Living in Threes Read Online Free PDF Page B

one. It was Mom’s idea to do it this year. She’d let me pick the stallion, but she drew up the list I picked him from.
    This was supposed to be our family project. She hadn’t been there for the breeding, either—vet, turkey baster, boy-in-a-box shipped all the way from Arizona. Work again.
    Egypt I was mad about. This just made me tired.

    I finished my stalls, and Cat and I got the water buckets filled. By then Kristen had started her dressage lesson and Rick was on to jump school number two. Her blonde ponytail and his screaming-flames helmet took turns bobbing around the dressage and jumping rings.
    It was almost time for the vet—though vet time is like Dad time: it takes as long as it takes.
    Cat went down with me to the pasture. Her big bay mare was Bonnie’s BFF; the two of them were waiting at the gate when we got there, with the rest of the ladies-in-waiting hanging back respectfully and the south-pasture geldings keeping a wary distance. Nobody messed with Bonnie and Dora.
    As soon as I saw my fat white pony, I forgot everything else but her. I wasn’t making any hopes or plans yet, but she looked even whiter and shinier than usual. There was a glow on her.
    She pushed her nose into the halter and I buckled it, and then stood for a long time with my face in her mane, breathing the smell of clean horse. She didn’t pull away as quickly as she usually did. I thanked her for that when I finally stepped back and took a deep breath and looked up to see the vet’s truck pulling in by the nearer barn.
    I could say I felt something building around me. I could say Bonnie farts rainbows, too. I wasn’t feeling anything right then but annoyance with Mom and excitement about the vet.
    Bonnie danced a little on the way up from the pasture to the wash rack, as if she knew something big was about to happen. Dr. Kay was waiting for us with her laptop that was, among other things, an ultrasound machine. She smiled at me and said to Bonnie, “Well, your majesty. Ready to show us what you’ve got in there?”
    Bonnie snorted and pulled ahead of me toward the wash rack. Cat laughed behind me. Maybe Dora did, too. “She knows,” Cat said.
    “Now the rest of us get to find out,” said Dr. Kay.
    I led Bonnie into the wash rack, which did double duty as a breeding stanchion. Dr. Kay fastened the butt bar and plugged in the ultrasound probe.
    Bonnie knew the drill from her breeding exams and her date with the boy-in-a-box. She didn’t exactly like it—would you like having somebody’s arm shoved all the way up where the sun don’t shine? But she’d been on board with this from the start, and she wasn’t changing her mind now.
    Bonnie is a whole lot smarter than your average horse. On her end of the horse-brains scale, weird is perfectly normal.
    I had Bonnie’s leadrope to manage, but while Dr. Kay probed and stretched and peered at the laptop screen, I angled around till I could get a glimpse of Bonnie’s grainy, blurry insides.
    The image stopped shifting and turning and zeroed in. There was something in the middle: a perfect black circle with a white dot at the top.
    Dr. Kay lit up with a grin. “There’s your baby,” she said.
    I burst into tears. It was totally embarrassing, and of course the whole world was there, from Barb the barn owner to Kristen with her Warmblood and Rick with big red Stupid, and Cat and Dora looking as if they’d put on the whole show. The humans were all grinning and clapping and cheering and kindly not noticing that my eyes were running over.
    Bonnie got cookies and carrots and a proud pat from Dr. Kay. Nobody said anything about the person who wasn’t there—who should have been. I aimed my phone at the ultrasound screen, which Dr. Kay had frozen and saved, and sent the picture to Mom.
    She’d get it when she got it. I told myself I didn’t care.
    It was Cat who asked the question I couldn’t get it together to ask. “So now what? Anything special we should do?”
    “Not