was going to faint.” I shook my head. “A simple kiss. I can’t explain it except that I felt I had dropped into a black void where there was only sensation. I simply lost myself in him.”
    “You got love sickness the worst I’ve seen for a long time,” replied Mrs. Todd. “Why don’t you call him?”
    I shook my head in despair. “Asa sent him away. Unless things are made right between the two of them, I have to give him up. She is my blood, bone of my bone, my flesh. I can’t go against my daughter.”
    “Like the biblical Ruth and her mother-in-law.”
    “Something like that.”
    We both heard Lincoln roll out of bed chattering to Baby, who had taken to sleeping with him. Mrs. Todd gave me a sympathetic look while helping me rise off the bed. She went to Lincoln’s room while I stumbled around looking for where I had placed the box of pain patches.
    I felt dull and listless. The only thing alive about me was the pain.
    And I hated it.

20
    In the thirties, Jean Harlow was one of the biggest stars at MGM, or in the world for that matter. Studio executives discovered her as she waited for a friend in a car. Harlow claimed that her platinum hair was real. It was that white hair that made her the screen’s first sex goddess – more so than Greta Garbo, Gloria Swanson or Mae West. Her film Red-Headed Woman created a furor over its plot in which a woman sleeps her way to success and suffers no retribution for it. She got clean away, enjoying the high life. The moral backlash was one more reason to force the studio heads to allow the Hays Commission to censor their films.
    But instead of a boycott, Harlow’s next film made even more money. Go figure.
    In the end it didn’t matter. She died at the age of 26 from renal failure. Her great love, William Powell, the elegant actor of The Thin Man series, left a note in her dead hand – Goodnight, my dearest darling .
    The Jean Harlow that stood before me at the September yearling sales at Keeneland Race Track was not a blonde but a gleaming brunette with four white stocking legs. She was brought in by a Hispanic worker, who handed her over to an African-American handler wearing a green Keeneland sports coat. The white auctioneers presided like high priests over the event.
    I sat in the back of the pavilion filled with international and local buyers with money to burn. They had one thing in common – they loved horses and the kingly sport of Thoroughbred racing. It was their passion. Their raison d’ĉtre.
    The Keeneland sales have had many “interesting” spectators over the years. One was a Mrs. Emile Denemark, who was rumored to be Al Capone’s sister. She was remembered wearing an apricot lace dress with a Chihuahua thrust into her ample bosom. Whenever Mrs. Denemark took a deep breath, the Chihuahua’s eyes would bulge out of his head and then recede when she exhaled.
    The reason I was at Keeneland was to watch Aspen Lancaster sell his own horse, Jean Harlow. The sire had been Arthur’s Dancing Ruby, which was unusual in itself. Horses still in their racing career are rarely used as stud horses, but apparently a special deal had been worked out between Arthur and Aspen – at least that’s what Aspen said.
    And he did have the video, semen sample, and paperwork to prove it.
    Aspen sat in the third row, his face blank. How did it feel to sell a possible Kentucky Derby winner – Aspen’s last chance at