by Leslee Green
She had driven after all.
Linda’s shoulders drooped. The wraith of a woman exited the vehicle, empty under her skin, her eyes fixated on the barn. Her daughters had called her on the phone, fearful of Linda’s progress. Now, they stayed in the office, peering through the blinds to make sure trouble had been started, and feeling relieved that it had.
The woman stood outside her car, a cobalt statue, staring at the barn, working it out in her mind.
She approached the building and ignored Linda as she passed her, making a slow lap around, looking for anything incomplete that she could point out. But the barn was finished, to the dismay of both women, who both hid their emotion about it.
After some time in silence, the woman spoke.
“I see you’ve made progress.”
Linda shrugged her shoulders almost apologetically, finding no way to lighten the situation. “It’s finished,” she said without enthusiasm.
“Quite eager to attend this rodeo, are we?” the woman asked with a raised eyebrow.
Linda, taking her time to think of a response that wouldn’t clue her stepmother in any more to her love of Blake and bull riding, took a long time to come up with an effective response, but couldn’t find one.
“It just wasn’t that much work,” she said, shrugging again.
“Nonsense. You’ve worked very hard to make it this far.” The devious woman looked around and thought for a moment. “Had help even?” she asked with a slight squint in her eyes.
Linda remained silent.
“Well,” her stepmother said, taking a breath and losing the slight hint of frustration in her voice, “If this task was so easy for you, we must be sure to find something more challenging for you to do.” She smiled as if she was joking, yet she had said exactly what she was thinking. “Come,” she said.
Linda followed her stepmother as she entered the barn. It was quiet inside without the horses and thick yellow sunbeams stood immovable in the room with hay dust stirring inside of them like fish in a tank.
The woman moved into the stable, crossing in and out of the beams, pacing slowly up the aisle, incredibly keen and perceptive to the condition of everything around her.
She went from stall to stall but did not scamper back and forth in an unbecoming way; she slowly strode up the center between the stables, her heels clacking and crunching beneath her, allowing her head and her eyes to do the running for her.
When she came to the end, she saw the wash rack, the painting tools, the lockers and saddle rack and ladder to the hayloft. Linda, as she watched her, was observing too, and growing more and more confident with the condition of the stable as they had made their way from one end of the barn to the other.
The woman lifted a riding crop off a nail that was hanging on the wall and examined it in her hand, running her thumbnail up the braided leather.
Everything was perfectly in order. Everything was clean. Linda was safe! What could the woman say about stables that were so clean?
“These stables,” she said as she pinched the leather tongue on the end of the crop, “are too clean.”
Linda fought against her eyeballs from rolling back into her skull.
“That’s a good thing, right?”
“No, it’s not a good thing,” she said as she approached Linda, towering over her. “Why are there so many empty stables?”
“I turned the horses out for the day.”
“That’s not what I mean.” The woman gestured with the crop, pointing swiftly to certain stalls. “Why is there no bedding in these stables? No food?”
“Because there aren’t any horses in them.”
Linda was only answering the question, but it came too close to sounding sarcastic and her stepmother waited for a better answer, the riding crop clenched across both fists. Remembering that she didn’t want to upset the woman any more than necessary, she gave it to her.
“I mean, we don’t have any renters for those.”
“And how do you expect this place to make a profit if we aren’t boarding horses in the stalls? This is a stable, is it not? Think, Linda. What is the explanation for this? Is it your intention to run this place into the ground?”
Linda refrained from mentioning the loans her stepmother had taken out against The Stagecoach, or the crippling interest costs that actually were running the place into the ground.
“I just take care of the horses. Aren’t Caroline and Emily supposed to find the renters?”
“Don’t worry about what they do,” the woman said angrily, whipping the crop to her side. “Aren’t you the one who has something to gain from paying this place off?”
This was actually true, and one of the more reasonable things she had heard her stepmother say.
“I think your next task should be to find the Stagecoach more customers. It’s for your own good.”
Lind agreed that it would be for her own good to generate more income for the stables, but there was always a catch.
“Find them before you go to the rodeo.”
And there it was.
“The horses we do have already keep me busy. If we bring in more, we may have to hire additional help,” Linda said.
“But don’t you see how that would defeat the purpose of bringing in more money to the business?”
“If it was enough money, it wouldn’t defeat the purpose.”
Linda’s stepmother took slow paces towards her, coming closer, and stopped right in front of her.
“Why don’t we see how much money you can bring in first?”
Linda nodded.
The woman then paced her way to the exit, paused, and pointed the riding crop harshly at Linda. “Before the rodeo,” she reminded her, hung the crop neatly on the wall, and disappeared.
So this was it. A new challenge shoved down her throat with a time limit that may have been impossible. She didn’t think there was anything her mystical fairy godmother could do this time to help her, this involving money and her being a bag lady.
She wouldn’t have minded the challenge of bringing more business to the stables, but doing it in a week and a half?
Returning to her regular work, she spent the time brainstorming and cleaning stalls. She supposed she could put a classified ad out at no charge on the internet and felt frustrated that her sisters were supposed to be taking care of things like that all along, though she was sure they hadn't.
Most of the horses, if not all of them, came from longtime renters that had known Linda's father and were loyal to the business.
And even if the Stagecoach did have some kind of outreach or advertising program, where would the horses come from? Other stables? People's backyards? Usually, people only boarded horses when they couldn't care for them themselves on their own property.
Boarded horses were horses kept as pets to learn riding on like Mary.
They were old horses, rodeo contenders and workhorses that, through loyal service, had earned a retirement package at the glamorous Stagecoach Stables.
And there was a mule that nobody wanted but nobody could get rid of, so his small check arrived every month and he ate oats and bit Halloween buckets in the little stall on the end of the barn.
Where would she find more of these horses?
Linda worked through the day, taking the time to admire again the paint as it dried on the barn and, in the end, it made her quite happy, looking bright and new.
She looked at it over her shoulder, hoping that passing cars could see it, feeling proud.
The Stagecoach Stables were, at one time, a place of joy, and the coat of red paint revived memories of that time.
As the workday ended, the real work was just beginning. How on Earth to bring more customers into the stable?
Could her fairy godmother come up with something after all? Something weird and confusing? Linda would have been fine with that. She looked around for her, but she was not in sight.
No help would come from her sisters either, who sat in the o
ffice doing nothing, watching the clock and thinking about leaving.
Maybe this one she would have to pull off without any help at all.
And just then, help arrived.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Blake!”
Linda was surprised to see him; she had been busy corralling horses and hadn’t heard his truck pull in.
She ran to him in the dust of the stable and gave him a welcoming hug.
“Sorry about last night,” he said, “I had stuff to do.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Just bull riding stuff.”
Linda didn’t understand what bull riding stuff there was to do other than ride bulls, but it seemed plausible that there might more to it than that.
“It’s okay.”
“I came here tonight to help paint but that coat looks pretty fresh, I think it would be a waste of time. That’s just my opinion.”
“No, you’re right, it doesn’t need painting anymore. I finished it yesterday.”
“How did you do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Alright...”
“Now there’s something else I have to do.”
“What’s that?”
“Get more customers for the stables.”
“Did you try putting an ad out? They’ll come eventually.”
“I have to do it before the rodeo or I can’t go.”
“What do you mean you can’t go? You’re an adult, I hope. You can do whatever you want with your days off.”
“Well that’s the thing, I won’t get the day off if I don’t find more customers.”
“Your stepmother is taking advantage of you.”
“I can’t even start with that.”
“Alright. Let’s go round up some boarders.”
“You want to help?”
“Sure. I came here to help.”
“But I don’t even know where to start.”
“We’ll think of something.”
Linda closed the barn and left in Blake’s truck, her sisters glaring at them. They rode to Main Street and looked at the dress she had worn in the store window and Linda expressed her love for it. They bought drinks at a café where there was a bulletin board hanging and they had the idea to put fliers up around town, deciding that first they would need some colored paper.
They drove around looking for it.
“Okay, I’ve got an idea,” he said. “We’re not just going to make a bunch of homeless horses appear, and we’re not going to try to steal boarders from other stables, that’s ridiculous.”
“So how are we going to find more people to board?”
"We're not," Blake said, proud of himself.
“Hmmm,” Linda wondered, sarcastically.
“Customers for a stable are hard to pull out of thin air. It’s not like we can go around selling stalls if there aren’t any horses, but we can go around selling something else.”
“Manure.”
“Horseback riding lessons.”
“We actually do sell manure by the way.”
“I’m not talking about manure.”
“I’m just saying.”
“Who buys it? Farmers?”
“Yeah.”
Linda didn’t immediately see the potential in Blake’s idea, but without further convincing, it quickly started making sense on its own.
“We could set some special price for the first lesson and hand out fliers at the grocery store or somewhere,” she said, “and hang them up around town.”
“It’s not boarders, but it would be more customers, and that’s what your stepmother asked for, isn’t it?”
“Blake, you’re a genius.”
“Most likely not, but I think this could work.”
They drove around some more, Linda thinking about Blake even though he was right there, and eventually found the colored paper in a store and decided to try to design something themselves.
“There’s a really old computer in the office at the stables. I’ll bet we could figure something out on there,” Linda said.
“No, we’ll just go to my house, I’ve got something.”
The thought frightened her.
“You mean your parents’ house?”
“Sure, whatever you want to call it.”
“That’s not what I meant. I mean, the place where your parents are?”
Imagining meeting Blake’s parents made her incredibly self-conscious. What would they think of her?
“No, they’re out of town. They take their long trips when I come home because I can take care of the animals for them.”
Linda was relieved and didn't worry as much as they drove to an area near her old elementary school and pulled into a beautiful property with horses in the back and a two-story farmhouse in front.
“Is this where you grew up?”
“This is it.”
As they exited the truck, an old, long-haired dog greeted Blake, who gave it a hearty scratch. Then it smelled Linda and listened obediently when told to stay outside.
Old, wooden stairs led up to a large room that Linda immediately knew to be Blake’s. She could tell by the smell, by the look, by the mud on the boots in his closet.
She entered the room and did a slow lap, examining and contemplating every single detail of the room while pretending not to.
There were amateur trophies on top of a bookshelf, but at a young age Blake had gone professional and begun to receive checks instead of trophies, so it made sense that there weren’t many.
His closet held jean jackets, his bed was loosely made with warm looking flannel sheets, and there was a bull rope hanging on one wall. "That was my first win," Blake explained.
She was thankful that, even though he had been here his whole life, there was nothing boyish left in the room; no posters from high school or pictures of girls. Instead, there was a framed picture from Glacier National Park, books, a cactus, and real, heavy wooden furniture that he, or someone, had actually picked out to match, which distinguished the room from the flimsy, hand me down look that boys rooms have.
Linda was not a snob, her bedroom looked terrible, but she took the look of the room as a good sign that the man could behave like an adult when necessary. It felt right. And she was almost grateful that the only thing clearly missing in the room was a woman’s touch. Not almost; she was grateful.
On a wooden desk, there were a few letters. She wouldn't have noticed them, except that the addresses were handwritten.
“What are those?”
"Fan mail." Blake winked. "Open one."
“No. I’m not a snoop.”
“Just see what they are.”
Reluctant but dying to know, she carefully opened one of the letters, read out loud, “Dear Blake,” but couldn’t handle the woman’s handwriting and immediately shoved the letter back into its envelope. She didn’t want to know.
“You didn’t even read it!” he said.
Disgusted with the letters and annoyed they even existed, she asked. “Don’t people have phones?”
“You should see my phone.”
And she was even more disgusted.
When she was done gagging, she sat down on his bed.
He sat at the desk and opened a laptop.
“Alright, we’ll make it look like this,” he said as he grabbed a rodeo flyer from somewhere.
The flyer was flamboyant, with graphics and western lettering that caught the attention.
“You know how to do all that?”
“We’ll get as close as we can. First, we need to work out what to say.”
"Well, I think we should set a special price for the first lesson."
“Are you allowed to choose the price?”
“The pricing barely matters because my sisters steal so much of the money.”
“Doesn’t your mom get mad?”
"She's my stepmom. And no, it kind of works out because she barely pays them and is essentially stealing from them too, b
ut then again they barely do any work so somehow it all adds up."
“I think you need to get out of there.”
“I don’t want to get out of there; I want to get them out. I guess if we bring in a bunch of money that’s how it could work out, eventually.”
“How about first lesson free?”
“Sure.”
Blake and Linda spent the rest of the evening working out a flier, making it look pretty good. They laughed and joked and found pictures for it, and looked at pictures of Blake on the internet.
They talked about their elementary school and the teachers, which ones they liked, and the town. They seemed to have a lot in common and, when they didn’t, they didn’t fight. She put her hands on his shoulders and leaned over to look at the laptop, their cheeks close together. The design was right. It was all they needed.
She had been so focused on making the flyer that she hadn’t thought about being in his room, and now with the work finished and nothing more to say about it, the room felt suddenly empty.
The sensation of each other’s presence that made Linda nervous only made Blake feel good. He gave her a kiss on the cheek and his stubble felt like the little cactus that was sitting on his desk.
She couldn’t believe she was here with him, doing this. There was so much she still hadn’t told him.
Blake grabbed his rodeo flyer and shoved it back into a planner that was sitting on the desk. She saw other flyers in the planner.
“What’s that?” she asked.
He flopped it open. “My road planner. Four whole months, day after day, going after the checks.”
As he flipped through the planner, each page she saw in it was a day that she would not be with Blake.
The days were packed in without breaks. Thursday. Friday. Saturday. Cross-country trips in single days; bull rides the same days. Rodeos were everywhere.
When he came to the front of the planner, there was the flyer for the rodeo in Helena. It was at the start of his trip.
“After the rodeo, you’re leaving?”
Blake smiled without showing his teeth, letting her know that it was the truth. “Gotta ride bulls,” he said.
She leaned over, still standing behind him at the desk, and told him how she felt by hooking her arms under his and embracing him around the chest, her cheek on his shoulder. “Blake,” she said.