But no one showed up and soon—very soon—it was too hot to cry anymore. So she loaded a different bale into the truck and fed the last few horses. She whistled up Gulliver, and this time she drove up the hill to the casita. She really needed to call Kristine back to return her messages, and now she would have to call her to report the injury.
Doc phoned just after noon. “How’s the horse?”
She told him what she had done to care for her. “Can you come see her?”
He said, “You did fine. Nothing more I can do now except wait and see how she is in a day or two.”
Billie felt bereft, abandoned, like a child left alone outside a new school. Even the realization that she wouldn’t have another monster vet bill to pay for a ranch call and treatment didn’t fill that hollow.
CHAPTER 14
ON THE EVENING of the horse show at her place, Billie climbed into the hayloft and sat on the edge, bare legs dangling out into the steamy, nearly still air. Maybe she should have worn jeans instead of shorts, but in the pre-monsoon humidity, she appreciated every little puff of breeze on her skin. Shorts and sandals felt a whole world better than jeans and boots in the heat. Hay stuck to her sweaty palms as she fiddled with the unfinished rope halter she had retrieved from the mess on the casita floor to finish tying. Gulliver lay beside her, pressed against her thigh, his paws over the sill too. The sun hung high in the western sky, a fireball more than an hour from setting. On the horizon, a few thick white clouds piled up into columns sparse and high enough that Billie was certain they would stay dry at least for the next day or two.
From this perch, she watched her barnyard fill. Trucks pulling horse trailers drove in through the gate and parked haphazardly on three sides of the big rectangular corral designated as the arena. Earlier, she had set up an area for the inspector to check each horse, marked with fifty-five-gallon water drums and posted with a cardboard sign: INSPECTION. It looked pretty iffy to her, but the people who drove in seemed to know what it was for, and they parked away from it.
She watched the drivers and passengers get out of their trucks, stretch, and get to work setting up. They unrolled carpets of fake grass, unfolded chairs and tables, and unloaded coolers from their vehicles. A white cargo van pulled into the arena, stopped, and a hefty woman in a spangled green dress emerged lugging first an electronic organ then a bench and a pot of geraniums. Within minutes, waltzes filled the air.
Starship and Hashtag leaned against the fence of their corrals, craning their necks to see as much as possible. As horses were unloaded they whinnied. Billie’s whinnied back. A line formed as people waited for the caterer’s truck to park and get set up, and soon Billie smelled fried meat and onions.
The inspector ran a yellow tape around the water drums Billie had put up. To one side he placed a table with a clipboard, pens, and a chair. Beside them, he set an ice chest. In the middle of the roped-off area, he put two orange cones on the ground. Immediately, a line of horses and their grooms formed, calling greetings to him, joking. One after another, the inspector examined the horses’ lower legs and hooves, observed them walking a figure eight around the cones, and released them to compete.
“Hey!” Richard appeared below her, his head tipped back. “You going to come down and join us?”
“I didn’t know you were here yet.” She slid back from the edge of the hay, tucked Gulliver under her arm, and climbed down the ladder, enjoying the feel of Richard’s eyes on her as she descended.
“Hold up.” When she was near the bottom, he placed one hand on her waist, and with the fingers of his other hand, he peeled something off the back of her thigh. “Foliage.” He reached around to show her the bit of hay, almost embracing her. She couldn’t keep from leaning slightly into him, her body asking him to close his arms around her.
It was hotter on the ground without the breeze she had felt up on the mow. She set Gulliver down to race off to play with the other dogs.
“Where are the kids?” Billie asked, hoping it was just her and Richard for the evening.
“Sylvie’s getting her horse ready for her classes later tonight,” he said. “Alice Dean is at the trailer with her. And Bo is working on your arena lights. Where do you want them? On those posts there?”
They moved out to where they could give Bo some help. He set portable lights around the arena and attached them to a generator. In the early sunset glare, Billie switched them on, and she and Richard struggled to see if they were working or not.
“Hey, Billie! What’s going on here?”
“Horse show, Josie. Stick around.”
Josie was dressed in her outfitters clothes, real denim jeans and a snap-shut Western shirt with a bandana at her roadmap of a neck. It made Billie hot just looking at her, and knowing that she wore a cotton undershirt too made Billie feel even hotter. Josie had explained that the undershirt worked as a personal swamp cooler—sweat into it, and as the sweat dried, it cooled the wearer. Billie had tried it and never felt any benefit.
Josie marched over to take a look at the inspector checking horses. She rocked back and forth on the worn heels of her boots, squatted down to get a closer look at what the inspector saw, then returned to Billie. “Thanks, but this ain’t my kind of thing. I’m more of a rodeo and gymkhana kind of gal. Rocky trails in the mountains, ya know? Inspections not
