Cross-Ties

by Bonnie Bryant

“I know.” Stevie lowered her rake and gave Carole an understanding look. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to complain. It really isn’t the same without all you guys, but it’s not like I’m totally without fun. Belle and I are bonding big-time, plus I’ve been helping Deborah with some research for an article she’s writing about retired show horses. She even invited me to go on an interview with her tomorrow. We’re going to ride up and talk to the old lady who runs the retirement farm.”

  “That sounds like fun,” Carole commented, pausing in her work just long enough to push back a stray curl that had escaped from her braid.

  Stevie rolled her eyes. “Well, I don’t know about fun, as in yee-ha, whoopee,” she said. “But at least it will be a change of scenery.”

  “Yeah,” Carole said glumly. “And at least there will be horses where you’re going.”

  “True,” Stevie admitted.

  The two girls lapsed into silence once again as they moved down the path, still raking. Carole couldn’t seem to stop thinking about the way life was going on at Pine Hollow without her. “So things are generally okay at the stable, then,” she said at last. “Max and Red and the others aren’t overwhelmed with work because I’m not there?”

  Stevie shrugged. “I guess not,” she said. “Although Denise was out sick for a couple of days, so naturally the others were all moaning and groaning about all the work there was to do.” She shot Carole a sidelong glance. “But actually, that brings up some other news. I sort of accidentally overheard Max on the phone yesterday—”

  “Sort of accidentally?” Carole smiled. Stevie was famous for her insatiable curiosity, and she wasn’t above a little eavesdropping when it suited her.

  Stevie shrugged again. “Hey, you know how close the tack room is to the office,” she said. “But anyway, Max was talking to some friend of his at another stable, and he mentioned that he’s started looking for a new stable hand.”

  Carole winced. She knew that Max planned to hire someone soon, though he’d told her it wouldn’t really be a replacement. Her job would be waiting for her when the grounding was over. Still, she couldn’t help feeling a little weird about Stevie’s news. “That’s good,” she said carefully. “Max and the others work really hard. It will be good to have someone to help out.”

  Stevie looked up from her raking with a skeptical expression on her face. “Yeah, right,” she said.

  “No, I mean it,” Carole said quickly. “They all put in a lot of hours—not just Max, but Red and Denise, too, and, well …”

  “Ben,” Stevie finished for her.

  Carole blushed, thinking about her encounter with Ben the day before. She realized she still hadn’t told Stevie or Lisa about that kiss. Glancing around, she decided this wasn’t the time or place for that. But she had to at least talk to Stevie about his behavior the day before.

  “Hey, speaking of Ben, guess who showed up here yesterday?” she said, trying to sound casual.

  Judging by the sudden sharp interest in Stevie’s eyes, Carole hadn’t fooled her for a second. “Really?” Stevie said. “Did he come to see you?”

  “Hardly.” Carole could feel her face turning redder than ever. She quickly told Stevie about seeing Ben with the little girl, Zani, and then how he’d hurried away after seeing the volunteers in the park. When she finished, she shrugged. “I’m not sure if he spotted me or not. But it was totally weird either way.”

  Stevie rubbed her chin. “Wow,” she said. “Sounds like maybe he did see you, and he didn’t want you to catch him hanging out with the little girl. Who do you think she is, anyway?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that a lot, actually,” Carole admitted. “And I’m just not sure. At first I assumed she was his sister. But the thing is, she couldn’t be more than three or four years old. And Ben’s, like, almost twenty.”

  Stevie nodded thoughtfully. “That’s a big gap in age,” she commented. “Especially when there’s no sign of a mother anywhere around.” She shrugged. “Still, anything’s possible. Maybe she’s his half sister—you know, like Lisa and Lily. Same dad, younger mother. Or maybe their mom got pregnant late in life and died in childbirth or something.”

  Carole shook her head slowly. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Not about the second theory, anyway. One time Ben was talking about his family—”

  “Really?” Stevie raised an eyebrow in surprise. “Are you sure? I didn’t think he talked about anything that wasn’t horse-related. Sort of like certain other people I could mention.” She grinned to show that she was teasing.

  Carole smiled, but her mind wasn’t on Stevie’s jokes. She was still thinking about Ben, trying to figure out how to reconcile the little she knew about Ben’s past with what she’d seen the afternoon before. “No, but seriously,” she told Stevie. “He said something once about his mother dying. I got the impression it happened a while ago—as in, longer ago than Zani’s been around.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Carole shook her head. She wasn’t sure. As hard as she tried, she couldn’t remember exactly what Ben had said to make her think that. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that it was true, either. At the time, she remembered thinking that it was one more thing they had in common—both of them had lost their mothers too soon.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t think the timing is quite right, that’s all.”

  Stevie jabbed at a half-buried rock with her rake. “Okay, then,” she said. “What about the half sister thing?”

  Before Carole could answer, she saw Dr. Durbin approaching. “Well now, Carole,” the vice principal said. “Who’s your friend?” Her voice was pleasant enough, but Carole knew better than to try to fool her. Plenty of Willow Creek High students had tried and paid dearly for it. “This is my friend Stevie,” Carole said. “She just stopped by to help out.”

  “Wonderful.” Dr. Durbin smiled and clapped her hands briskly. “Then why don’t you leave her to the raking and come with me, Carole? We could use your help over in the painting department.”

  Shooting Stevie a helpless, apologetic glance, Carole agreed.

  Yikes! Lisa thought as she pulled a head of lettuce out of the refrigerator. How did things get so weird around here so fast?

  She moved over to the butcher-block counter, stepping around Lily, who was playing on the floor with some blocks. As she grabbed the wooden salad bowl from the cabinet over the counter, Lisa sneaked a peek at Greta, who was sitting at the kitchen table peeling an apple. It was hard to believe that this total stranger was part of their family now. It was even weirder to think that her big brother was actually married. And had stepchildren.

  “Greta, when you’re finished with that, could you grab some salad dressing out of the fridge?” Evelyn asked from the stove, where she was making an omelet. “Then lunch should be just about ready.”

  Greta shrugged. “All right, if you say so,” she said. “But the men are still not yet returned from the golf course.”

  “I’m sure they’ll be home soon,” Lisa put in, breaking the lettuce apart into a large wooden bowl. “And Dad’s always starved after a morning on the links. He’ll be ready to eat right away.”

  “All right,” Greta said again, in a tone that implied she had serious doubts about what Lisa had just said.

  Lisa gritted her teeth, wondering if she was the only one who found her new sister-in-law a little hard to take sometimes. Greta certainly wasn’t making much of an effort to fit in. That was making it even harder for Lisa to adjust to the idea that she was family, even though in some ways Lisa couldn’t help thinking that she couldn’t have asked for anyone better for her brother.

  I mean, get real, Lisa told herself. A glamorous European sister-in-law? And one that makes her living buying and selling horses? It should be a dream come true.

  And so far, Greta’s sudden appearance did seem a little like a dream—one of those long, confusing ones where people kept shifting identities and nothing was quite the way it was suppose
d to be. Everyone was acting odd: Mr. Atwood kept clearing his throat and glaring at walls, Evelyn was acting so chipper and cheerful that she was like one of those sitcom moms from the 1950s, and Lisa herself wasn’t sure what to say or do from one moment to the next. And of course, Greta was the strangest one of all, since none of them knew what to expect from her. And it wasn’t as if she was making much of an effort to get acquainted. In fact, she had spent most of the previous evening on the phone, talking in German to clients and to her family in Germany. Then, that morning, she had announced at breakfast that she needed Peter to take her shopping. They had returned just in time for Peter to head off to the golf course with his father.

  “Here we go, the apples are ready,” Greta announced, dumping the fruit she’d just finished peeling and cutting onto a platter that Evelyn had set on the table. “Now I will get the salad dressing.” She stood, smoothing her ivory slacks, and headed for the refrigerator.

  “You speak English so well, Greta,” Lisa commented politely, deciding it was time to start making more of an effort herself. “Did you study it in school?”

  Greta shrugged. “It is not a difficult language to master when one speaks German,” she replied offhandedly. “Besides, I am very interested in languages—it is one of the things my Peter and I have in common.”

  Trying not to grimace at her use of my Peter, Lisa opened her mouth to respond. But just then there was a loud shriek from right outside the kitchen, and a second later Greta’s two children—Lisa still couldn’t think of them as in any way belonging to Peter—raced into the room.

  The older one, Dieter, was about seven years old, with longish wheat-colored hair and a turned-up nose. Hanni, his sister, was a couple of years younger. She wore her brown hair in shoulder-length pigtails, and her eyes were just as blue and direct as her mother’s.

  “Mama!” Dieter cried breathlessly. “Hanni, she is being a big jerk! Tell her to stop right now!”

  “Nein, nein, Mama!” Hanni cried. Then she launched into a torrent of German mixed with French and a little English, which Lisa found completely impossible to follow.

  Greta dropped the salad dressing on the counter and hurried over to her children, clucking soothingly to them. Speaking softly in German, she managed to calm them and shoo them out of the room.

  “They’re lively kids,” Evelyn said cheerfully as she slid an omelet onto a plate.

  “Yes, they are marvelous.” Greta gazed fondly in the direction the children had gone. “I do not know what I would do without them. It was my one great concern when I—ah, what is the word auf englisch?—divorced from their father a year ago.”

  Lisa couldn’t help raising her eyebrows at that. “A year?” she said. “You’ve only been divorced for a year? Then how long have you been going out with Peter?”

  Greta smiled, a faraway look coming into her eyes. “My Peter—I do not remember life before him. It has been two wonderful months.”

  “Two months?” Lisa repeated in disbelief.

  “Yes, that is right—two. Zwei.” Greta held up two fingers. “Two.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Lisa said. “You’ve only known each other for two months, and you decided to get married?”

  Evelyn shot Lisa a worried glance from the stove. “Sometimes love is like that,” she said lightly. “It happens fast. After all, Lisa, your father and I had only known each other a few months when we started talking about marriage.”

  Lisa clenched her fists, suddenly wishing that Evelyn would just go away for a while. You know, she’s starting to sound an awful lot like Mom, she thought, shooting her stepmother a quick, annoyed glance. Always trying to make nice, keep everyone polite and happy—at least on the surface—no matter what else is happening.

  Before anyone could say anything else, Greta’s kids raced back in. This time they didn’t seem to be angry with each other. Both were laughing and jumping up and down with excitement.

  “Mama, we’re hungry,” Hanni announced. “When will we eat?”

  “I hope it’s soon.” Dieter glanced at Lisa and Evelyn and then rattled off a question in French. Even though she’d taken the language for several years in school, Lisa couldn’t follow what the boy was saying.

  She waited, expecting Greta to translate for them or at least respond in English so that they could figure it out. Instead, Greta let out a loud laugh and then replied in rapid-fire German.

  Lisa grimaced. Nice manners, she thought, feeling a little like her mother now herself but not really caring. We all know Greta and those kids can speak English as well as the rest of us. So why can’t they stick to it when the rest of us are around?

  Deciding it was time to switch to a safer subject, Lisa took a deep breath and then forced herself to smile at Greta as the children ran out of the room once again, almost tripping over Lily on their way. “So, Greta,” Lisa said. “It must be really interesting to travel all over the world looking at horses.”

  “Oh, yes, it is interesting,” Greta replied. “Do not think my job is easy, though. It is not like going to one of your malls and shopping.”

  “Of course not,” Lisa said politely. “I’m a rider myself, as Peter must have told you, and so I realize—”

  “Ah, yes, that is right,” Greta interrupted. “Peter did say something of the sort. He said you and your friends, you go trail riding often.”

  “Well, yes, but that’s not all we do.” Lisa wondered why just a few words from Greta made her feel so defensive. “I mean, I’ve been taking lessons since junior high, and I’ve been in lots of shows and stuff, too. I’ve done tons of jumping, and competed in dressage and equitation, and even done some other kinds of things like foxhunting and polocrosse.”

  “Yes, Lisa is quite the equestrienne,” Evelyn broke in cheerily. “But why don’t you tell us more about your work, Greta?”

  “Of course.” Greta smiled, then started chattering about all the top-notch horses she’d found for riders all over Europe.

  Lisa hardly paid attention. She was too busy trying to calm herself down and convince herself that Greta hadn’t meant any harm by her comments. She probably runs into people who think they’re horse experts all the time, she thought. And if all Peter told her about my riding is that his little sister likes to go on trail rides with her friends, it’s no wonder if Greta assumed I was just a casual weekend rider. She glanced at her sister-in-law with a slight frown. Still, we’re supposed to be family now. Couldn’t she at least give me the benefit of the doubt?

  “Hello! Anyone home?” Peter called, stepping through the back door.

  Lisa turned to look at him. Her brother’s words had been light and casual, but the deep crease in his forehead made her suspect that his golf game with his father hadn’t exactly been relaxing. When Mr. Atwood stepped into the kitchen behind him, his tense expression removed any remaining doubt.

  Lisa winced. I totally feel for him, she thought as Peter stepped over to give Greta a kiss and Mr. Atwood dumped his golf bag in the corner near the door. After all, I definitely know what it’s like to do something our parents disapprove of—and hear about it, over and over and over again, until you just want to scream.

  Evelyn stepped over to greet her husband with a kiss and her stepson with a pat on the arm. “So,” she said pleasantly. “How was the golf game?”

  Lisa rolled her eyes. Evelyn couldn’t possibly be dense enough not to notice the tension between father and son. That meant she had decided to ignore it.

  “Fine,” Peter said tersely. “Nice course.”

  “That’s good,” Evelyn chirped. “Then you must be hungry. Lunch is just about ready.”

  As Evelyn hurried to fetch the omelets and bring them to the table, and as Greta stepped into the hall to call Dieter and Hanni, Lisa took her place beside Peter. “You okay?” she whispered to him when she was pretty sure no one else was listening.

  He shrugged, not meeting her eye. “Been better,” he muttered. “Dad just doesn’t know when
to let up sometimes, you know?”

  “I know.” Lisa grimaced, glancing over at her father, who was lowering Lily into her high chair. “Believe me, I know.”

  Soon everyone was settled around the table, helping themselves to salad and omelets and juice. For a minute or two, the conversation centered around the men’s golf game and the amenities of the local golf club.

  “You should really come along and check it out next time, Liebchen,” Peter commented, reaching over to squeeze Greta’s hand. “They have a nice pool, a restaurant, and some tennis courts.”

  “Ah, yes?” Greta looked interested. “I would like to see the courts. I used to play tennis quite a lot as a teen. My sister and I, we won our regional tournament in doubles two years in a row.”

  Peter smiled at her. “Is that right? I didn’t even know you played tennis,” he said.

  Mr. Atwood cleared his throat. “After only two months of acquaintance, there’s quite a bit you two don’t know about each other, I’ll wager.”

  Greta pursed her lips but kept quiet. Lisa felt her own cheeks turning pink. Did her father really have to be so negative about anything new and different? The rest of the table was silent. Even Dieter and Hanni were staring at Mr. Atwood with wide, surprised eyes. Only baby Lily seemed unaffected as she played with a piece of lettuce in her bowl.

  After a quick glance at his new wife, Peter turned to glare at his father. “Look, Dad. Enough is enough. Can’t we just have a nice family lunch and talk about something else?” he said.

  “Exactly what I was thinking,” Evelyn put in quickly.

  Mr. Atwood hardly seemed to hear his wife’s remark. He glared at Peter. “Of course, son,” he said. “Why discuss anything important? After all, we’re only your family, that’s all.” With a scowl, he returned his attention to his plate. “We’re just lucky your mother isn’t here right now,” he muttered under his breath, but loudly enough for everyone at the table to hear.

  Lisa winced. Peter had left their mother a message the night before, saying that he was in L.A. and that he had a big surprise to share with her. Knowing their mother, Lisa was sure she would be on the phone to California the second she heard that message, no matter what time of day it was in either place. The fact that she hadn’t called yet, nearly eighteen hours later, was a sure sign that she was off somewhere with Rafe.