One Unhappy Horse (2 page)

They wouldn't, but at least Jan still had Dove. What if something was very wrong with him? No, Jan told herself. She couldn't lose her father
and
the big house that she'd grown up in
and
her horse all in one year. Life couldn't be
that
unfair.

Jan had never liked going to school. Even when Dad had seen to it that she was outfitted with the right clothes, she hadn't felt as if she belonged. Dad had said her attachment to Dove was the problem. He'd teased her, saying if he'd known how much space the horse would take in her life, he wouldn't have given her Dove for her seventh birthday.

That had allowed Mom to jibe, "I told you we couldn't afford a pet horse on this ranch."

"It's not the money," Dad had said, "but I don't want the horse making our girl into a loner."

"I'm not a loner," Jan had protested. "I just like being with Dove and you guys best." She didn't care about TV programs and computer games and shopping malls and team sports the way the other kids did. Even the few who loved horses talked either about showing them or about rodeo.

As far as the lessons part of school, learning was a chore to
get through. And now that Dove had a problem, Jan was having a hard time concentrating. She sat in social studies class while the teacher, Mr. Coss, droned on about the importance of topographical maps, but she didn't register a word he said. She was wondering if the Bute tablets that she'd mixed with bran and that Dove had lapped up so eagerly that morning would work. Dove had nickered, as if to ask her where she was going when she left him, and she'd nearly missed the bus to go back to hug him. It had seemed to her that the hot surge of her love should help heal him. Surely, its power had to have some use.

"Soon you're going to feel so good that we can go cantering down the road," she'd promised him. Then the driver had honked impatiently and she'd had to sprint.

One day—that's the time she'd give the Bute to cure Dove. If it didn't, she'd remind Mom that Dad wouldn't have hesitated to call the vet. "Life's too short to be economizing all the time," Dad had always said when Mom objected to his buying something. Well, he'd been right about life being short because he was only thirty-six when he died. "My girls," Dad had called his wife and daughter in a voice syrupy with love and pride. He'd been the center of their lives, the only one who could make Mom relax enough to enjoy herself, the only one who could make her smile.

By lunchtime, Jan had chewed her lip until it was sore and slightly swollen. Besides, she wasn't hungry. Even pizza didn't seem appealing today. She bought milk and an
apple and went in search of an empty seat in the noisy cafeteria.

She felt exposed standing there alone with her backpack on her back and her hands full. It wasn't just that her jeans had the wrong label and she was wearing an old shirt of her father's with the sleeves rolled up instead of a fashionable stretchy-fabric top. It wasn't just that she was too tall and long-jawed and thin. What made her an outsider here was that she had no close friend among these kids she'd been going to school with since first grade. The embarrassment of being solitary made her think of taking refuge in the computer room. Kids could spend lunch hour there but not eat. Jan was considering ditching her apple and milk so she could go when someone called her name.

"Come sit with us," Brittany hailed her. Brittany was a people magnet. She collected kids around her wherever she was and had more friends than the old woman in the shoe had children. Jan liked her, but she had learned not to expect much from Brittany. The girl had to divide her time and affection up into too many little pieces.

Today, though, Jan was grateful for even a small piece. "Thanks," she said to Brittany and fitted her narrow hips onto the bench at the end of Brittany's crowded table. Blended into the crowd at last, Jan relaxed. All she had to do now was listen.

For once everyone at the table was female. They were talking about boys and how stupid they could be.

"Do you have a boyfriend?" the girl sitting next to Jan asked her. The personal question surprised Jan because she didn't know this small, intense, freckle-faced girl who was new in their school.

"No boyfriend. Not me," Jan said.

"Did you ever have a boyfriend?" the girl persisted.

"She has a horse," smart-mouth Barbara said from across the table. "They're going steady."

"Oh," said the girl, leaning toward Jan. "I had a horse for a while, but I got tired of getting up early to take care of it before school. Does your father make you do that?"

"No," Jan said. She wasn't about to confide to a stranger that her father was dead. To distract her, Jan asked quickly, "Do you ride much?"

"Well, I used to ride in Connecticut. That's where I lived," the girl answered. "But that was English saddle. You know, posting and that stuff? I've never ridden western style."

"It's easy," Jan said. "You just sit the saddle and put pressure on your toes instead of with your knees."

"So what's your horse like?" the girl asked.

Jan stiffened and answered shortly, "He's lame right now."

"Is that why you're so grumpy?" The girl asked it with a smile that took the sting off her words.

Jan didn't know what to answer. She took a bite of her apple and munched, fixing her eyes on the table. The girl inched away from her then and turned to face the other end of the table where they were talking about a rock star who was coming to Tucson. Jan felt bad. The new girl had just been trying to be friendly. If only she had her father's knack with people! "Nothing to it," Dad would say. "Just smile, and most folks will smile right back." She hadn't smiled. If she had, would the girl have become her friend? Probably not. The ranch was too isolated. Besides, she didn't have time for a friend now with Dove sick.

Dove's head came up expectantly when he saw Jan coming toward his corral that afternoon. He nickered, tossing his head and showing his teeth in his funny smiling way.

"So did the medicine work?" Jan asked him. She patted his neck and knuckled him under the ear the way he liked. Taking her time about it, she went about cleaning up the dirty shavings and shoveling in fresh.

Dove butted her in the rear end with his head, nearly knocking her into the soiled shavings she was piling into the wheelbarrow. It had been a favorite trick of his when she first got him, and she'd worked hard to break him of it. But now she was glad to find him so frisky. "If you're feeling so good, how about a little exercise?" Jan asked.

The sun blazed in a pale sapphire sky, scouring the desert with its heat even though Halloween was only a few weeks off. Jan was happy because Dove finally seemed to be walking better. She decided to try mounting him and
see how he did with her on his back. If she kept to the dirt road inside the ranch and stopped when he showed signs of tiring, it should be all right.

She was riding Dove bareback, leaning over his neck to tell him how glad she was that he was fit again, when she spotted the tiny curly-haired lady who had helped her rescue the wanderer yesterday. The lady—what had she said her name was? Mattie? Yes, that was it. Mattie was walking with another old woman as tall and thin as a crane. Jan had seen people from the home out walking before and had deliberately avoided them. Today she meant to pass them on the opposite side of the road. Should she say hi since Mattie wasn't quite a stranger anymore? But if she did, and Mattie didn't recall her from yesterday, it would be embarrassing.

While Jan was still trying to make up her mind whether to pass in silence or not, Mattie stopped short and grabbed her companion's arm to halt her.

"Look there! It's the girl who saved Sadie," Mattie said. Her high, quick voice carried easily in the still air. "Our hero—or is it heroine? Heroine, I guess, seeing she's a girl. Right, Amelia?"

"Correct," Amelia said. She stood statue-still in the middle of the road, eyes aimed straight ahead.

"Is that pretty horse yours, dear?" Mattie asked Jan. "I've forgotten your name. When you get old as me, you're lucky you can remember your own name. Right, Amelia?"

"I remember fine," Amelia said. "I just can't see anymore."

"Amelia's legally blind," Mattie said, "but she can see her way to the table for meals just as good as you and me."

"Hmm," Amelia said without much heat.

"My name is Jan. Jan Wright. And my horse's name is Dove," Jan said.

"Wright? That's the name of the family that owned this ranch," Amelia said.

"We still own the working part of it," Jan was quick to point out.

Mattie had approached Dove and was stroking his neck. He allowed her touch while he waited patiently for Jan's next signal.

"Why, was it you, then, who carved your name inside of our closet door?" Mattie asked Jan. "I saw that name there, and I remember thinking, I bet some girl wanted us to know this was her room."

Jan felt a blush coming on. Luckily her skin was tanned enough to hide it. She remembered defiantly carving her name on the door the day Mom told her that their house had been sold. "Yes, that was me," she admitted.

"So where do you live now, honey?"

"In the casita." Jan swiveled her slim hips and pointed back over her shoulder at the tiny building with its postage-stamp ramada.

"That itty bitty place?" Mattie said. "My, you must be mad at us for taking over your nice big house."

Jan felt her cheeks heating up again, but she mumbled, "I'm not mad at you."

Mattie shook her head doubtfully. "I guess I would be."

Amelia said nothing.

"Want to pet this horse, Amelia?" Mattie asked. "I used to have a pretty, mahogany-colored quarter horse like him when I was a girl in Mississippi, you know."

"You told me," Amelia said dryly. "More than once."

Unfazed, Mattie turned back to Jan to say, "My daddy got me a horse for my fourth birthday, and was I ever wild about him! Right from the start, when I was too small to ride him."

"Wild about your daddy or your horse?" Amelia asked sharply.

Mattie's answer bypassed the sarcasm. "Both. I was wild about both. You know that horse of mine lived until I got married? Then I had to leave him behind on my mother's place, and he up and died. Mama said he missed me. But I don't know. He was old by then."

"So are we old," Amelia said, "and we're not dying."

"Some of us are getting pretty close, Amelia." Mattie turned to look up at Jan and said confidentially, "You know Sadie, that woman you rescued yesterday?"

"Yes," Jan said.

"Well, we didn't get away with hiding that she'd wandered off again. This morning they took her off to the nursing home, that one in the middle of Tucson." Mattie shook her head sadly.

"Was she sick?" Jan asked.

"Just up here." Mattie pointed to her head.

Jan felt a cold ripple down her spine. How awful, she thought, to be carted off against your will just because you got lost easily. "Will she come back soon?" she asked.

"Next step after the nursing home's the grave," Amelia said. She still hadn't moved from her position in the middle of the road.

"Well," Mattie said, "at least they don't have us yet, Amelia. Come on. I best get you out of the sun before you get heatstroke." Mattie took the tall woman's hand and said to Jan, "She won't wear a hat. I always tell her when we go for a walk, she should wear a hat, but she won't." Mattie laughed. "Stubborn, that's what Amelia is."

"That's what all old people are. Keeps us alive," Amelia said. She took a step in the direction Mattie had turned her, back toward the main house.

They would have to walk down the dirt road a quarter of a mile and then cross a field to get into the desert garden at the back of the house, where one could sit on the patio out of the hot afternoon sun. Jan missed the patio almost as much as she missed having her own room. She missed the cave-like cool inside the thick walls of the baked-brick ranch house, which hugged the ground and resisted the heat of the day. She missed the smells from the kitchen when Dad was cooking dinner, something he was better at than Mom. Life had been good when they lived in that house.

Before the two old ladies had taken more than a few steps, Mattie looked back over her shoulder at Jan and Dove. Her smile was bright as she said, "Come visit sometime, honey. I'll show you a picture of my Laddie-lee. That's what I named my horse when I was four. He was big, like your horse, but he had a white blaze between his eyes, and—Did I tell you he saved my life one time?"

"Let the girl be," Amelia chided her. "She's got more to do than listen to your old stories."

"Now, Amelia, you just feel that way because you've heard them all." Mattie turned toward Jan again. "Amelia and I share a room. We're the only two in our house that share. The others all have their own room.... But we don't mind it that much, do we, Amelia?"

"It must be getting close to suppertime," Amelia said.

She started forward again and Mattie followed, offering Amelia her arm. Over her shoulder, Mattie called out to Jan, "Come by anytime, honey. We
love
visitors, especially pretty young things like you. Bye, now." She waved and then concentrated on guiding Amelia.

She'd never step inside that house again, Jan thought. She'd hate being a guest in her own home and trying to make conversation with those women. What could she possibly have to say to them? They had nothing in common. But that Mattie did have a sweet face. She might have been pretty once, though it was hard to imagine she had ever been young. Of course—Jan smiled to herself as
she thought it—she wouldn't have to worry much about having to talk if Mattie were there.

Jan continued riding Dove slowly along the dirt road, but a few minutes after her encounter with Mattie and Amelia, Dove stumbled. Not that there was anything in the road for him to stumble on—his knee just seemed to buckle under him. And then he stumbled again. He wasn't better, Jan realized. It had been wishful thinking on her part to think the anti-inflammatory pills had worked so fast. She slid off his back and turned him around to walk him home.