Before They Rode Horses Read Free Page B

when the ambulance got there.
    Deborah hung up the phone and asked Lisa if she’d like to play some Scrabble.
    “Until the ambulance gets here?” Lisa asked.
    “No,” Deborah said, shaking her head and smiling. “There’s no ambulance coming. The doctor isn’t rushing over. There’s nothing to hurry about because it’s going to be a good long time before anything needs to be rushed at all—if ever. My instructions are to stay calm, walk around if I feel like it, and don’t eat anything. I’m supposed to call and report progress every once in a while, and he definitely wants to hear from me when my contractions are five minutes apart. That’s not likely to be for another twelve hours or so. We’ve got plenty of time to play Scrabble, read a book, tell stories. See, there isn’t even any need to call Max because he’ll be back long before then. If we call him now, he’ll worry, and that won’t do me or the baby any good. And he’ll also miss the meeting. He’s leading a workshop on handling obstreperous kids, and I know the rest of the Pony Club directors would hate to miss that.”
    “There aren’t any obstreperous kids in Horse Wise!” Lisa said.
    “Well, then I guess Max knows what he’s talking about,” Deborah said with a smile.
    Lisa laughed. She decided that if Deborah could make jokes, there probably wasn’t any need for an ambulance. She didn’t know an awful lot about women having babies, but she did know about veterinary care of horses, and one of the things that an owner always had to be sensitive to was a change in basic character. If a normally sweet horse became moody and naughty, it could be a sign of a medical problem. As long as Deborah could joke like usual, that seemed to Lisa to be a sign of good health.
    “Okay, so where’s the Scrabble set?” she asked.
    Lisa was behind by twenty-three points by the time Stevie and Carole came from the stable. Deborah agreed to let the three girls work together. In no time, they’d put
hacking
with the
k
on a Triple Letter and
quirt
on a Double Word with the
q
on a Double Letter. It wasn’t easy, either, because Deborah didn’t know what either word meant. Lisa explained patiently that
hacking
was what they had been doing when they went on their ride in the woods, and Carole gave an intricate explanation of the braided leather quirts that Western riders used instead of whips or crops. Deborah was a good sport until Stevie came up with a way to use all seven letters for a fifty-point bonus with
jodhpurs.
    “Help! I give up!” Deborah declared, looking ather measly 125 points versus The Saddle Club’s 342. “Maybe you weren’t kidding when you said you could do anything when you worked together.”
    “Well, as long as it has to do with horses,” said Lisa, looking proudly at the Scrabble board with all their other joint works, including mare,
foal
, and
stall.
Plus, they’d built
colt
on the c in
hacking.
    “Maybe you three should try to do something really hard now,” said Deborah.
    “Like what?” Stevie asked, eager for the challenge.
    “Anything that doesn’t have anything to do with horses,” Deborah said.
    “Why would we want to do that?” Carole asked.
    “Oh, I don’t know,” said Deborah. “Sometimes you have to do things just to prove to yourself that you can. I mean, there was a time in each of your lives when you didn’t ride horses, talk horses, breathe horses, and live horses, wasn’t there?”
    “Not so long ago,” Lisa said, remembering that she’d only begun to ride recently.
    “Well, there was life before you rode horses,” said Deborah. “I mean, you did things, learned things, played things—oh, dear …” A pained look crossed her face and she glanced at her watch.
    “It wasn’t that bad,” said Stevie.
    “It’s a contraction,” Deborah explained. The girls watched her. In a few seconds, the uncomfortable look left her face. “There, it’s over.” She looked at her watch again.