Show Barn Blues Read online

  As the horse gods would have it, the next day, Ivor came up lame.

  I had tacked him up with the plan to just give him a light ride. It was Wednesday; we left for a show in south Florida the next day, which meant he’d have that day off, but it would be a travel day, and that meant stress on the legs anyway. He’d have a couple of easy classes on Friday, to get used to the footing and the surroundings, then on Saturday and Sunday both we’d have big classes, timed and with money on the line. HITS Ocala was right around the corner, an extravaganza of horse showing that wouldn’t leave Florida until late April. Everyone would have a few weekends off after this show, to rest up and prepare mentally and physically for HITS. Because once that got started, it would be really and truly on, with very little downtime, for three amazing months.

  “Amazing, well, that’s what I used to say,” I sighed, girthing up Ivor myself. Anna was occupied with Mason, Margaret was tacking up a lesson horse for later, Tom was scrubbing water troughs in the paddocks. Kennedy cast me an inquiring look. “I usually can’t wait for HITS,” I explained. “This year, I have to admit, I’m a little tired.”

  “You’re getting old,” Kennedy announced. She was grooming one of the ponies: Dream, or Wonder, who knew? They looked so alike. “Pretty soon you’ll be sitting on a bench to teach, and you’ll give up riding altogether. And saying ‘whipper-snappers,’ probably.”

  “That sounds really nice, actually.” With Ivor’s saddle secure, I checked his polo wraps before I went over to a chair and put one foot up to zip on my half-chaps. My ankles felt too tired to deal with tall boots today. “I could do with a bench, instead of standing there on the hard ground for hours while everybody else is comfy on horseback.”

  “Believe me,” Colleen interjected, walking by with a tired post-riding-lesson Bailey. “No one is comfy when you are teaching them. My body feels like I just climbed a mountain.”

  I grinned at her. “That’s what I like to hear from my students,” I called. She stuck out her tongue and continued down the aisle, taking Bailey outside so he could graze and dry off from his bath.

  “Ringing endorsement,” Kennedy agreed. “I’ll remember that’s what they’re looking for in a trainer.”

  “Not the kids,” I said warningly. I worried the half-chap zipper over my calves with more effort than usual (Were they getting fatter? Or bulky with muscle? Probably the former.) and stood up again, stretching. In the cross-ties, Ivor flung his head up and down, his eyes locked on me. “You ready to go, big guy? Kids,” I added, for Kennedy’s benefit, “do not always understand that pain equals gain.”

  “Neither do I,” Kennedy joked.

  I slipped on Ivor’s bridle, hooking up buckles and straps mindlessly. It was all second nature now, after so many decades with horses. When I’d been very small, a bridle had seemed like an impossible puzzle I would never master. “Very funny,” I told Kennedy, and led the horse out of the wash-stall. We turned left, to walk into the aisle.

  That turn was the moment I saw Ivor’s head shoot up suddenly, and his eyes widen. Just for a second, no longer than the moment it took for his left foreleg to bear his weight and then leave the ground again. I pulled him up sharply and peered at the offending leg. Kennedy peered out from the wash-stall. “What happened? What’re you looking at?”

  “Watch him walk,” I commanded. “Come on, Ivor.” I walked forward again, careful to leave plenty of give in the reins so I wasn’t tugging on his head, and damn if Ivor didn’t do it again — the head-bob was much more slight now, since he wasn’t turning, but still, now I knew it was there, it couldn’t be missed. “See it?”

  “No…” Kennedy came out of the wash-stall, brush still in hand. “Turn him on it?”

  We took a hard left. Ivor followed me willingly, but his head snapped up again, the white sclera suddenly showing around his eyes, as the left foreleg took all his weight.

  “Well, damn,” Kennedy said. “He’s lame as hell, isn’t he?”

  I stood very still in the aisle and glared at Ivor’s leg, trying to see what I might have missed in grooming. I had brushed off his leg, and polo-wrapped it, and hadn’t noticed a thing. No heat or swelling had stood out. I knew Ivor’s legs like the back of my hand, from years of running my hands down the popping veins and sleek cannon bones, day after day, trying to stave off an incident just like this. “I didn’t see a thing in his lower legs,” I admitted finally, and kneeled down to start unwrapping the polos.

  “Maybe it’s higher up,” Kennedy said, running a hand along the big bold line of Ivor’s shoulder. He shook his head and flattened his ears at her, not so unusual behavior, since he was a snotty stallion, but still… we both paused and looked at his expression together.

  “I think you’re right,” I said after a moment. Ivor flung his head up and down, his lips pulled back and his teeth bared in a tiny grimace. Kennedy took away her hand and he shook his head once more before subsiding into good manners. “Hell.”

  Unwrapped and untacked and settled back in his stall to pull at his hay and make threatening faces at every gelding that walked past his private space, Ivor seemed content enough with his fate. I leaned against the tack room wall, waiting for the vet to pick up her cell phone, and counted the horse shows on the big calendar hanging from the door. How many was I going to miss?

  The vet answered at last. I explained my problem. She broke in with, “Can it wait?”

  My face twisted in a confused grimace, which concerned Kennedy. She had elected to stand and stare at me while I called the vet instead of riding Dream/Wonder the pony, which I did not find particularly helpful. She mouthed “What?” at me and I mouthed “Go away!” at her and she mouthed “What?” again and I gave up and looked at the floor instead, the linoleum curling from years of heat and humidity. “How long do you need me to wait?” I asked Dr. Bartlet, who was making great sighs and sounds of exasperation on her end of the phone.

  “I don’t know, until tomorrow? I’m heading to Hawk Landing for a nasty colic and it’ll probably have to go into surgery, and I have about ten other calls today that I’m going to have to reschedule if I so much as hit a red light on the way there.”

  “We’re going to Fort Myers tomorrow.”

  “Can’t you leave the info with a groom?”

  I rolled my eyes. “This horse is going too.”

  “Well if he needs me to look at him, maybe he shouldn’t go. Look, I’m sorry to be so rude, but I am really having a hellish day and I think this colic is about to make it a thousand times worse. This horse is a repeat offender and of course he belongs to a little girl and —”

  Dr. Bartlet launched into a diatribe about the state of the paddocks at Hawk Landing, which were admittedly pretty bad, and how simple it would be if people just fed their horses hay on rubber mats so they didn’t eat so much sand. I tuned her out and looked at the ceiling and looked at the toes of my boots and looked out the doorway into the barn aisle, where people were living their lives and riding their horses without a care in the world or a vet shouting in their ear. Finally she stopped and took a breath and sounded halfway-normal again, like the vet I liked very much despite her temper.

  “Which horse is it? Is it a boarder or is it yours?”

  “My gray stallion,” I said, feeling blue just saying the words. “Ivor, the big show jumper.”

  “Ah, shit.” Dr. Bartlet was quiet for a moment, and I imagined her mentally calculating how many minutes of her day were accounted for. “How late will you be up tonight?”

  “As late as you need me.” I hopped up from the tack trunk I’d perched upon, feeling much more hopeful. She was a very good vet, after all. Who knew, maybe it would be something simple. Maybe she’d get Ivor all sorted out and we’d go on with our weekend as if nothing had happened.

  “It might be crazy late, if this horse goes into surgery,” she warned. “Don’t stand me up. If I say I’m coming tonight, I’m coming.”

  “Are you saying you’re coming?”<
br />
  She sighed. “Yes. I’ll come tonight. I’ll call ahead. Leave your phone ringer on, sleepy-head. It might be past your bedtime.”

  “Thank you thank you thank you thank you —”

  “Okay.” There was a click and Dr. Bartlet was gone.

  I looked at Kennedy. “She’s coming late. But at least she’s coming.”

  Kennedy lifted an eyebrow. “Is she always so… hard-boiled?”

  “She’s a character.” I slipped the phone into my pocket and started rummaging around the shelving unit where a thousand bottles of medicines, shampoos, potions, and liniments had accumulated over the years. “She gets very tense when she’s driving. And I guess this horse she’s going to see is a candidate for his last surgery before he’s toast.”

  “That’s pretty sad.”

  “Yup.” I lifted an unlabeled bottle of liniment, just the concoction I’d been looking for, and held it up triumphantly. “My grandfather’s secret recipe. Rodney still makes it. I’m going to go give the old boy a massage. You go ride that pony of yours.”

  Kennedy gave me a salute and marched out of the tack room, a pony bridle slung over her shoulder. I went back to Ivor’s stall, ready to risk a few bites for the sake of maybe soaking some of his soreness up with this bottle of camphor and menthol and lord only knew what else. “Maybe it’s nothing,” I told myself over and over. “Nothing at all.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “Oh, it’s something,” Dr. Bartlet said ominously, prodding the offending shoulder. “Not sure what, though.”

  Ivor clacked his teeth together, snap snap snap snap, like a cat hunting a mouse. I had a lip-chain on him, there to remind him if he tried any funny business on my vet, it was going to go very badly for him. This was his usual response, to stick his tongue out of the side of his mouth and rattle his front teeth. I knew he only did it to annoy me. That’s the thing about stallions. They have big, funny personalities which verge on the obnoxious when you want them to just settle down and be quiet.

  At eleven o’clock at night, all I wanted was a little quiet.

  I’d been in my slippers, or more accurately, in my flip flops, for the night when the phone had finally rang. I draped my limbs in ungraceful folds across the couch, vacantly staring at the ten o’clock news, which I found very boring because there weren’t any horses on it. As always, I waited for the weather report with great anticipation, although I could’ve flipped to the Weather Channel at any point and just seen the forecast. Still, it was interesting this time of year, and I liked a detailed analysis by a local meteorologist with lots of nerdy details. The weather forecast in summer months was always the same; in the winter you never really knew what was going to happen next.

  An enthusiastic young man swung his arms around the map of Florida. He announced blue skies and seventy-degree temperatures for the weekend. Well, that sounded simply heavenly, compared with the massive cold front he predicted for Monday night. We’d have to leave Ft. Myers bright and early Monday to avoid getting caught in that, I thought.

  When Dr. Bartlet finally rang up, sounding exhausted, I slipped my feet from flip flops to Wellingtons and pulled a cardigan on over my t-shirt. No bra, no problem, I thought. The benefit of having a lady vet.

  Now Ivor gave me a hard nudge in the chest and I thought longingly of underwire. I gave him a little wiggle on the lip chain, just a statement of fact: I can nudge you right back, buddy. He went back to clacking his teeth. “Blithering idiot,” I told him, and Dr. Bartlet looked back from her perusal of his leg.

  “I’ve never seen you so fond of a horse in my life.”

  “You haven’t known me very long,” I said airily. “And anyway, I just gave him a shank with the lip chain and called him an idiot. So you’re actually being a little insulting right now.”

  We’d known each other fifteen years, when she was fresh from vet school and had a much longer fuse, and when I was just starting to poke my head out of the assistant instructor shell and wonder if it was time to go into business for myself. After so many years, speaking to one another without sarcasm was reserved for the most serious of cases. Now she grinned and went back to her poking and prodding. “If you didn’t like him, you wouldn’t even talk to him. You’d just stand there and look irritated.”

  I couldn’t deny this. “Are you going to talk all night or are you going to figure out what’s wrong with my horse?”

  “He’s just sore,” she said, straightening up. “In the shoulder, though, not in his lower leg, so no suspensory or tendon issues. That’s good. Sore shoulder’s hard to diagnose, though.”

  “That’s bad,” I said.

  Dr. Bartlet sighed. “Has he been on hard ground, maybe? Or took a jump funny? Damn, Grace, he looks extremely fit…” She ran her hands over his slim neck and down his face, and I realized for the first time how tightly his skin was stretched over his bones. He wasn’t thin, but he was somehow more elastic and taut than usual. She traced the hard knob of bone above his eye and he playfully tried to snatch at her arm. “Have you been galloping him? Like, a lot?”

  I hesitated, and that was all she needed. Dr. Bartlet whipped around, took one look at my face, and had me figured out in an instant. “What have you been up to?”

  Old friends are overrated.

  “We’ve just been going out for some gallops,” I said cagily. “He’s had a lot of excess energy. Getting bored easily. The galloping keeps him fresh.”

  “Are you taking him to a training track?” she asked suspiciously. “Because the closest one I know of is thirty miles away, and I know you don’t have room in that covered arena to get up to a good gallop before you have to slow down and turn.”

  “No.” I sighed and brushed the end of the lead-shank against Ivor’s nose. He snapped at it with yellow teeth. “We’ve been doing it out back, on the trails.”

  Dr. Bartlet whistled. “That’s not like you at all! Where did this wild streak come from?”

  “I told you. He was getting bored. I was having trouble with him, a couple of others — they just needed freshening.” I paused. “I just really liked galloping him out there, so we kept doing it.”

  “It’s the dry season, though,” Dr. Bartlet pointed out. “That ground’s getting hard, isn’t it? You should have been icing him afterwards.”

  I didn’t bother to explain my rides were done in secret, under the cover of darkness, when the moon was bright enough to light our way along the white-sand trail, and fitting him with ice boots would have aroused suspicion in the grooms. It didn’t matter — she was right. I had been treating the gallops like they were nothing but fun, without even taking into consideration that Ivor was working very hard even though he was enjoying himself. I’d thought about the hard ground in the arena, but not on the trail.

  That did explain my tight half-chaps, though. At least my calves were bulking up from muscle, not fat. The half-seat I’d been using when we galloped had my calves taking the brunt of my weight. My lower leg had been bulking up all along, without my notice. We were both harder and stronger, but it was only a matter of time before one of us got hurt. It just happened to be Ivor.

  “Let the soreness work its way out, rub him with liniment if you want. And put him in ice boots next time if you want to keep those lower legs tight,” Dr. Bartlet said, rummaging in the bucket she’d brought along from the truck. I leaned over to see what groundbreaking veterinary tool she was reaching for. She came out with a wet-nap and wiped her hands clean. Very anti-climactic, but good at the same time. It meant nothing very serious (or expensive) was happening. “As long as the ground is hard, ice him. If it’s softened up, poultice is fine, but do him up in wraps every time you gallop! His legs already take a hammering from jumping. I’m sure the galloping is good for him — my God, Grace, he’s ready to run a race. A Thoroughbred trainer would say he has his game face on.” She ran her hand along his bony face once again. “I mean, he really looks fantastic. I don’t think the week or two off is going
to do him any harm.”

  “That’s it?” I asked, trying to ignore the sinking feeling in my stomach at the loss of this weekend’s show. I should be grateful, I told myself. Grateful she didn’t think it was anything serious.

  “That’s all I think it is. A bad step on hard ground, maybe he was feeling sore on one side and worked too hard on the other. Shoulders are funny — you think the shoulder hurts and it turns out it’s coming from his hip, or his back, or wherever — anywhere but where you thought. So just give him some time off. But, I mean…” she stepped back and surveyed Ivor from nose to tail once more. “He’s not giving you any other trouble. You said he was acting like he needed freshening, which could be a warning sign, but the trail rides brought his attention back. So I’d say it’s just soreness from a bad step.”

  “Oh, thank God.” I felt a little dizzy at her speech… if it had been his spine!

  “But if he’s not feeling one hundred percent better in a week, we do a bone scan.”

  “Oh.” I felt more dizzy.

  “Shoulder injuries can be a bitch,” she said thoughtfully. “Hard to diagnose, hard to fix…”

  I couldn’t speak at all. Surely she was just playing with me now.

  “But honestly, since he hasn’t had any incidents to blame this on, I’d say it’s nothing a week off won’t fix.”

  I poked Ivor in the nose again, for lack of anything better to do, for lack of any words to say. He snatched the end of the leather lead-shank in his mouth and yanked at it, nearly pulling me over.

  “Yeah,” Dr. Bartlet said, watching him play with the lead, watching me recover my balance. “I’d say it’s nothing.” She picked up her bucket. “Welp, I’m heading home to my bed.”

  I watched her go, wobbling down the aisle with her big bucket full of bits and pieces of veterinary equipment she hadn’t needed. Then I looked back at Ivor, who was wiggling his nose contentedly on the leather shank. He didn’t seem to mind that it was nearly midnight and that the barn was lit up bright as day, although quite a few of the other horses were grumbling and pacing, trying to figure out why their night had been disturbed. That was the thing about Ivor — since I’d had him longer than I’d had any other horse in years, he had settled into life with me like a comfortable glove. “And here I am risking you out on the trail,” I told him, planting a kiss on his nose and then backing up before he could take off my face with one playful nip. “All the hell I gave the boarders about hurting their horses, and I did it myself.”