For Sale or Swap - Alyssa Brugman [30]
After she hung up Shelby leaned back on the lounge, grinning. She told her mother everything Mr Mulligan had said. She felt so much better.
Her mother leaned over and patted her on the shoulder. 'You know what that means? If you hadn't swapped, that man might have come back and taken Blue anyway, so you can stop beating yourself up about that.'
Shelby looked down at her hands. 'But that's not the point, is it? I shouldn't have let him go. I shouldn't have even rung in the first place.'
'Oh, I don't know,' her mother said. 'You wanted a new challenge. There's nothing wrong with that. If you never challenge yourself then you never improve.'
Shelby sighed. She hadn't expected the challenges to be so . . . challenging.
14 Lime
Shelby didn't have a horse to feed in the morning, but she was used to waking up early, so she lay in bed with her hands behind her head, scrunching and unscrunching her toes under the covers.
She'd been dreading the phone call to confess that Brat was stolen, and had put it off, but now that it was done it felt good. She'd made someone's life better. She wondered if she placed an ad in the magazine whether somebody like her would admit to having Blue.
Now all she had to do was face the Crooks. It didn't seem such a terrible task as it had the night before – now that she had done the right thing. She would tell them that, yes, Brat was a grey, and she was stolen, but she had informed the people who owned her and they were coming to collect her. She imagined Mrs Crook might get a little tight around the mouth, but they couldn't hold it against her. It wasn't as if she had stolen Brat.
Shelby climbed out of bed and padded out to the lounge room to watch cartoons with her brothers. The Lego toy box was still in the middle of the floor and Blake tipped it upside down, raking out the blocks with his small hands.
'Can you help me make a helicopter?' he asked.
Shelby held up the small haphazard block that he had created. 'I don't know how to make helicopters, but I can put together a wicked stable complex. Will that do?'
Blake nodded. Connor crawled across the carpet to help them.
Shortly afterwards her parents emerged from their room, and Shelby did another thing that she hadn't done for years – she had Sunday breakfast with her family.
'We're making a stable complex,' Blake announced.
'Really?' his father replied. 'It's a pity they don't make Lego a bit bigger. Then we could build Shelby a real one.'
'They do,' Connor informed him. 'It's called Duplo.'
Her father gave her a wink. 'You never know, Shel, Santa might bring you a great big pile of Duplo. Would you like that?'
'He'd never fit it through the range hood,' she replied.
The Shaws didn't have a fireplace, and so one time, when the boys had asked how Santa brought the presents, her father had told them that he came in through the range hood over the stove.
Connor chewed on a strip of bacon with his fingers, and then wiped the grease across his shirt in long smears, but his father didn't get cross as he usually would.
At the end of the meal Shelby's mother gathered the plates from the table.
'I'll do the dishes if you like,' offered Shelby, pushing her chair back.
'Would you?' asked her mother.
Shelby carried the plates to the bench and filled the sink with water. She looked into the lounge room at her parents sitting side by side on the couch. Her mother sipped her cup of coffee. Shelby realised that it had been a long, long time since she had seen her mother just relaxing.
After the dishes were done Shelby asked if one of her parents could drive her over to the stables to see how Brat was doing. Her father offered to take her, as he had some chores to do anyway.
Out in the driveway, Shelby waited for her father to open the door. To her surprise he walked straight around to the driver's side. 'I think you're old enough to open it yourself now,' he said. 'But be careful. Just use the handle. And don't slam it.'
Shelby rolled her eyes. Sometimes he was just like Mrs Crook.
On the way, her