Page 2 of Beside the Rolling Waves
But life went on, and she hadn’t heard from him for a long time. And she wasn’t going to worry about it. She was going to move on with her life.
She pushed her shoulders back and finished petting Jasper’s wide forehead before she grabbed the bucket out of the gelding’s stall, and another one out of Jethro’s stall, and took them to the water hydrant at the front of the barn.
Hopefully it wasn’t frozen this morning.
She saw the heat tape glowing and took that as a good sign.
Hooking the handle of the bucket over the back of the hydrant, she carefully turned it on so it didn’t blast with full force at the bottom of the bucket, soaking her face and coat. She’d done that plenty of times and had done the rest of the morning chores with a frozen coat and frozen body. Getting her face flushed with cold water first thing on a subzero-temperature day served to wake a person up, that was for sure. But it also was exceptionally uncomfortable.
As the water filled the bucket, she grabbed her phone out.
Good morning, beautiful.
She smiled. It was Rick, her almost boyfriend.
She didn’t take her gloves off to message him back, just used her nose to pull up the emojis and sent him a smiley face.
Rick would know she was working and understand.
Shoving her phone back in her pocket, she shut the water off, switched the buckets, and carefully turned the water back on. Then, while the second bucket was filling, she carried Jasper’s bucket to him and opened the stall door, setting it down so he could drink his fill.
She’d go and fill it back up, and that time, she’d hook it into his stall.
The heat from the horse usually kept the water from freezing, but not always. It depended on the wind coming off of Lake Michigan and how low the temperatures dropped.
Grabbing a bucket from Velvet’s stall, she hurried back, knowing from doing it over and over again that if she hurried, she could get there just as the bucket got full.
She timed it perfectly, shut the water off, hooked Velvet’s bucket onto the water spout, turned it on, and hurried back to Jethro’s stall.
It took a good fifteen minutes to completely water the horses, and then it was time to feed them.
Once they were fed, she would muck out their stalls, and then she would work on taking them out and giving them some exercise.
It wasn’t strictly necessary, but she wanted them to be in good shape if she got a request for a carriage ride. Which, now that Christmas was over, bookings had slowed down to a trickle. Or maybe it had stopped altogether. She scrunched her nose up and tried to remember the last time she had a booking.
Last week? Two weeks ago?
She wasn’t even sure what day it was. Sometime toward the end of February.
“Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Clementine. You were lost and gone forever, oh my darling Clementine.” She sang to her horse as she scooped poop out of the stall, dumping it into the wheelbarrow that waited in the aisle.
Her phone buzzed again, and she tried to figure out who in the world that could be.
Rick had said good morning to her, but he knew that she would be working, and he wouldn’t bother her unless there was a problem.
Was there a problem?
She stopped, leaned the manure fork against the wheelbarrow, and pulled her phone back out of her pants pocket.
There were two texts. Both from her sister, Rita. That was even more strange. Rita knew she didn’t have a data plan. She paid for data as she used it with her TracFone. They didn’t talk to each other unless it was strictly necessary.
Rick wasn’t quite so considerate, and she gave him a little bit of grace, because she figured that when a man liked a woman, he wanted to talk to that girl.
She really wasn’t sure how much Rick liked her, and they’d never said anything about being exclusive. Their relationship was one of those ones where she was kind of in limbo all the time, but it suited her just fine, because it wasn’t like she was financially stable and ready for a serious boyfriend anyway.
He was. At least he should be. He had a good job, and he was at the point where he could support a wife and family.
She wasn’t quite sure he could support a wife with four Clydesdales and a family, but she kinda hoped he was.
