One Unhappy Horse Read online

  One Unhappy Horse

  C.S. Adler

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  ...

  Copyright

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Clarion Books

  New York

  With thanks to Mary Ann Adamcin, ranch owner

  and lover of quarter horses extraordinaire. She cared

  enough to patiently correct the horse-related material

  in this book to make sure the author got it right.

  Thanks also to my daughter-in-law, Karen Adler,

  whose veterinary medicine expertise I drew on.

  Clarion Books

  a Houghton Mifflin Company imprint

  215 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10003

  Copyright © 2001 by C. S. Adler

  The text was set in 13.5-point Garamond.

  Designed by Sarah Hokanson.

  All rights reserved.

  For information about permission

  to reproduce selections from this book,

  write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,

  215 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10003.

  www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com

  Printed in the USA.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Adler, C.S. (Carole S.)

  One unhappy horse / C.S. Adler.

  Summary: Things are difficult for twelve-year-old Jan and her mother after her

  father's death, and when it turns out that her beloved horse needs an operation,

  Jan reluctantly gets money from an elderly woman whom she has befriended.

  ISBN 0-618-04912-6

  [1. Horses—Fiction. 2. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 3. Old age—Fiction.

  4. Friendship—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.A26145 Ho 2000

  [Fic]—dc21 00-025907

  HAD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To James Cross Giblin, the wonderful editor who has given me so many years of unwavering support and wise guidance

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was hot, over a hundred, even though it was early October. Jan rode Dove toward the shade of the cottonwood trees growing along the wash on the southern border of the ranch. But they hadn't gone more than a few hundred feet before Dove started limping again. Jan slipped off his back and bent down to examine his right front leg. Mom had said that Dove might have a stone bruise, but nothing appeared to be wrong.

  "If that's all it is, you're sure taking a long time to heal," Jan told her horse. He had been standing as if he were rooted in the corner of his pipe corral in the shade of the mesquite tree for a week now. Normally, Dove kept himself in motion most of the day.

  "You hurting, tall, brown, and handsome?" Jan asked him.

  He snorted softly against her shoulder as she laid her cheek against his and combed his reddish brown mane with her fingers. His hair was much the same color as hers. She could still hear Dad's words when he'd given Dove to her five years earlier. "I picked him because he looks like you, Jan. Both long-boned graceful. And you got the same look in your eyes, like you were wanting something."

  Now Dad was gone, and the only relief Jan could find from the pain of her loss was being with Dove. Her horse understood her in some unspoken way that no one else did. Certainly not Mom, who understood nothing but work. Mom had closed so tightly into herself this past year that she barely seemed to notice she still had a daughter. Jan suspected she knew the choice Mom would have made if she'd had to pick between losing her husband or her child.

  "All right, Dove. I'll put you back in your corral so you can rest some more," Jan said.

  She turned her head so as not to see the main house as they walked past it. That house had been home her whole life until Mom had sold it last spring after Dad's accident. A man running a red light at a major Tucson intersection had sideswiped Dad's old pickup truck and killed him instantly. Jan still hadn't recovered from the shock of losing him when Mom moved them into the casita. That was the bunkhouse where a wrangler had stayed when the ranch had been so busy that they could afford hired help. Back then Dad and Mom had not only boarded and trained horses but also given trail rides and riding lessons. Back then—when Dad was alive and they'd been happy.

  The casita was so tiny that Jan and her mother couldn't move without bumping into each other. They slept in the same bed, and, as Jan had confided to Dove, Mom kept her awake with her snoring. Besides, no matter how hard they scrubbed the tin shower stall in the bathroom, it still smelled.

  The main house had been renovated and turned into River Haven, an assisted living home for a handful of old folks who couldn't quite manage on their own. With a glance, Jan checked the corner window of the bedroom that had been hers. Yes, the blinds were down. They were always down, as if whoever lived there now was some kind of sunlight-hating mole. It angered Jan that people who couldn't even enjoy a little Arizona sunshine should be living in the place that was rightly hers.

  Dove stopped to nibble at a tuft of long grass growing in the dirt road. Jan waited for him patiently. If she were riding him, she wouldn't let him graze, but why be strict while they were walking? She stroked his neck. His hide felt sweaty.

  "You're hot, but you wouldn't complain, would you, Dove? Not like me, huh?"

  Dove had turned his ears her way and was listening patiently. He was a good listener, Dove was. Jan tugged at his lead line to set him moving again. Usually, his sleek, smooth-muscled gait was a joy to watch. He lifted his legs high and held his head up. Now it worried Jan to feel him heaving along beside her on the dirt road that bisected the ranch. He was barely using the tip of his right front foot for balance. She winced as he gave an odd little groan and stumbled for no reason.

  "Is something wrong with that pretty horse?" a high voice called.

  Jan looked back and found a doll-size old lady with curly white hair coming up behind her.

  "His foot hurts him," Jan said. She suspected this could be one of the people from the assisted living house.

  "Well, that's too bad. I hope he gets better soon. I'm Mattie," the sweet-faced woman said.

  Jan mumbled her own name in return, and the woman continued, "You didn't happen to see an old lady in a housedress and slippers go by, did you? She slipped out on us again, and I—Oh, my!" Mattie's hands went to her crinkled cheeks.

  Jan followed her horrified gaze to the main road, which ran past the entrance to the ranch. The road was so heavily trafficked that few people risked walking along it, but now there was a woman right smack in the middle of it.

  Both Jan and Mattie screamed as the woman on the road wavered and was nearly sideswiped by boards hanging out of the back of a wide-bodied truck.

  "Sadie, you come back here!" Mattie yelled. She tottered a few steps toward the road.

  Jan said, "I'll get her." She dropped Dove's lead line, confident he would stay put, and sprinted diagonally across a field of prickery creosote bushes and weeds. Still running, she ducked under the rail fence beside the road. Meanwhile the woman had wandered into the eastbound lane. Mistake. A speeding car swerved to pass her. It honked madly but didn't stop.

  Jan ran onto the road. She grabbed the woman's skeletal arm and pulled her back onto the shoulder. "You're going to get
killed," she said.

  This person was older than anyone Jan had ever been near. Her white hair grew in sparse threads from her pink scalp, and her skin hung loose on the narrow bones of her face. She looked like a witch. But her eyes had a mischievous glint as she cackled, "Can't catch me. I'm the gingerbread boy." She had on a thin cotton housedress and fuzzy pink scuffs and wasn't carrying even so much as a purse.

  "Here, take my hand. I'll get you back," Jan said.

  "You know where I live?"

  "Did you come from there?" Jan pointed toward the main house.

  The woman cocked her head and grinned at Jan. "They lock the door," she confided, "but I can get out." Her laughter was girlish.

  Jan slowed her steps to match the old woman's shuffle as she led her back toward the house. It took a while before they caught up with Mattie, who was standing at Dove's head telling him what a good boy he was to be waiting there so patiently.

  "It's okay," Jan told Mattie proudly. "He's trained to stay ground-hitched."

  "Isn't he something!" Mattie said.

  Jan kept steering her charge back toward the main house.

  "What's my name?" the lost woman asked Jan slyly as they progressed at a frustrating turtle speed.

  "I don't know. What is it?" Jan asked.

  "You know," the woman said confidently and patted Jan's arm with her free hand. "You're my granddaughter."

  "No, I'm not." Jan couldn't imagine being kin to this person, who seemed more apparition than human.

  Near the screened-in ramada at the front entrance of the house, Mattie finally rejoined them. "Thank you, honey," she told Jan. "You saved her life. Now I've got to get her back inside before they find out she ran off again." Mattie took the wanderer's hand.

  "Hurry, Sadie," she said. "You know how mad they get when you take off." She led Sadie onto the ramada.

  Through the glass top of the front door, Jan could see some white-haired people seated in the living room. None of them seemed to be moving to open the door, though Mattie was waving her hand at them. Jan glanced back at Dove. She was curious to see what would happen next, but Dove couldn't stand out in the hot sun forever.

  All at once the front door was opened by another ancient woman. This one was tall, thin, and dignified. "Get in quick," she said.

  Mattie and Sadie followed her into the living room, but Jan saw a younger woman in a white uniform with dark hair slicked back in a ponytail approaching. The uniformed woman was shaking her head disapprovingly.

  Jan shook her own head to free herself of a sensation of unreality. She felt as if she'd just participated in a drama staged by aliens. These old people were that different from anyone else she knew.

  Dove had to walk only a couple of hundred feet more to his corral after she reclaimed him, but standing seemed to have worsened his limp. "It's got to be more than a stone bruise," Jan told him when she finally had him back in his corral. Resolutely, she marched off to find her mother.

  Mom was in the main ring putting their prime boarder through his paces. The black horse was supposed to be exercised daily. Usually it was Mom, and not the horse's teenage owner, who took care of him. "They pay me well to do it," Mom said whenever Jan sounded off in disgust about how anybody could neglect such a beautiful animal.

  "So how's Dove doing?" Mom asked from the middle of the ring where she was guiding the prime boarder on the lunge line.

  "Bad. So bad an old lady from the main house noticed."

  "Well, we'll give it another week, Jan."

  "Another week? Mom! Please call the vet tomorrow."

  Mom sighed. "I suppose we could try Dove on anti-inflammatory pills. I've still got some Bute."

  "You're not a vet. I mean, I know you're good with horses, but you're not a vet, Mom. Why won't you ask Dr. Foster to come look at Dove?"

  Mom gave her a look that was as close to a rebuke as she ever got. "Your father used to say time was the best healer," she said as she revolved patiently to guide the black horse around the inside of the ring.

  Jan bit her trembling lip. Dad had said that, true enough. But he'd never have let Dove suffer this long. "Dad wouldn't worry about a vet bill when it came to Dove."

  Turning to face her, Mom said evenly, "No, your father never worried about paying bills. And he left us a drawerful of unpaid ones when he died."

  This was news to Jan, something her mother had never mentioned. "Probably Dad just didn't have a chance to sit down and do them," Jan said. She'd never heard her mother criticize her father before.

  "Maybe," Mom said. "But there wasn't any money to pay them with, either."

  "Is that why you sold our house? To pay off bills?"

  "I had to," Mom said.

  "But banks loan you money when you need it, don't they?" Jan asked. She knew Mom hated to be beholden to anybody for anything. She suspected her mother would rather starve than ask for a loaf of bread. "You didn't have to sell the house in such a hurry. You could have borrowed the money to pay what we owed."

  "There were overdue bank loans in that drawer, big ones," Mom said. "I did my best, Jan. If I hadn't sold the house, we would have lost the whole ranch."

  "Maybe we'd be better off," Jan said bitterly. "Then I wouldn't have to keep being reminded of how it used to be back when Dad was alive and people knew how to laugh around here."

  A twitch in Mom's gaunt cheeks was her only reaction. Patiently, she said, "If we'd sold off the whole ranch, what would I do for a living? The only work I'm good at is with horses. Besides, you couldn't keep Dove if we didn't have a place for him."

  "I know what we can do," Jan said, buoyed by the idea that had suddenly come to her. "We can use my savings account to pay the vet."

  "I wouldn't be so quick to spend that if I were you. There could be an emergency—"

  "Mom!" Jan cried. "This is an emergency."

  "We'll give it another week," her mother repeated quietly.

  Jan turned on her boot heel and stalked off to Dove's corral. She gave him a good rubdown and left him groaning with pleasure with his head eye-deep in Bermuda hay. "Those anti-inflammatory pills'll make you feel better fast," she told him.

  And if they didn't? Mom was so stubborn, so hard. Nothing moved her now that Dad was gone. It was like Dad was the only thing she had ever cared about. Not that she'd shed a tear for him. "There's no use in all that crying," Mom had said to Jan last summer. "Tears won't bring him back."

  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.

  CHAPTER TWO

  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.