Chosen by a Horse by Susan Richards

Author:Susan Richards [Richards, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-56947-486-0
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2006-09-20T04:00:00+00:00

[ 10 ]

A WEEK AFTER my date, Allie stopped by early on a Saturday morning before the bugs were bad. We stood at the fence with our coffee watching my four horses. They were still two separate couples, but now the pairs were grazing closer together, the geldings always positioned between the mares.

“She looks so good,” Allie said about Lay Me Down’s recovery. She was still limping from Georgia’s attack, but the Vetrap was gone, and she was on the mend. Gone, too, was the dull coat, the hacking cough, the skin with open sores stretched over protruding bones. She looked as sleek and brown as a Hershey bar, as sweet as one, too.

As if she knew we were talking about her, Lay Me Down stopped grazing and walked over to the fence where Allie and I stood. She came up to us and sighed into Allie’s cup. Allie spilled a little coffee into the palm of her hand and let Lay Me Down lick it up.

“Stingy,” I said, watching the big tongue search for more in the emptied palm.

“OK, OK,” she said and let Lay Me Down lick it right out of the cup.

As Lay Me Down lapped coffee, Allie looked at her in that funny way she looked at people when she was trying to figure out something. It made me nervous.

“What?” I chewed my bottom lip.

“When was the last time you had the vet here?”

“A week ago. After the fight with Georgia.”

“Look at her eyes,” Allie said.

I looked. They were big and brown with enormous black eyelashes. They were beautiful. “What about them?”

“They’re not the same,” she said.

I looked again. They seemed exactly the same to me.

“The right eye protrudes more than the left.” She pointed at it.

Horse eyes protrude. All of them. That’s the way horses are made. Lay Me Down’s looked normal to me. But this was Allie talking, and she looked concerned.

“Are you saying something’s wrong?”

Allie studied Lay Me Down for a few more minutes. “See if you can get the vet to come today,” she said.

My heart skipped a beat. I gripped my coffee cup with sweaty fingers. I was torn between wanting to ask more and telling her to shut up. I hurried inside to call. Jeannie, the woman who ran the office, answered. She was knowledgeable about horses so I told her what Allie had said about the eye protruding. All five vets at the clinic knew Allie, and they knew she wouldn’t have asked for someone to come that quickly if there wasn’t a good reason. Dr. Grice was on call and could get to my place sometime in the afternoon. I wished that I knew a human doctor’s office that was run as well and caringly as Rhinebeck Equine. If you needed them, they came, day or night.

When I went back outside, Lay Me Down had finished Allie’s coffee and had returned to the herd to graze. We stayed at the fence a few more minutes before Allie had to leave.

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