Ivy Takes Care Read Online Free PDF Page A

scenery from a saddle, and eat Ivy’s mother’s good cooking.
    The guests seemed not to be members of the Clean Plate Club like Ivy and Billy Joe’s families. At dinnertime, they left drumsticks uneaten, steak half-finished, beans in a pile at the edge of the plate. Almost all of these leavings went to the two ranch dogs, Hoover and Coover, who waited out on the porch, thumping their tails, anticipating their treats.
    “You have to share now!” Ivy told Hoover and Coover the night she’d discovered the fox. She took some bones and chicken wings and baked potatoes from the dogs’ dishes, wrapping the best bits of meat in waxed paper. All for a wild creature and six furry red babies in a horse stall, a couple of miles over the mountain.
    Then she looked up inflammation in
The Home Vet
and saw that the remedy for most pets was a baby aspirin. There were plenty of aspirin in the medicine closet. She started slipping one quarter of an aspirin a day into a steak rind or a chicken morsel for the fox, so the swelling in her foot would heal.
    One afternoon, Billy Joe saw Ivy putting some waxed-paper-wrapped meat in her bike basket. She had wrapped the T-bone in the paper, sealing it with Scotch tape, neat as a butcher’s package.
    “Where are you taking that meat?” he asked from behind one of the wooden pillars on the porch.
    “Trouble trouble, and trouble will trouble you, Billy Joe,” said Ivy.
    Billy Joe paused a beat. Ivy knew that he knew that she would never answer him. So he got more personal.
    “Where’s that fancy ring of yours, Miss Climbing Vine?”
    “I took it back to the store because I decided I didn’t like it,” she said in what she hoped was a bored grown-up voice.
    Billy Joe sashayed backward into his house with a knowing laugh. “I bet it was for your buddy back East at that camp of hers! I haven’t seen any postcards from Camp Pellagra yet this summer, and I pick up all the mail every day!” he teased.
    That hurt because it was true. Ivy had not heard from Annie yet. “Shut up, Billy Joe,” said Ivy. “And it’s
Allegro,
not Pellagra!” Was there no limit to his busybodyness?
    Ivy biked to the Pratts’ place with the small sting still inside her. It started to thunderstorm, so first Ivy brought Chestnut in from the rain. Then she tossed the leftover T-bone to the fox mother, whose foot looked worse today. She limped over to the piece of meat, and her eyes did not look bright. The kits cried around her.
    “I’m worried about you, Mama Fox,” said Ivy. “We can’t have you leaving those kits hungry!”
    Suddenly Ivy heard truck tires crunch into the stable yard, then the slam of a door. Dashing into the barn, rain pouring from the rim of his ten-gallon hat as if it were a gutter spout, was Dr. Rinaldi. Dr. Rinaldi had known Ivy from his visits to the Red Star Ranch since she was knee-high. The vet shook off the rainwater, smiled, and put a hand on Ivy’s shoulder.
    “I promised Martha Pratt I’d look in on you now and then,” he said. “Make sure everything was running smoothly.”
    “Chestnut’s fine,” said Ivy. She did and didn’t want to tell him about the foxes. Most people did not believe in nursing wild creatures.
    The vet pulled Chestnut’s ear affectionately and gave him a once-over. “Everything looks shipshape,” he said, eyes on the clean stall and the neat stable.
    “Since you’re here, Dr. Rinaldi,” said Ivy, “could you look at Chestnut’s front right leg? He’s had a festering horsefly bite there all week.”
    Dr. Rinaldi scrambled around in his bag and pulled out some ointment. He applied it, grumbling about horseflies being like a plague of locusts. Chestnut stamped and snorted at him.
    “You bike over here?” the vet asked.
    Ivy nodded. Then she looked up at the doctor. It was now or never. “Dr. Rinaldi, can I ask you something?”
    As if on cue, a soft cry came from the spare stall at the back of the barn. Dr. Rinaldi cocked his head and