The Long Ride

by Bonnie Bryant

  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?”

  Carole didn’t think driving was the issue. She needed to remind Stevie of the sacrifices they all seemed to be making for Callie Forester. “I was sorry to miss the ride this morning, and I meant to thank you for helping out with Pine Hollow’s newest difficult tenant,” she said, referring to Callie.

  “It was no problem,” Stevie said. “I mean, he acted up a few times on the tra
il, but Callie controlled him just fine. She said she thought it helped having him between Belle and Prancer, too. He’ll settle down in a few days, I’m sure.”

  Carole thought that was probably true; she just wondered when his owner would settle down. For whatever reason, Stevie didn’t seem concerned about that. Carole thought it best to drop the subject.

  The book was right where Lisa knew it would be. She picked it up, tucked it into her backpack, and was about to leave for the library when she realized she hadn’t given Prancer a proper farewell for the summer. She wasn’t just leaving her human friends for two months.

  Prancer’s stall was on the far end of the U-shaped hallway that housed all the horse stalls at Pine Hollow. The nice thing about that was that she passed all the horses in the place on her way. She greeted them by name, waving, patting, and talking to them sweetly. Most of the horses were in their stalls. The place was quiet.

  “Hi there, PC,” she said, giving Emily’s curious horse a welcome scratch on his neck. He nuzzled her neck with his damp nose.

  “Oh, forget it,” she said, giggling at the tickle. “I don’t have any goodies with me. Besides, I’m absolutely certain I saw Emily giving you an apple this morning.”

  He relented and returned his attention to his hay tick.

  “Hi, Fez,” she said, greeting the horse across the hall. “Are you worn out from our—Oh, Callie, you’re in there. I didn’t see you.”

  Callie stood up. “Yeah, I was working on his coat. It’s amazing how much mud gets on the coat—to say nothing of his fetlock, which I brushed for five minutes before I got the ball of mud off.”

  “I know,” Lisa said. “Horses are very absorbent. Do you want some help?”

  “No thanks. I’m actually finished cleaning up my dirt sponge,” Callie said. She brushed her hands off on her apron, stowed the last of her equipment in the bucket, and unlatched Fez’s cross-ties. “I really do appreciate your offer of help, though. It seems to me that the riders here are always offering to help out—much better than the staff. And that reminds me that there’s something I need to talk to Max about.”

  “What’s that?” Lisa asked. The remark really surprised her. She’d always found everyone at Pine Hollow very helpful. “I mean, what happened?”

  “Well, it was partly my fault, I know,” Callie began. “I got in here to groom Fez and didn’t put him on cross-ties. He got upset and threatening. I asked the stable hand to help me and she refused.”

  “We don’t have any girl stable hands now,” Lisa said. “It must have been a rider.” She couldn’t imagine who would refuse to help.

  “Well, she was wearing one of the stable T-shirts,” Callie said. “And she was grooming that horse over there—the one you were talking to.”

  “PC?”

  “That’s his name?”

  “Right, this one here,” Lisa said. “This is PC, and he belongs to Emily Williams. It must have been Emily—Oh, no. What did she say? I mean, exactly.”

  Callie described what happened. “I asked her to help me. She said, ‘No, I can’t,’ and then she said she’d call for Ben if I wanted—like I needed help calling for help.”

  “She was right,” said Lisa. “She couldn’t help you.”

  “All I needed was for someone to run over here and hand me the cross-ties. Even a child could do that.”

  “As long as the child wasn’t on crutches,” Lisa said.

  “What?”

  “There’s no way you would know, I guess, but Emily has cerebral palsy. She can walk, but only with crutches, and it’s slow. When she said she couldn’t help you, she meant it. You were going to do a lot better with Ben’s help than hers.”

  Callie put her hand to her mouth. “I didn’t know,” she said quietly.

  “Why would you? Look, don’t worry about it. Emily doesn’t like special treatment. She always says she’s not a disabled person, she’s a person with a disability. It’s not the first thing she wants anybody to know, and as a result a lot of people get to know her before they notice. That’s okay, too.”

  “As long as they don’t insult her the way I did,” said Callie. “I … I threatened to report her to Max. I thought she was an employee—”

  “Well, we’re all kind of like employees here, so you weren’t so far off the mark on that one.”

  “Well, I was making noises like I thought she shouldn’t be an employee any longer. I must have come off like a total jerk. I’m so embarrassed!”

  She stepped out of Fez’s stall and closed and latched the door behind her. “Do you think she’s still here?” she asked Lisa. “I’ve got to find her and apologize.”

  “I didn’t see her, but let’s look.”

  The two of them hurried to the office. Denise was behind the desk, trying to straighten out a rider’s bill for the month.

  “Is Emily still here?” Lisa asked.

  “Nope,” Denise said. “She left about half an hour ago. She used the phone to call her mother and asked her to come right away. She seemed pretty upset about something. Do you know what it was about?”

  “I’m afraid I have an idea,” Callie said. “I need to talk to her. Can you give me her phone number?”

  “I’m not really supposed to give out phone numbers,” said Denise.

  “It’s important,” said Lisa.

  The look on Lisa’s face must have convinced Denise to get out the stable address book. She jotted down the number and address on a scrap of paper and handed it to Callie.

  “Hope it turns out okay,” said Denise.

  “Me too,” said Callie. “Thanks, and bye.” She was out of the office before Lisa had a chance to offer to walk with her. Callie wanted to get home and to the phone as quickly as possible.

  TWELVE

  It was getting harder and harder to pretend that nothing was going to be different that summer. Lisa and Alex had a date—their last date before she left. They’d seen a movie, though Lisa doubted she could have told anyone the name of it or anything about it. She and Alex held hands tightly all the way through the film, and she was far more aware of his presence, the tender pressure on her palm, his gentle caresses on her fingers, than she was of anything happening on the screen in front of her.

  He walked her back to her house.

  “This is going to be hard,” Alex said finally.

  “I know,” said Lisa. “I guess it’s time to acknowledge it, too. We’ll talk, we’ll send e-mail. You’re probably going to be spending more time communicating with me over the summer than you do now.”

  “Probably,” he said. “But it won’t be as much fun.” He stopped her in a shadow, and they kissed. “I’ll be thinking of you a lot.”

  “When?” Lisa asked.

  “Often,” he said, a little surprised by the question.

  “Why don’t we make a date to think of one another—say every night at nine or something like that?”

  “That’s midnight here.”

  “So, you’ll still be up. You’ll probably be in your room then. You can look out the window at the moon. The very same moon will be looking down on me in California, and I’ll be looking up at it at the same time.”

  “It won’t even be dark some nights—”

  “So I’ll look where the moon probably is,” Lisa said. “I’ll know. If you’re looking at the same time, I’ll know. I’ll be able to feel it, and that’s how I’ll know where the moon is.”

  “How could I have ever been in love with anyone before I met you?” Alex asked. And then he kissed her again.

  Lisa took that as a yes.

  The house was dark and the phone was ringing when Lisa unlocked the door. Her mother was at what she called Group. It was supposed to be a therapy session, but the group was comprised of women whose husbands had left them. Behind her mother’s back, Lisa referred to it as Gripe Therapy.

  She picked up the phone in the still-dark kitchen.

  “Hi, honey!” a cheerful voice said. It was her father. H
e knew when Lisa’s mother was likely to be out of the house and often called then.

  “Hi, Dad,” she said, flipping on the light.

  “It’s just one day now and I can’t wait to see you.”

  “Me too,” she said, meaning it. Sad as she was to be leaving Virginia for the summer, she loved her father and was looking forward to having time with him.

  “I wanted you to know that I’ll be at the airport to meet your plane. Evelyn has all the ingredients to make the vegetarian chili you liked so much, so don’t worry about eating any lousy airplane food. We’ll feed you when you get here.”

  “Will Lily still be awake?” she asked.

  “Lily is always awake,” said her father. “Why didn’t someone remind me how little sleep babies get at night? The only time she sleeps really well is in the daytime. Whatever it means, it seems to be good for her because she’s thriving. Wait until you see her.”

  “I can’t wait. I got the pictures from Evelyn and I can’t believe how much she’s grown.”

  “She’s a real beauty—almost as lovely as her big sister.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” said Lisa.

  “And speaking of her big sister, you got a piece of mail here today.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m not exactly sure, but it’s from Worldwide Studios and the initials on the envelope are SR.”

  “Skye? He said he’d talk to me when I got out there.”

  “Well, apparendy he decided to write first. You can see what he wrote tomorrow.”

  “As if I could wait that long. Go ahead. Open it and read it.”

  “Your private mail?”

  “What do I have to do to convince the world I’m not in love with Skye and he won’t be writing anything all that private?” she asked.

  “I guess the best way is to let me read the letter,” her father said. She could hear him opening the envelope. There was a pause. “Okay, here it is. ‘Dear Lisa, I’m so glad—’ yadda-yadda. ‘Lots of things to show you—’ blah-blah. ‘One thing I—’ Got it. ‘One thing I want to ask you about, though, is if you know anyone who might be interested in working on our show’s set this summer. The show is about horses, as you know, and we have a whole stable full of them. One of the assistant stable hands has left and we need to replace her. The job requirements are knowing something about horses and being willing to look after them. It’s not glamorous, of course. A lot of it is going to involve mucking out stalls and carrying buckets of water. Do you, by any wild chance, know of anyone, over sixteen years old, who might, possibly, fit that description, who could be persuaded to take a summer job on a television film set?’”