One Unhappy Horse by C. S. Adler Read Free Book Online Page A

hooted somewhere. Jan blinked and shivered in the chill of the desert night. The temperature had dropped thirty degrees since the sun went down. Her warm bed began to seem appealing. This time, when Jan put her head down on the pillow, sleep snatched her right away.

CHAPTER SIX
    Saturdays were always busy days for Mom. Owners who worked all week arrived to ride their horses, complain, ask for favors, and give excuses for not paying their horse's boarding fee that month. The parking area was crisscrossed with cars and pickups, and the center aisle in the barn was jammed with people grooming their horses. Jan finished her usual chores and then worked steadily at stripping the tack room. What time she had left she spent with Dove.
    Sunday, Mom worked on enclosing the shed, and Jan helped her measure and cut and nail boards in place.
    Between school, homework, and helping her mother with chores, as well as taking care of Dove, Jan stayed very busy all week. On Thursday night, she made her fudge, stirring and testing, stirring and testing, until a drip from the end of a fork formed a soft ball in a glass of cold water.
When the candy cooled enough to cut, she tasted a corner piece that had crumbled at the edge. Lo and behold, it was good!
    Feeling triumphant, Jan packed the fudge in plastic wrap in a small pink-and-white box that had once held stationery her grandmother had sent her. She pasted a square of white paper over the label on the box, and wrote, "Happy birthday, Mattie. Your friend, Jan." The remainder of the candy went into the freezer for any possible future entertaining.
    Her plan was to scoot over and deliver the candy after school Friday before getting ready for Brittany's party. She
was
supposed to wear a costume, and early in the week Mom had offered her a matador outfit.
    "I didn't know you'd saved it," Jan had said when Mom surprised her by pulling the elegant black braided jacket and tight knee pants out of a box under the bed.
    Mom had shrugged. "Didn't your father tell you how I tried my hand at bullfighting?"
    "But he made it sound like—" Jan didn't want to say "a joke," but Dad
had
made her laugh when he told the story.
    "Like I wasn't serious about it?" Mom asked. "Well, I was. It was my big dream. When your father met me, I was practicing on the bulls on his father's ranch."
    "Then why did you give up so easily?"
    Mom shrugged. "Nothing easy about it, Jan. A bull
hung me up on his horns my first time in the ring. Your father sat by my bedside, persuading me to marry him while he fed me my meals. He kept saying I was better with horses than with fighting bulls. Considering all the bones I'd broken, I decided he had a point."
    The matador pants barely covered Jan's knees, but she had a pair of white tights that spanned the gap between foot and knee, and she liked the way she looked in the short-waisted, broad-shouldered jacket. She tied her hair back and said, "I look just like a boy."
    "No way. You've got girl written all over your face." The way Mom said that was as near as she had ever gotten to telling Jan she was pretty.
    Friday afternoon, Jan was eager to get into the matador suit. She gave Dove a quick hello, got the box of fudge, and raced over to present it to Mattie, whom she hadn't seen all week. Amelia was sitting alone in the shade on the back patio.
    "Hi," Jan said. "It's me. The girl with the horse you met the other day when you were walking with Mattie?"
    "Oh, yes. I remember," the dignified woman said. Her head had been tilted toward the mountains. Now she turned it toward Jan. "They're there, aren't they?" she asked. "The mountains? I can't see them anymore, but I suspect they're still there."
    "They're red right now because the sun's going down soon," Jan said.
    "Yes, I remember." Amelia's slight smile barely lifted her lips.
    "Is Mattie around?"
    "Sulking in her room. Her daughter was supposed to take her out for lunch, so Mattie spent the whole morning boasting about how she was