Gift Horse (10 page)

Tuesday after school, Catman took a turn at helping me exercise Gracie. He loved leading the mare outside in the cold of the paddock. He would have kept it up for hours if I hadn't stopped him.

Wednesday both M and Catman came over after school. We trimmed Gracie's hooves and gave her a horse massage.

In the evening, we stopped over at Barkers' to check on the puppies. Granny, Mr. and Mrs. Barker, Barker, Matthew, Mark, Luke, Johnny, and William were all decorating the biggest Christmas tree I'd ever seen. I didn't have to touch it to know it was real. The whole house smelled like pine.

Mrs. Barker brought out Christmas cookies, which Catman and M downed in two minutes, while Macho, Johnny's black-and-tan hunting dog, watched, his tail thumping the wood floor in time to the Christmas music piped through the house. Luke's Chihuahua yapped, while Matthew and his bulldog, Bull, frowned at the little white dog.

Just being inside the Barkers' house felt like Christmas, as if they loved each other so much it spilled over and got into the furniture and stove and everything else in the house.

Granny B had a story for every ornament she hung on the tree, and every story embarrassed one of the Barker boys.

M stared at a tiny nativity ornament, picturing Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus in the stable. “Nice-looking baby,” he commented.

Granny Barker stared at the ornament with him.

“Did you see my Christmas bulletin on the Pet Help Line homepage?” Barker asked, standing on a stool to hang Matthew's old baby shoe on a high branch.

“Extremely cool!” Catman said, stringing a gold cord where Mrs. Barker pointed.

“What?” I asked, struck with a pang of guilt that I hadn't answered the horse e-mail in a couple of days.

“I made a dog lover's Christmas list on how to dog-proof your house at Christmas. You know—like no tinsel.”

“It's metal!” Matthew added, glaring at me as if I'd dared to bring tinsel into his house. “Tinsel can mess up a dog's insides. And cover your tree water with foil!”

Barker got down from his stool. “And warnings about Christmas-light cords and berries on string, things dogs could chew. And no English holly, amaryllis, or mistletoe.”

“They're poison to dogs!” Matthew declared, petting Bull.

M had disappeared. I glanced around the room.

“Puppies,” Catman said, as if reading my mind and telling me where M would be. He headed down the back hallway, and I trailed after him.

Mark scurried after me.
“My
dogs are growing fast,” he said.

Poor Mr. and Mrs. Barker still had a fight on their hands.

We found M lying on his back, with all four puppies crawling over him. The biggest one was chewing on M's ponytail. Two of the others were licking his face.

Catman and I played with them, too. And for almost an hour I forgot about everything that was going wrong with Christmas.

On Thursday, Mason helped M and Catman and me pile fresh grass hay in Gracie's stall. We let Mason, secure in his cowboy boots and riding helmet, sit on Gracie's back while we led her up and down the stallway. M was the one who got Madeline to give us the okay.

When we finished, M held Mason up and let him press his ear against Gracie's belly.

Mason giggled, and his thick-lensed glasses scooted down his nose. “Is it hard for a mommy horse to have a baby?” he asked, his voice soft as a horse's muzzle.

“Easier than it is on cows,” I answered truthfully. I didn't add that if something does go wrong with a mare in foal, it's almost always serious, a lot more dangerous than with cows.

“I love Gracie and her baby,” Mason said, trying to wrap his thin arms around the horse.

God, please don't let Mason get hurt. Make everything go okay.
I'd been thinking it, and then I was praying it. God and I had come a long way since I'd moved to Ashland. For a time after Mom died, I refused to talk to God, much less listen to him. But praying was getting more natural, even automatic sometimes. I had a long way to go before I prayed like Lizzy or our mom, though.

Mason was staring at Gracie's gray-dappled splotches.

“Will you help me make a first-aid kit, Mason?” I asked, not wanting him to go away to the secret place in his mind. I knew Madeline still hated it when Mason followed us to the barn. But I also knew it wasn't because she thought we couldn't take care of him. She didn't want her son to get too attached to the mare.

It was too late for that.

Mason brought out towels from the supply room. I gathered clean strips of cloth, string, scissors, a squeeze bottle, iodine, soap, bandages, and plastic sleeves, which are like big gloves. We packed everything into a small suitcase I'd brought from Wyoming. I could hardly wait for school to be out for Christmas so Dad would let me start spending nights in the barn.

There were more reasons why I couldn't wait to get out of school. Summer had made a sales chart and posted it big as life in Ms. Brumby's room. Each day we had to record how many rolls of wrapping paper we'd sold. I tried not to let it bother me, but I was the only one with all zeros.

Just to get Summer off my back, I decided I'd try to sell a couple of rolls. Then, if we really did raise enough money to go to Cedar Point, I wouldn't have to feel guilty.

On Friday I stomped snow off my boots and headed straight for Pat's class before school.

She acted glad to see me. “Winnie! I was just praying for you and that horse. Did you come by to bring me those assignments?”

I couldn't believe I'd forgotten about them . . . again. I shook my head. I should have done them. And I should have gotten Barker's notes too.

I changed the subject. “Pat, our class is selling Christmas wrapping paper. Would you—?”

She laughed. “ 'Fraid you're barking up the wrong tree, no offense! I made that mistake already—all that money for that little bit of paper on the roll! Mighty pretty, but whoo-ee!”

“You already bought paper . . . from someone else?” I'd never even thought of that. She must have known I'd be selling too.

“Let's see here . . . Brian, Barker, and a roll from Summer. Wish I'd unrolled the paper before unrolling my bankroll.”

“But I haven't even sold one single roll, Pat.”

“Sorry! Must've had me a dozen or two kiddos try to sell me paper this week alone.”

Kids streamed into the classroom. One of them edged between us and asked Pat something about the final.

I wandered off to Ms. Brumby's room. Couldn't Pat have bought one roll from me? Would it have killed her?

Instead I had to trail into Ms. Brumby's room just as the bell rang and get in the “reporting line.” Ahead of me, Kaylee wrote a
1
in her box. Grant wrote
6.
When it was my turn, I filled in the square the way I'd filled in every other square—with a big fat goose egg. No offense.

Saturday night Hawk called from Florida. As soon as I heard her voice, I wanted to say a million things—that I missed her, that Mason and Nickers and I missed Towaco, that I wished she'd come home and help me with Gracie.

Instead I said, “Hi, Hawk. Having a good time?”

“I miss Peter Lory,” she said. “He would love this balcony.” Peter Lory is her favorite bird, a red chattering lory she named after an old actor, Peter Lorre. I've never seen him, but Hawk loves him in black-and-white crime movies.

“How's Towaco?” I asked, imagining the Appy with a Florida sunburn.

“Towaco and I prefer Ohio,” Hawk admitted.

I tried to fight feeling happy about that. But as soon as I'd stopped worrying about her trailer in the snowstorm, I'd started worrying that she'd love Florida and want to stay there. I was glad she liked cold, snowy Ohio better.

Neither of us said anything. I could hear her breathing and birds chirping out on the balcony.

Finally Hawk asked, “How are you, Winnie?”

I started to say fine. I'd played it safe with Hawk since the first time we met, when she was known only as Victoria Hawkins. She'd been guarded too. But we'd started breaking through that stuff. It was no time to go backward. “Not so good.”