Tennessee Reunion Read online

  Tom began a tap dance worthy of Fred Astaire while Anne tried to grab the hose and drag it out from between the horse’s front legs before all three of them wound up in a tangle.

  Vince’s jeans were wet from the waist down, Anne’s shirt from the waist up. Tom was barely damp.

  Vince shoved Anne out of the way.

  “Hey!” she said as he reached down, snatched up the sprayer and narrowly avoided catching a small hoof on the back of his head. “Get out of the way. I’ll do it. I’m not the one that got smacked in the crotch.” She grabbed the hose out of his hand.

  He looked down at his jeans as she began to snicker. Then laugh.

  He could have throttled her. Instead, he grabbed it back from her. It seemed appropriate to pay her back in kind, so he turned it on her. She threw up her hands, shrieked and hurled a currycomb at him. Since her eyes were closed, she missed, but the comb hit the wall with a satisfying thunk.

  Tom skittered sideways.

  “Are you two trying to drown one another?” Victoria said from the barn door.

  “She dropped the hose...”

  “He sprayed me on purpose.”

  “Thereby drenching both of you. Tom, on the other hand, is practically dry.”

  “It was an accident,” Anne said and pointed at Vince. “The hose slipped and Tom smacked him in the groin...”

  “He did nothing of the sort. She upset him...”

  “Does he look upset?” Anne asked.

  “He doesn’t even look wet,” Victoria said. “Do you plan to bathe him before or after you put on dry clothes? I assume you have a change in your van, Doctor?”

  He glanced away from Anne, suddenly aware how long her legs looked in her damp jeans. He turned to Victoria. “It’s warm in here. I’ll dry off fast.”

  “Me, too,” Anne said. “Let’s keep going. We’ve got more horses to bathe. I doubt they’ll be quite so easygoing. We’ll probably get wet all over again.”

  “Make sure it’s because of the horses, you two, and not each other.” Victoria turned on her heel and stalked out the barn door. Her shoulders were shaking with laughter.

  “Give me the hose,” Anne said. “I do too know how to bathe a horse. I’ll soap, you rinse. Faster that way.”

  “Be my guest.” He stepped back out of range.

  She flashed him a frown, took in their bedraggled appearance and began to laugh. “Looks like we could both use some lessons. The point is, Doctor, to get more water on the horse and less on us.”

  “What a concept!”

  Tom Thumb bumped him with his forehead, and Vince started laughing as well.

  “He thinks we’re crazy,” Anne said.

  “He has a point. Let’s get this done before we drown him.”

  Instantly, the laughter died, and they became sober and businesslike again.

  That was fine with Vince. He felt they’d achieved a tiny moment of agreement. And he hadn’t behaved like such a bear this time. Now, if he could just keep it up. Anne’s impression of him was important because of her influence on Victoria. He picked up the soap sponge, squeezed it nearly dry and washed Tom’s face.

  Some horses relished being around humans and being petted. Tom Thumb ranked ten on the scale of one to ten. He seemed to have a preference for Anne. Not surprising. She was closer to his size and hadn’t dosed him with nasty stuff or stuck him with a needle.

  Anne and Vince managed to stay out of each other’s way, and once Tom was clean, he seemed perfectly content to stand under the hose as long as they’d let him. Eventually, Anne took him out in the paddock where there was plenty of hay and shade.

  Vince watched her, but did not offer to help. Maybe that was the key. If he and Anne could figure out a way to work together without communicating in words...

  Vince had expected Victoria to supervise what he and Anne were doing with her minis, but she’d disappeared. He and Anne barely said two words to one another the rest of the afternoon. Fine with him. He didn’t snap more than four or five times when he saw the state the minis were in. She raised her eyebrows at his tone, but didn’t comment.

  He knew she was not personally responsible for the condition the horses were in, but his stepmother, Mary Alice, reminded him frequently that he was what she called “an equal opportunity snarler.” He took out his annoyance on the nearest person. He needed to cut that out, but in his family, he’d learned to snarl first before someone snarled at him.

  Late afternoon, his cell rang. The caller was the clinic answering service. He released the hind hoof of the mare he was trying to trim to answer it, and she promptly stepped on his foot. Hard. Vince yelped with pain. Her hooves had edges as sharp as knives, and he was grateful for the steel toes on his work boots.

  “Dr. Vince? This is the office. We just got a call for a case of choke down the road a piece from where you are, and Dr. Barbara’s off the other side of Williamston County. You through over at Mrs. Martin’s?”

  “I’ll be through sometime next century.” He took a breath. “How bad?”

  “Bad enough. Can you go?”

  He glanced at the three untrimmed elf toes on the mare beside him. “Have to. Where?” He held the phone under his chin and gestured to Anne. “Write this down.”

  “Sorry, my third hand is occupied at the moment.” The mini tossed her head and bopped Anne on the side of her face.

  “Then remember it.” He repeated the information, hung up, pulled a sticky note from his shirt pocket, wrote the info and shoved the note back into his pocket. “Don’t you carry a pad to take instructions?”

  “Not generally, no. I remember the ones that matter. As you can see, my hands are otherwise occupied.”

  “Get one. Tomorrow be prepared to take notes accurately.”

  “Uh... I’m not your clerk.”

  “You are when there’s nobody else here. Consider it under the heading of ‘other duties as assigned.’ I’ll clear it with Victoria, if it’s important to you. Right now I have to go. Do you know how I get to Bar-Q Farms?”

  “Stop that!” Anne gave a fast tug on the line attached to the mare’s halter. “I’ve been there. Out our gate, turn left, three miles to Marcy Road, turn right. Their gate is a couple of miles farther.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Hey!” She trotted along behind him and hauled the mare with her. “We’ve still got horses to do. You coming back?”

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  “What about Harriet here?”

  “She’ll be fine.” He left Anne standing beside the mare, who was now in full fidget mode.

  * * *

  ANNE TURNED TO the horse. “Quit it, you. One jerk is enough for one afternoon. ‘Get a notebook. Other duties as assigned. Take notes. I was starting to think I was wrong about his status as a world-class jerk. He must put on a whole different personality with Barbara. Or maybe it’s just me.”

  Anne walked the mare back out to her pasture, pulled off her halter and turned her loose. She checked that the little horse wasn’t lame from having one trimmed and one untrimmed hind hoof. Apparently not. Her striking surface was flat. Okay, that was one for Dr. Charming.

  What was his problem?

  She walked through the patio door into Victoria’s office. Her boss sat hunkered in front of a big desktop computer with her glasses halfway down her nose. “He’s gone.”

  Victoria looked up. “Finished already?”

  “Still three and a half more. He had to head off to an emergency. A choked horse down the road. He said he’ll be back tomorrow morning, goody, goody.”

  “Whoa. What about him rubs you the wrong way?”

  “He is impatient, opinionated and bad-tempered.”

  “With the horses?” Victoria leaned back and listened.

  Anne waved her away. “He’s peaches and cream with th
e horses, but he treats me as though I was doing everything possible to delay him or get in his way. He must have been fun to work with in vet school. Oh, I forgot. In vet school he had a lot of techie minions prepping and cleaning up. And taking notes. I’m supposed to carry a notebook with me at all times to take his instructions.” She dropped into the chair.

  “Surely you’ve worked with prima donna trainers and owners before.”

  “He makes me feel as though I am a lesser being, and that I am his employee, not yours. I just got out of a relationship with a man who was a rage-aholic. I never knew what would set him off, so I walked around on eggshells all the time. Then I got smart and dumped him. I hate feeling I have to justify myself. I’ve spent too much of my life justifying my need for horses with non-horse people. Either they’re afraid of the size of them...”

  “Not in this case, obviously.”

  “...or they talk about the dirt or the expense. I tell people that horses got me through all the bad parts of adolescence. When my sister Elaine’s friends were going to sorority balls and coming home drunk, I was fast asleep because I had to feed my horse at six thirty in the morning.”

  Victoria leaned back in her chair. “I’ll talk to Vince. If he needs notes, he can take them himself.”

  “I know you need him. He’s good, and he’s conscientious. Just set me my boundaries and I’ll deal with him. I don’t want to lose this job because the working atmosphere is a tad tense.”

  “No danger of that.” Victoria finished the soda she’d been drinking and tossed the can in the trash. “I need you both. Barbara adores Vince. She says his surgical skills are the best she’s seen in twenty years. I’m sorry you got off on the wrong foot, but even you admit he seems to be good at his job. Since it’s still early, how about we take a trail ride, so I can show you the property? Get you on a normal-sized horse for a change? That should smooth out your emotional wrinkles.”

  “You’re on. Right now, I definitely need to hug a horse.”

  Victoria tacked up her bay Morgan gelding while Anne got her big hunter, Trust Fund, ready. Trusty was still getting used to his new pasture and his new herd out back of the barn. She hadn’t been paying enough attention to him. He showed his displeasure by spooking at nothing as they walked down the road shoulder to shoulder. He settled, however, when she was in the saddle and walking beside Victoria’s mount.

  “There’re lots of deer trails down past the woods,” Victoria said, “but we’ll stick to the gravel roads. It’s easy to get lost back here.”

  “We’re riding west, yes? I had no idea you had this much land.”

  Victoria nodded. “We don’t need it at the moment, but that could change. My husband, Edward, is thinking of renting it next year to someone who wants to cut it for hay, then we could share the crop for our winter forage instead of charging actual money. Now we keep the horses safely in their pastures closer to the barn. Just so you’ll know, there’s a creek at the end of this road that can flash flood in a storm. The area around it is swampy and can turn treacherous. Stay out of it.”

  “Snaky?”

  “Very. We don’t see them in winter when they den up and seldom in the summer, like now, when they run away fast. In the spring and fall when they’re chilly, they can’t react quickly, and if they’re sleeping or sunning, one of the horses could step on them.”

  “I don’t do snakes,” Anne said.

  “The ones around the barn are speckled king snakes. They keep the bad snakes away and the mice down.” They had reached the end of the road that led to the creek and the bog. “It looks harmless now. The horses could ford it easily. In a big rainstorm it’s deadly.”

  “Listen,” Anne said. “Frogs.”

  “More than one kind. Hear that? It’s a big bullfrog.”

  Anne leaned down, wrapped her arms around Trust Fund’s neck and laid her cheek against his pelt. “Out here everything smooths out. Our horses don’t judge us. Together we become one unit. We’re free. I love this big guy, and I think he cares about me, not simply because I feed him. Out here all that stuff with Vince seems overblown and silly. Don’t worry. I’ll make it work. Now, is there any place around here where we can have a nice relaxed canter? That would really mellow me out.”

  “You bet.” Victoria led them through the woods beside the road to where the trees opened into a field. The hay had recently been baled and left in the field to be picked up later.

  “Lovely,” Anne whispered. She laid her legs against Trusty’s sides and took a good hold of her reins. They were off.

  Twenty minutes later they walked the horses to cool them down as they started back up the trail toward the fenced paddocks.

  After they detacked their horses, rinsed them off and put them in their stalls to eat, Anne said, “Thank you. Nothing can get on my nerves now. There’s something about a leisurely ride that reaches in and reminds me why I often prefer horses to people. They don’t have hidden agendas.”

  “And people certainly do,” Victoria said. “Come on. Time for a swim. Don’t worry so much about Dr. Vince. It’ll work out.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  VINCE COULD TELL at once the choked horse was suffering. Head hanging, the horse stood on the wash rack of the Bar-Q quarter horse barn, dripping sweat and coughing so hard to try to dislodge the food caught in his throat that his back humped up with every attempt. Jack Quarles, the “Q” of Bar-Q, stood at the horse’s shoulder and ran cold water over his back. Despite a big fan aimed at the horse, the afternoon heat inside the stable was intense.

  After he introduced himself, Vince asked, “What happened?”

  “Lil Joe here gulps his feed. We keep rocks in his trough to force him to eat slower. This afternoon one of my grandsons came out after school to help feed, and he put Lil Joe here in the wrong stall.”

  “No rocks, huh?”

  “By the time I caught what had happened, the feed was gone, the horse was heaving and coughing, and my grandson was having a fit for fear he’d killed him. He loves Lil Joe, but he’s an eight-year-old kid. He didn’t know.”

  Looking at Mr. Quarles, Vince realized he wasn’t far off from having a fit himself. The kid must be in agony.

  “Let’s see what we can do.” He took care of the preliminaries quickly, then began the laborious process of easing the thick rubber tube down Lil Joe’s esophagus while avoiding the trachea. “I’m going to try to clear as much as I can frontways, and then we’ll see if we can move the rest down into his stomach. Where’s your grandson?”

  “I sent him in the house with his mother, my daughter. Didn’t want him seeing this in case it went bad.”

  “Probably a good idea. Once we’re sure he’s okay, you ought to bring him out.”

  “Can you fix it?”

  “Let’s hope.” The kid had done a stupid thing and put the horse in jeopardy. If it had been an adult who should know better, he’d have torn a strip off the offender while he tried to save the animal. This kid was eight. He’d been trying to help, to do something he could be proud of with an animal he loved. He was suffering more than from any pain Vince might cause him.

  It was a case of “been there, done that.” Vince still shivered at the memory of walking in the barn when he was ten and discovering he’d left the door to the feed room open after the evening feed the night before.

  His brother Joshua had warned him that horses would devour tasty sweet feed so long as it was available to them, even if they overate so badly they killed themselves with bloat.

  The three horses clustered around the spilled feed knew they were in trouble when he came in, realized what they’d done and spooked away from him.

  Those were the worst two days of his life up to that point and among the top ten overall. He worked with the vet to dose the horses to calm their guts. He walked them in turns until his ten-year-old legs cramped from dehydration, an
d he thanked God for every pile of manure that landed in the aisle.

  It was a close thing. By rights his daddy’s Tennessee Walking Horse mare should have died. Miraculously, she survived, as did the other two, but the vet told him that they might all be susceptible to gastric problems for the rest of their lives.

  That was his first lesson in how much damage being thoughtless or careless could do to an animal. He still experienced flashes of guilt over that open feed room door.

  He’d expected his father to take his belt to him, although for all his faults, Thor Peterson, his father, was never a hitter. In the end, Vince would have preferred the belt. A beating would cause finite pain that would subside and eventually go away. Instead, his father dumped a load of guilt on him he still carried. The wound never healed because his father never let him forget what he’d done. He could still feel his skin tighten when he thought of that near-disaster.

  Over the years whenever his father’s mare showed the faintest sign of distress, Daddy accused him all over again of trying to kill her. The old man had perfected the art of inducing guilt in the whole family. He never forgave or forgot. Daddy had total recall. Vince had found his only escape was to stay beyond his dad’s influence. That translated to staying away from home.

  That open feed room door was probably the reason he became a vet. It was his job to protect animals from the human beings who too often didn’t protect them. He hated watching an animal suffer and figured he needed as many skills as he could accumulate to make them better.

  Sweat dripped off Vince’s face and ran down his back between his shoulder blades. He worked with the tube and syringes of water, watching as the undigested gunk that was blocking the horse’s gullet gushed out onto the concrete floor. The horse coughed and shook. He was miserable, but he could still get enough air down to breathe, if shallowly. Vince worked to keep him on his feet.

  “I explained to Jack Jr. that horses can’t upchuck,” Mr. Quarles said. “He already knows Lil Joe here is a gobble-gobble eater. We’ve tried everything from feeding him in a foal-size manger to putting a wire grid across his feed bin so he has to suck little bits at a time. So far the only thing that’s worked is the rocks.”