After Being Kicked Out, I Became the Queen My Family Can't Reach novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Gravel
Warrick Redmond blames his nineteen-year-old daughter for her mother's death and throws her out in front of two hundred guests; at the gate she sees his new wife wearing her mother's ring.
My mother was buried on a Thursday, and by Thursday night my father had decided I was the one who killed her.
I was nineteen.
I stood in the front hall of Redmond Hill with a plate of ham I couldn't eat.
Two hundred people in black shook my hand.
They said she was a queen.
They said the farm would never be the same.
Nobody said her name without lowering their voice, because she had won the Redmond Gold Cup three times.
My father stood on the stairs with a glass in his hand.
Warrick Redmond was forty-nine, silver at the temples, and he had never once raised his voice in front of a guest.
He raised it now.
"Somebody tell my daughter where her mother was at two in the morning."
The room went quiet.
I put the plate down on the hall table.
"Dad, please."
"The barn," he said.
"She was in the barn."
"She went out in her nightgown and a pair of boots, because somebody had to find you."
A woman near the door put her hand over her mouth.
"You sneaked out to see that boy from the feed store," he said.
"Your mother couldn't sleep until you were home."
"She climbed that loft ladder in the dark to see if your horse was in his stall."
"And she never came down it."
I hadn't sneaked out.
I had been in my room with the lights off, crying over a boy who hadn't called me back.
I had fallen asleep with my phone on my chest.
I had not heard her go.
I had not heard anything.
"I didn't know," I said.
"Of course you didn't."
My father came down the stairs one step at a time, and the guests moved back to make a path for him.
"You never know," he said.
"You were a careless girl, and now I'm a widower."
Behind him, at the top of the stairs, a woman in a black dress stood with her hand on the banister.
Renata Redmond kept the farm's books.
She was forty-one, with a neat blonde bob and a pleasant face she used when she was adding up what other people owed.
Two of my suitcases stood beside her feet.
I had not packed them.
She had.
"You'll find everything in the blue one," she said, in the voice she used to tell grooms their pay was short.
"Your clothes, your riding boots, and four hundred dollars."
I looked at my father.
He looked at the front door.
"You're not staying in this house," he said.
"You're not staying on this farm."
"Dad, it's Mom's funeral."
"Don't call me that in front of her friends."
I want to say I cried.
I had been crying for four days, and I thought I had nothing left.
What I felt instead was a kind of quiet.
I walked up three stairs, took the suitcases from Renata's feet, and carried them down myself.
Nobody moved.
Then I turned to the hall table, where my mother's riding crop lay in the silver dish with the guest cards.
Braided leather, a brass cap, her initials worn almost smooth.
She had carried it in every Cup she rode.
I picked it up.
"That belongs to this house," Renata said.
"It belongs to the Queen of the Cup," I said, "and she's lying in the ground on your hill."
I heard a few people breathe in.
My father went red from his collar up.
"Put it down, Calla."
"No."
"Put it down or I'll have you carried out."
I looked at the two hundred faces and the flowers.
I looked at the trophies on every wall with my mother's name on them.
Then I looked at him.
"You won't need to," I said.
I walked to the front door with a suitcase in each hand and her crop under my arm.
The guests parted for me exactly as they had for him.
"Callie," someone whispered.
It might have been Abel, the old groom, standing by the door with his cap crushed in his fist.
He didn't say anything else.
I stopped on the porch and turned around.
"One day somebody will put a silver crown on my head in front of every one of you," I said.
"And you will have to stand there and clap."
My father laughed.
It was short and ugly.
"You couldn't win a pony ride."
The door shut behind me.
The October air smelled of cut hay.
I walked down the long gravel drive, because I had no car and nowhere to call.
Halfway to the gate, I heard heels on the stone behind me.
Renata had followed me out, and she wasn't hurrying.
She stopped under the lamp at the foot of the porch steps and held up her left hand to the light.
On her ring finger sat a square emerald in an old gold setting.
I knew that ring.
My mother had worn it every day of my life, and I had watched her take it off exactly once, to wash a foal.
She had worn it in the coffin, I thought, and I had watched them close the lid.
Someone had taken it off her hand before they did.
"Your father gave it to me this morning," Renata said, and turned her hand so the stone caught the lamp.
"It fits me better."
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