House of Mercy by Erin Healy Page B

Instead, the direct and thoughtful attention, as if he possessed a clear answer but didn’t think she could handle it, caused her to speak over any reply he might have offered.
    She continued, “Or do we just call anything we don’t really understand a miracle?”
    “Nope. Miracles happen,” he said again.
    She wanted his certainty.
    “If I get Gert off the ground in the next fifteen minutes, will that be miraculous?”
    Jacob frowned now, and a deep line crouched between his brows.
    Beth cleared her throat. She hadn’t meant to be flippant. “What I meant is, what do you call a miracle?”
    “Do you believe God loves you?” he asked.
    “Sure. He loves everyone.”
    Jacob shrugged. “For starters, then, I guess I think it’s a miracle that he loves someone like me.”
    “What do you mean, someone like you? You’re a straight-up guy, you work hard, everyone likes you, you’re good to people.” She sighed. “You’ve never stolen a horse and killed it.”
    He didn’t reply to that, and she might have apologized for her self-pity if he hadn’t cracked that smile at her—the kind of unfunny, condescending smile older people gave when they were thinking, I’m wiser than you are, young’un, but I’ll hold my tongue .
    The smile goaded her to be just a little sassy. She was really bungling this whole conversation. She said, “If I get off light in this lawsuit, will that be a miracle? I’m sure Darling would say it’s an injustice.”
    “Encouragement is hard to come by,” Jacob said. “Maybe you should just take it at face value when it shows up.”
    He was right, of course.
    He said, “Maybe it’s a miracle you weren’t hurt worse than you were when Joe threw you.”
    “Okay, okay—forget I brought that up.” She turned back to Gert. “I’m thinking she’s got heat stress.”
    Jacob glanced back at the reclined horse. “I know it’s hot, but none of the other animals show signs. And she’s not sweating. Isn’t that how horses cool off ?”
    “Generally speaking. Animals with fur pant; animals with hair sweat.”
    She removed Gert’s thermometer. “One-oh-two point nine,” she read. “Might as well be 103. You score again.”
    “Wish I’d been wrong about that number.”
    “It is a bit high. Did you really just guess?” He nodded, and she said, “I’m impressed. I mean it.”
    “What do you recommend?”
    The question brought to mind a story she’d read in one of James Herriot’s books. In this particular tale, the vet had been summoned to treat a collapsed bull. The owner, befuddled over the bull’s condition, put a lot of stock in cutting-edge medicine and expected Herriot to wow him with a complex diagnosis and high-tech treatment. When Herriot told him the bull had heat stroke and would recover with shade and a cold spray from the hose, the owner was downright disappointed to see his valuable animal come back to life so quickly.
    “Sometimes things are never anything more than what they seem,” she muttered.
    “Then it should be okay to call a miracle a miracle,” he said.
    She laughed and felt forgiven. “You are worse than a dog on a rabbit,” she said. “I was talking about Gert. Let’s try to cool her off.” There was a hose wound like a rattlesnake at the side of the barn. She unwound it and attached it to a spigot, then turned on the water and directed a gentle spray at Gert’s legs. In a few short minutes, the horse’s terrible breathing began to slow.
    “I hereby diagnose her with heat stroke,” Beth said.
    Jacob was too nice to ask her again about the lack of sweat, but she knew he was thinking it. That was one mystery that her diagnosis didn’t solve.
    “How long have you had her again?” Beth asked.
    “Since last October. She went with me when we went up to fetch the cows.”
    “Okay. I remember that. So she hasn’t been with us through a summer before—or an August. Did her previous owner mention any trouble with