It Began with a Crush (The Cherry Sisters)

by Darcy, Lilian

  Which was the cue for one seven-year-old in a riding helmet to appear around the corner of the barn, leading a shaggy black pony roughly the size of a large but very well-fed dog, walking very steadily and carefully and seriously, while her twin was walking a few yards behind them, grinning from ear to ear. Penelope was on the opposite side of the pony, Suzie, walking right beside the shaggy head, keeping an eagle eye on the proceedings.

  Right now, it didn’t look as if Joe had anything to fear.

  Holly was the one grinning. Mary Jane could tell once they’d come closer, even though Maddie’s hairline was hidden under the riding helmet now.

  Well, huh, she thought. I can tell them apart even without the clue!

  It seemed like a triumphant achievement, and she wanted to show it off to Joe, even though she didn’t know quite how she was managing to do it, the differences were so subtle. Still, she was sure. Maddie was the twin leading the horse, Holly was walking behind.

  “I had my turn leading her before,” Holly explained. “Now Maddie’s having her turn.”

  “I can see that,” Joe said.

  “We’re doing it exactly right, Penelope says.”

  “Are you supposed to be calling her Penelope?”

  “Yes, they are.” Penelope smiled. “I told them that was what I wanted to be called. First names are just as polite as Mr. and Mrs., as long as they’re used respectfully.” It was quite clear that Penelope intended to be spoken to respectfully. She turned to the girls. “Right, now I’m going to open the gate into the round pen, and we’ll tie Suzie to the rail inside it while we groom and saddle her. You can help me bring the grooming kit and her tack from the tack room.”

  “Yes!” the girls said. They clearly wanted to hop up and down again, but Penelope must have told them that sudden movements would startle the pony, because they kept their hopping in check, and in general seemed a whole lot calmer and more in awe of the experience than they had been earlier.

  Penelope tied the pony’s lead rope to a piece of twine, and said, “Do you know why we use the twine, girls, instead of tying the rope directly to the rail?”

  “No…” They sounded disappointed in themselves. Joe was watching and listening so intently that Mary Jane feared he was forgetting to breathe. She began to forget to breathe herself.

  “So that if Suzie gets a scare and pulls away, she’ll just break the twine instead of hurting herself fighting the strong rope, or breaking the yard.”

  “Could she really break the yard?” Joe asked.

  “Well, this one couldn’t, but my big warm-bloods and Thoroughbreds could do some damage to themselves or the rails, especially my stallion, if they were really fighting to get loose and couldn’t.”

  “Don’t some of them work out how easy it is to break the twine and get free?”

  “Occasionally. Some of them learn to untie the knot in the lead rope, instead! Mostly they’re happy to stand like this, and happy to be caught from their fields. When they’re well-trained, they like the riding partnership with humans, and they like being groomed. They definitely like the food! Come along, girls. I have things for you to carry.”

  The three of them disappeared again, back to the tack room.

  “I should probably tell you more about their mother,” Joe said as soon as they’d gone. He did another one of his restless shifts, swapping his feet on the bottom rail of the yard, and turning slightly to face her.

  They were standing too close. Too close for Mary Jane, anyhow. She knew it…felt it…could almost feel his body heat…but didn’t want to move away in case he thought—

  Well, fill in the blank.

  In case he thought she was uncomfortable with him, or not uncomfortable with him. In case he realized that what she really wanted was to get much, much closer.

  “Don’t, if you’re not comfortable about it,” she told him.

  “Look, of course I’m not comfortable, it’s not a good story, but you might need to spell it out a little more to Penelope, or to the parents of those other kids, if they’re all playing and riding together. I don’t want to just dump it on them, but they’re staying at the resort, and you’ve known Penelope for a while. It’d be better coming from you, when you can pick the right moment. Someone besides me and Dad needs to know about this.”

  “Then of course, tell me.”

  “They were abused when they were little. One of their mother’s drug-addled boyfriends. It was going on for a while before I knew. And then even after I knew, it took a while before I could get them permanently away from the situation.”

  “That must have been horrible!”

  “Yeah.” He was silent for a moment, clearly looking for what to say next. “That’s how Maddie got the scar,” he continued eventually. “Holly’s not scarred, but hell, she was bruised. And their mother wasn’t any better than the boyfriend. Was worse, in her own way.” He shook his head. “Chronic neglect. Raw bottoms from diaper rash because she left the same one on for so long. She gave them soda in their baby bottles, instead of formula or milk, if she’d run out. Do you have any idea what that much sugar in a bottle does to their teeth?”

  “I can imagine.”

  “They had cavities in their baby teeth before they were two. I got custody as soon as I could, but she still had some rights, and the court gave her more access than I wanted, for a while.” He made a frustrated sound. “I’m probably not telling any of this in the right order, or the right way. Sheesh, details about their teeth!”

  “They paint a picture, Joe. Women love details, don’t you know that?” She gave him a sidelong grin and he grinned back, which made her regret the moment of flirtation at once.

  And they’d run out of time. Penelope and the girls were coming back—Holly carrying the handle of a black plastic carrier that looked like an open toolbox, Maddie carrying a padded saddlecloth and a bridle and Penelope holding the saddle. She rested it on the middle rail of the corral—or, no, round pen—then took the saddlecloth and bridle from Maddie and laid them on top.

  “Can we find a time?” Joe said quietly to Mary Jane. He looked at her with those eyes, and they were suffering and serious again, yet they were the same eyes he’d flirted with back in high school. Flirted with just a moment ago. “To talk, I mean? I want to do this properly, not in snatches. Privately.”

  “Of course.”

  “Maybe after this? When I drop you back? Could the girls have a play down by the lake, or a swim in the pool, and we can watch them and talk?”

  “Yes, that’s fine. Of course,” she repeated.

  “We could swing by a coffee shop on the way through and get a latte, or whatever you like to drink.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “Least I can do is buy you a coffee, since I’m taking your time.”

  “I broke your car,” she reminded him.

  “Yeah, you did.” He grinned again, suddenly, and her stomach kicked and dropped and her limbs went funny. What was she, fourteen? “You are going to be very, very sorry about how much I’m going to milk that.”

  She wasn’t going to be sorry at all, Mary Jane knew. She was going to be painfully, embarrassingly glad.

  They both watched while Penelope showed the girls how to groom the pony, clean the dirt out of her hooves and put on the saddlecloth, saddle and bridle.

  “She’s so little!” Holly said.

  “Is she going to get any bigger?” Maddie asked.

  “No, this is as big as she’ll ever be. She’s not a baby horse. She’s a grownup pony. Actually she’s quite an old girl. She’s twenty.” Penelope looked across at Joe and Mary Jane. “And very tolerant.” Her blue eyes were twinkling. “Now, which of you is going to ride first, I wonder?”

  “Holly,” said Maddie quickly.

  “Is that all right with you, Holly?”

  “Yes, I want to go first!” Mary Jane had started to realize that Holly was often the one to take the lead, while Maddie was just that little bit mo
re cautious.

  Penelope showed Holly how to mount by putting her booted foot in the stirrup and then swinging her leg over. She arrived in a seated position in the saddle wearing a big smile, while Suzie simply stood there, steady as a rock.

  It was a lovely lesson. Mary Jane could feel Joe start to relax as each twin in turn listened very seriously to Penelope’s instructions and was clearly trying her very hardest to do everything exactly right. There was no jumping on and galloping, no silliness, no questioning of anything Penelope said.

  The older woman let the pony around the circular pen for most of the lesson, but both girls had a few minutes of riding on their own at a walk, and were able to use the reins and their legs to change direction in the middle of the round pen and go back the other way.

  “Next time, we’ll trot,” Penelope said.

  Beside Mary Jane, Joe let out a carefully controlled breath. “Next time,” he murmured. “So I guess that means they’ve passed.”

  “I would have passed them,” Mary Jane said. “They’ve been adorable.”

  She found it hard to drag her eyes away—from the girls themselves and from the sight of Joe watching them. The grins on the girls’ faces, or the very serious moments when they tried their hardest to do exactly what Penelope was telling them. “Heels down. Sit deep in the saddle and tall in your back.” How cute was a seven-year-old trying to concentrate that hard!

  And as for Joe…

  His eyes lit up every time they earned Penelope’s praise, and he watched intently every time they were asked to do something new. When they beamed at him and said, “Look, Daddy!” he beamed back and said, “Yes, I can see!”

  He hadn’t brought a camera with him and didn’t get out his phone to take pictures, either, and Mary Jane liked that, too—that he was just here, in the moment, focusing on the girls not on obsessively capturing their every move. She’d noticed that with some of the resort guests sometimes, especially the men. They were so busy bagging the prize of endless video and photos, they never truly saw anything while it was actually happening. Joe wasn’t like that.

  Maddie climbed down from the pony, but the girls weren’t quite finished yet. Penelope had them help unsaddle and groom the pony again, then asked them to use a special scoop and brush to clean up the scatter of manure that Suzie had left in the round pen, while Penelope herself led the pony back to her day yard. The girls were thorough about it, Holly saying to Maddie, “You’ve missed a bit,” and Maddie directing Holly to move the scoop closer.

  Neither Joe nor Mary Jane missed the way Penelope looked at the state of the round pen when she returned. Had they done a good enough job? Apparently yes. “Good girls,” she said, then to Joe, “I’m happy to have them. The Richardsons are here for another three weeks. Mary Jane, you said they’re happy to work something out with Lucy’s hours and pay?”

  “Yes, we didn’t get down to exact details, but they thought it would be great for their two to have some other kids to play with, while they’re here. I thought we should wait to work everything out until after you’d met them.”

  “They’ve been working on a schedule of the kids riding in the mornings with the help of Lucy and one of my working students, while I’m coaching Vanessa and Phil. That takes a while because they’ve brought eight horses.”

  “Vanessa and Phil don’t ride with their kids?” Joe asked.

  “No, we’ve concluded it’s a bit too much like husbands teaching their wives to drive a car. When it comes to formal lessons, Jessica and Simon learn better from someone else, but they do go for trail rides with their parents sometimes and that’s lovely and stress-free.”

  “Maddie and Holly won’t be ready for trail rides just yet.”

  “No, but that’s fine. It’ll come sooner than you think. At lunchtime, Lucy takes the children on an outing or back to Spruce Bay for swimming and that kind of thing for a few more hours in the afternoon, while Vanessa and Phil finish here. I expect that’s how they’ll want to continue, if that works for you, Joe.”

  “Sounds perfect,” he said. “Thank you. I really appreciate this. You can’t know how much.”

  “I hate seeing children cooped up inside in front of television and computer screens all day,” Penelope said matter-of-factly. “I’ve seen a love for horses save children’s lives. Literally. It’s given them a passion and an outlet when otherwise they would have been lost to drugs or crime. And I’ve seen children with autism or cerebral palsy come to life on horseback, after they’ve been imprisoned in their own bodies by their disability.”

  Joe nodded without speaking, and Mary Jane thought that she wasn’t the only one who’d sensed him tense up at the mention of drugs and crime. Penelope seemed pretty perceptive. “Thank you,” he said again after a moment.

  He was quiet in the car as they drove back to Spruce Bay, and so were the girls. As they detoured to Bolton Landing to pick up the coffees Joe had promised, he said to them, “I thought you’d be all chatty about the riding.”

  “We’re thinking.”

  “About ponies?”

  “We’re revising our lesson,” Holly said.

  “So we don’t forget how to saddle and groom, next time.”

  “We’re in heaven,” Holly added.

  “Oh, you are?”

  “Yes, it was just so heavenly, Daddy,” Maddie said, her sober mood suddenly erupting into excitement again. “We can’t even talk about it, it was so, so amazing and heavenly.”

  Holly added, pronouncing each word with emphasis, “We are more in love with ponies than ever.”

  It sounded impossibly solemn and unnatural, and Joe said, “Didn’t we read that in a book?”

  “Yes, in Laura Loves Ponies,” Holly told him.

  “In Chapter Four, after she goes for a trail ride with her friends Ella and Gracie and her new pony, Poppy. Don’t you remember, Daddy?” Maddie elaborated.

  “Remind me.”

  “She comes back and she’s all tired and happy, and the sun is setting in the western sky, in shadings of mauve and lemon and pink and gold, and as Poppy munches contentedly on her oats and hay, the book says Laura is more in love with ponies than ever.”

  “You’re right,” Joe said with a straight face. “I do remember that bit.”

  Mary Jane decided that she knew just how Laura, Maddie and Holly felt about the “being in love” thing. The only problem was, she wasn’t sure that the feelings flaring inside her were just for ponies.

  Chapter Six

  “You must be wondering what the hell I was doing, letting any of it happen,” Joe said. It was a question he’d asked himself a thousand times, looking back. He never felt he really had the answers.

  Mary Jane let him off the hook, of course. She sat there in a blue-and-white painted Adirondack chair beside the solar-heated Spruce Bay pool, sipping a latte from a thick paper cup while the girls swam and Joe sat in a matching chair beside her, and she made all the right noises, of course.

  Not his fault. Must have done everything he could. Heartbreaking choices. Yada yada.

  Mary Jane was too good to him, he decided. Way too nice. Out-of-his-league nice. Nurturing and forgiving and generous and warm. It was a new feeling to be on the receiving end of all that. He’d never dated a nurturing woman before. If you were talking emotional maturity, it was possible he’d never dated a woman before. They’d all been silly girls at heart, tricked-up in overly sexualized adult bodies.

  “Well, I wondered,” he said, almost angrily.

  She ignored the anger, and just asked quietly, “So how did it happen?”

  “The pregnancy was an accident. Obviously.”

  “I would really like to hear it from the beginning.”

  When was that? He let out a sigh between his teeth, as he tried to put it all together. “Okay, well, you probably know I wanted to be an actor in high school.”

  “The whole of high school knew that.”

  “Ouch!”

  “No, no.” She l
ooked stricken, sat up straighter and twisted to face him. “I didn’t mean it that way.” She brushed a strand of hair back from her face with a frown and a distracted gesture, and he saw for the first time how nicely the blue-and-white top clung to her curves, and how pretty her nails were. Almost as pretty as her mouth. They were neat and oval with a professional French manicure, and he had an uncomfortable image flash into his mind—those nails lightly scraping against a man’s skin.

  His skin.

  Jeesh!

  “No?” he said on a growl, fighting to break away from the pictures in his head.

  “Really. I just meant that we all saw you in West Side Story and Phantom of the Opera and you were fantastic.”

  “High school productions, and not a big-money high school, either.”

  “High school productions where you stood out like a sore thumb. I mean, in a good way.”

  “Glad you added that.” No, this wasn’t right. He didn’t want to talk about high school musicals. And he definitely didn’t want to think about her pretty nails and her nice curves. “We’re getting distracted.”

  I’m getting distracted more.

  “We are.”

  The girls were happy in the pool, and the sun was still on the blue water, although it was almost six o’clock. There were a couple of other kids in the pool, too, and Holly and Maddie were making friends. Unfortunately, the other kids weren’t Jessica and Simon Richardson, so Joe didn’t think the friendship had much chance of lasting.

  The relationship that the girls would build with the Richardson kids was another unknown factor in all this. What if the girls sabotaged it with difficult behavior? What if Vanessa and Phil decided they were a bad influence? Was he being too paranoid about this?

  Talk about it, Joe. Tell her about why there might be a problem.

  “I was itching to get out to California right after high school,” he said to Mary Jane, “but Mom was sick by then and I didn’t want to leave. That was when I got the car-mechanic qualifications. Which have come in way more useful than I ever expected.” He laughed and heard that it sounded a little bitter, and hated what she might think.