I brought the wheelbarrow over to the stall as instructed, and he handed me a pitchfork, which I lifted straight up in the air. “I feel like a peasant about to rush a castle.”
He didn’t even crack a smile. “Hilarious.”
“I guess Frankenstein jokes are out.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “First, you sift out the waste.”
“So serious.” I glanced into the stall. “Right. The waste.”
Mucking stalls turned out to be just as awful as I remembered it from when Abigail Hardy had showed me how as a Girl Scout. I hadn’t been around manure in years, but the smell brought those memories back full force. I didn’t remember the waste falling apart quite so easily, as though every little ball of crap wanted to hide itself from me in the bedding. I fussed and fumed, digging at pieces until I totally decimated a pile without ever getting any into the wheelbarrow.
Ty made a clucking sound in the back of his throat. “That is unfortunate. Try to get all the way under it next time, so it doesn’t fall apart.”
A small smile tugged at the edges of his mouth. For a man who claimed he wanted nothing to do with this bet, he sure looked like he got a kick out of it.
Huffing a breath, I moved on to the next clump. I’d only been at it fifteen minutes, but gaining Ty’s respect by shoveling his horses’ manure didn’t seem like such a hot idea anymore.
“Make sure you leave any clean bedding behind,” he said as I dumped a large forkful into the wheelbarrow. “We don’t want to waste it.”
I tried to scoop more carefully, but picking up the manure and leaving the bedding in the stall wasn’t as easy as he made it sound. A clump of manure fell between the tines of the scoop, landing with a soft thud on the cement floor outside the stall.
“Whoops.”
“It’s okay. You can sweep the floor down after you’re done.”
My shoulders sagged. “Great.”
“Now,” he said, handing me a broad shovel. “Find the urine spots. You need to get rid of all of it, so check for any discolored bedding.”
“How do I find the urine spots?”
He nodded toward the floor of the stall. “You look for it.”
I sighed and started poking around in the straw with the shovel. It didn’t take long to find the first soaked area, and I learned that shoveling wet bedding was harder work than shoveling clumps of manure. It smelled worse, too, a thick, acrid smell that burned my nose and stung my eyes when I exposed it to the air.
“That’s a stallion’s stall,” Ty said from behind me. “He usually has a few episodes to find.”
“Episodes? I’m standing in his piss, you can call it what it is.”
His brief laughter turned into a groan. I whipped my head around, but he watched me without expression, like both the laugh and the groan had been my imagination.
“You could sit down while you supervise, you know.”
“I need to make sure you’re doing it right. A dirty stall can lead to all kinds of disease.”
Great. Just what I needed to hear. Not only was his estimation of me on the line, now I had the threat of sick horses looming over me, too. I searched more diligently through the bedding.
“So, you have all the groomsmen’s suits figured out, right?”
I heard a quick exhale over my shoulder.
“June.”
“I’m just curious. It’s kind of my job.”
“Funny, I thought it was my job.”
I waved my hand in a so-so motion. “My job is to double-check your job.”
