The Long Ride (11 page)

“Anytime, Carole,” Emily said.

Carole walked to the door of the stable and climbed onto the paddock fence so that she could welcome the trail riders back. The three of them rode abreast, Callie in the middle. Callie was doing well with that handful of a horse she had. Carole didn't like to admit it, but Callie was doing much better with Fez than she had. She wished she could flatter herself by saying that Fez was easier for Callie to ride because Carole had exercised him so successfully, but she suspected there wasn't any truth to that.

Carole had to wait until the riders were within a hundred yards of the stable before any of them saw her perched on the fence.

It was Lisa, finally, who spotted her. “Hi, Carole. We missed you!”

“Terribly!” said Stevie.

“Did you show Callie everything?” Carole asked.

“Absolutely,” Stevie said. “Now she and Fez know all our secrets.”

Carole smiled on the outside. She knew Stevie was just joking, but it didn't feel like a joke.

Carole opened the paddock gate, and the girls rode to the stable entrance before dismounting. Carole had brought a small supply of carrots for the horses. Just riding on a trail was generally considered as much of a treat for the horses as the riders, but no excuse was too slight to give Belle and Prancer rewards for good behavior. Carole handed some treats to Callie to give to Fez as well.

“Speaking of treats,” Stevie began, “did you say something about TD's?”

“I did,” Carole said. “And as soon as I've groomed Fez, we can go over there.”

“You don't have to groom him, Carole. I'll take care of it,” said Callie. “You've already had one plan canceled this morning. You should have time for a nice long visit with Lisa and Stevie without worrying about me or my horse.”

“Okay, thanks,” Carole said, looking at Callie curiously. What she'd said sounded perfectly normal and straightforward, but Carole wondered if perhaps Callie just didn't trust her to groom the horse. No, that didn't seem likely. After all, she was trusting her to ride him.

Carole set her concerns aside and focused on helping Lisa and Stevie finish their chores so that they could get down to the serious matter of spending precious time together. It didn't take long. Less than an hour later, they were sliding into their usual booth at the ice cream parlor.

This had been a tradition among the friends for a long time—as long as they'd known one another. It was always TD's, it was always the same booth, it was almost always the same waitress. Every once in a while, they'd find someone else in “their” booth. They all swore the food didn't taste as good if they ate it at another table.

Stevie picked up a menu. “This should be something special,” she said. “We won't be doing it again for a long time.”

“Don't remind me,” Lisa said. “I've already lectured your brother about not beginning to say good-bye before we absolutely have to.”

“Okay, okay,” Stevie agreed. “So I'll pretend I'm not sorry you're going away. But I'm still going to have something special. What I mean by that is something that isn't pizza.”

Stevie ordered a sundae of hot fudge on pistachio ice cream. With peanut butter sauce. “Oh, and can you put some granola on it, too?”

Carole and Lisa never ceased to be amazed at what Stevie chose to call a treat. They each asked for frozen yogurt.

When the waitress left their table, Lisa continued where Stevie had left off. “Let's pretend I'm not going away at all,” she said.

“I'm with Lisa,” said Carole. “Let's ignore the obvious and change the subject. So, how did the ride go with Callie? That was so nice of you to look after her and get her to ride her
own
horse.”

“No problem,” said Lisa, ignoring Carole's rather pointed comment. “She's awfully nice. We had a good time, except for missing you.

“She was telling us this funny story about one night during her father's election campaign when she had a big research paper due but she had to be at this dinner instead of doing history homework. The paper was about a factory in their state that had been shut down because of toxic dumping. She hadn't had time to do enough research—and then it turns out that at the dinner, she was sitting next to the man who'd been governor when the factory had been closed. He'd signed the papers to do it! Her teacher couldn't believe how much primary source material she'd gotten.”

Lisa and Stevie laughed as they retold the story, describing how Callie had written quotes from the former governor on the evening's printed program, on her napkin, even on the palm of her hand, while her father was trying to get votes.

Lisa noticed that Carole wasn't laughing. “Well, I guess you had to be there. Anyway, Callie has done a lot of stuff, and she tells great stories. You're really going to like her when you get to know her better.”

“I'm sure you're right,” Carole said. Their desserts arrived before she had to say any more.

Callie was glad to have some quiet time with her horse. She'd enjoyed the ride with Lisa and Stevie. They were nice, and they might even be friends one day. What mattered more than friends, though, was looking after Fez. He was a handful. He was more of a handful that day than he had been when she'd taken him for his test ride. He'd been at Pine Hollow for three days and should have settled in a little bit. As talented as he was, it was going to be a nuisance to have a horse who hated traveling and took a long time to get used to a new stable. Competition horses traveled a lot and stayed in unfamiliar lodgings all the time. She was going to have to find a way around that. Maybe he'd like a stablemate, a dog or a goat perhaps. Maybe she could find some kind of toy for him that he could take wherever he went. Sometimes horses became particularly fond of something in their own stable, a bucket or a hay net. Whatever it was, it would be a sort of security blanket for him. There had to be an answer, because if this was his best behavior, she wasn't going to keep him any longer than the summer lease.

“Whoa there, boy,” she said, patting Fez's neck. He liked that and stood still for a moment. He stood still while she picked his hooves, but he got fussy as she was combing him. His ears flicked back and forth and then lay flat against his head. His eyes opened wide.

She put away the comb and took out a brush. He seemed to like that better. She worked carefully and methodically, trying to see if there were any particular places Fez didn't like to have brushed. He tolerated it.

As she worked, she noticed that there was another girl about her age grooming a horse in the stall across from Fez's. She was wearing a T-shirt that said Pine Hollow. It was the same kind of shirt that Ben had been wearing the day before. In spite of all the talk about how everybody at Pine Hollow took care of their own horses, it seemed that there was at least one stable hand doing an owner's work.

Callie finished using her brush and tossed it into the grooming bucket. It made a louder sound than she'd expected, startling her. Even more, though, it startled Fez. He tossed his head up. His ears went back, and his eyes opened wide until the whites showed. He began prancing nervously, and that was when Callie realized that she might have made a terrible tactical error by failing to cross-tie her horse before she groomed him, though it hadn't seemed necessary as long as he was in his stall.

Callie tried to shift around so that her back was to the door of the stall and not the back wall, where she could be pinned easily, but Fez was blocking her way. He whinnied and fussed. He wasn't threatening her, specifically, but he was upset, and it was a really bad idea to be in a stall with a loose horse that was upset.

Then she remembered the girl across the hall.

“Can you help me?” she asked.

“No, I can't,” Emily answered. “Do you want me to call Ben?”

The response stunned Callie. How could anyone refuse to help someone who so obviously needed it?

Then, as suddenly as he'd spooked, Fez calmed down and Callie didn't need help from anyone. She took the set of cross-ties out of her bucket, clipped them onto the walls of his stall and to his halter, and finished grooming him.

“Did you get your horse under control?” the girl across the hallway asked.

“Yes, no thanks to you,” Callie shot back.

“But I couldn't—”

“I understand that you
wouldn
't,” Callie said, cutting her off angrily. She'd really been in danger. It was inexcusable that someone would refuse to give her a hand. “I don't think I have anything further to say to
you.
”

But she had a few things to say to someone else. As soon as she could have an appointment with Max Regnery, he was going to get a piece of her mind about a certain stable hand who was too good to help a rider who was in trouble.

“All right, so there's one thing I have to say about this summer,” Lisa began. “And that is that I've heard from Skye. He called me. I can't wait to see him. It's always exciting. He even said there was something he wanted to talk to me about when I get to Los Angeles.”

“He wants you to meet his movie star buddies,” said Stevie, licking the last bit of fudge off her spoon.

“In which case, I'll give you a list of the ones you
must
give my phone number to,” Carole said as she finished her dish of frozen yogurt.

“I don't think so, but count on me to be looking out for your interests if that's what Skye has in mind.”

Stevie looked at Carole. “She's never going to come back! She'll go out there, where they have good weather year-round, where she knows the most famous and desirable of all the young stars—”

“Don't be silly,” said Lisa. “Not come back? How could you even think that I would ever consider leaving all this behind?” She gestured around her, indicating both TD's and the town of Willow Creek, which lay beyond the windows.

Stevie and Carole glanced around. What they saw was an ice cream parlor that hadn't changed much since the late 1960s. It had probably been humble then, and time hadn't improved it any. Willow Creek was a nice enough town, but there were no movie stars, very few celebrities (unless you counted Mr. Jenson, who had won more than forty-three thousand dollars when he was on vacation in Las Vegas), and zero glamour.

“Look on the bright side,” Stevie said. “At least we'll have a good excuse to go to California!”

“Stop it!” Lisa said. “I have no intention of moving out there. I promise you I'll be back in time for school. I'll be ready to come back. The hardest part about this whole summer is going to be leaving. And I don't mean just the saying good-bye part, either. Even getting to the airport is going to be tough. My mother says she can't do it. I think she means she won't because she hates the whole idea. Thankfully, Alex said he'd take me.

“But I've got the car tomorrow,” Stevie protested. “I'll need it for work in the evening, and I promised to take Callie over to the tack shop at the mall in the afternoon.”

“I know. Relax, Alex told me you'd have the car,” Lisa said. “He's going to borrow someone else's. I wasn't expecting you to offer. Besides, Alex really wants to be there.”

“I'm sure,” said Stevie. “He wants to give you the kind of send-off that'll guarantee you'll be back.”

“Guarantees aren't necessary,” Lisa said. “I'll be back. Count on it.”

Stevie and Carole were both already doing that.

ELEVEN

“Yikes!” Stevie said, looking at her watch and then at Carole. “I promised you a ride home and I still have to shower before I go to work. We'd better get going. Can I give you a lift anywhere, Lisa?” She glanced at the check and put her share of it on the table. Carole followed suit.

“No thanks,” Lisa said. “I have to go back to Pine Hollow. I left a library book in my cubby, and I'd better return it today or I might not have a chance.” She took out her wallet and added her share.

The three girls stood up.

“We'll talk to you before you go,” Stevie said.

Lisa nodded. “Definitely,” she agreed. She gave them each a quick hug and headed for the door.

Stevie and Carole walked the short distance to Stevie's house.

“Where's the car?” Carole asked.

“In the garage,” Stevie said. Carole was a little surprised. Normally both Stevie and Alex left the car in the driveway, ready to go in a second. “Wait here, I'll bring it out,” Stevie said.

Stevie had backed the car into the garage so that it could be stored with the broken taillight and dented end in the place least likely to be detected by her brother or her parents. She knew she was going to have to confess at some point. She just wasn't at that point yet, and the longer she could put it off, the better. She could tell Carole, of course—but why? If nobody knew, nobody would be nagging her to confess.

In a few minutes Carole was buckled into the passenger seat and the two of them were on their way to her house.

“So, what are we going to do about our farewell for Lisa?” Carole asked.

“We'll go to the airport, of course,” Stevie said.

Carole smiled. It was exactly what she had in mind, too. “Alex won't be able to give her all the send-off she deserves,” she said. “He's definitely going to need some help from us.”

“Definitely. We can do balloons and stuff if you want.”

“No, just us,” said Carole. “A strong reminder, along with Alex, of everything she's leaving behind.”

“That's a deal, and then I can take Callie to the tack shop on the way back from the airport before I go to work.”

“Callie?”

“Well, yes, I promised I'd take her to the tack shop at the mall.”

“Aren't you going to a lot of trouble for someone you just met?” Carole asked.

“It's really no trouble. I like driving, remember?”