Read Online Summer of Two Wishes by Julia London - Free Book Online Page A

horses. Cutting horses had once been used to cull sick cows from herds of cattle, but now they were used mostly in competitions to separate calves from herds. Macy hadn’t known any of this, of course, until Finn had taught her. And she’d learned that a good cutting horse could sell for thousands of dollars.
    José had taught Finn everything he knew about training horses, and the two of them became known as some of the best trainers in the southwest, their services in high demand. They’d kept about three dozen cattle on the ranch for training purposes, and two high school kids had worked half days with them, learning the business.
    But training a horse took time, and money was slow to come in. When they’d first married, Macy had just graduated from college and had secured a position as a social worker with a nonprofit agency that mentored kids in the foster care system. Her salary was laughably low, but she loved the work. She’d been good at it, and her caseload grew. It eventually got so big that she spent more time driving around central Texas than she did mentoring. It seemed like the only thing she managed was a quick check on the welfare of the kids on her list—there was no time for anything else. She didn’t feel like she was helping anyone but the oil companies.
    Finn convinced Macy he needed her at home. She had a better head for numbers and bookkeeping than he did, so Macy quit her job and stayed home to keep the books. Unfortunately, that didn’t take very long. She ended up spending a lot of time hanging around Finn, watching him work.
    Finn had acquired three cutters of his own, which he entered in competitions for a little extra money. Those horses had been with Finn longer than Macy had, longer than any of the stray dogs he’d taken in. It had killed Macy to sell the cutters, but there was nothing to be done for it. Even if she could have afforded their upkeep, she couldn’t care for them by herself.
    When he’d left her to join the army, Finn had told Macy the ranch would take care of itself. For a few months, it had. But then the officers had come and told her Finn had been killed. And then the cattle got sick. The veterinary bills were high, even with Finn’s brother Luke providing the service and Macy paying only for the medicine. A big chunk of the death gratuity provided by the army had gone to pay bills and taxes. Macy had also received life insurance for Finn from the government, but her mother had been frantic that she would spend it all on the ranch and had made her put a chunk of it in mutual funds for her future. That was a great idea, but the market had taken a nosedive since then, and she’d lost about thirty percent of it. The two high school kids graduated, and then it was just Macy and José, and…and she couldn’t do it.
    One day, under a hard Texas sun, Macy told José of her decision to shut down the cutting horse business. She’d given him six months pay as severance. She never knew if it was the heat or the news that made his eyes water, but José had said little more than “ Gracias ,” and had packed up his beat-up, boxy, old red pickup. She’d heard he’d gone on to a vaquero job south of Dallas-Fort Worth.
    Macy looked at Finn now with all of that running through her mind and said, “I am so sorry.”
    “I understand,” Finn said, but his jaw was clenched. “It was too much for you.”
    “It was hard, Finn. It was a lot harder than I ever thought it could be. The cattle had to be fed in winter, and that year we had a drought, so we had to buy a whole lot more feed than usual, and the horses needed to be watered, and then the cattle got a respiratory disease…” Her voice trailed off. It had all started one night when she’d heard an awful howling outside. She went out and discovered one of the dogs—a big dog they called Tank, who easily weighed one hundred pounds. He’d eaten something or been bit, she didn’t know, but he was in distress. He was too