Trail Mates

by Bonnie Bryant

  Lisa hauled out the sandwiches and juice and passed them around.

  “It’s so nice out today that even a peanut-butter sandwich tastes like a feast.”

  “Well, today’s sure a lot better than Saturday,” Carole told her friends.

  “What happened Saturday?” Lisa asked her. She and Stevie had been so involved in their own disastrous day as models that it hadn’t even occurred to her to wonder what Carole had been up to.

  “I went shopping for a dress,” Carole said, as if that were an explanation.

  “I love shopping,” Stevie said.

  “Me, too,” Lisa piped in. “Unless my mother’s with me. Then what she does is to practically lock me in a dressing room and bombard me with the most hideous dresses.”

  “Tell me about it,” Carole said, rolling her eyes.

  “Oh, there was this one that she kept on about once. It made me look about eight years old!”

  “Did it have tons of little roses?” Carole asked.

  “No. Balloons,” Lisa told her.

  Carole gulped. Maybe Lynne wasn’s so bad after all!

  “What was so awful about shopping Saturday?” Stevie asked.

  “Well, I had to go with Lynne Blessing. You know, the woman my dad’s been dating? She tries to be nice to me, but she just doesn’t get it. It was just exactly what Lisa described. It was like she was trying to make me into something I’m not. I try to be nice to her, because she’s Dad’s friend, but it gets hard sometimes.”

  “Sounds like a mother,” Lisa remarked. “She’s always trying to make me into something I’m not, too.”

  “I had a mother,” Carole said. “She was terrific. I even used to like to go shopping with her. It wasn’t at all the way it was with Lynne.” Carole described Lynne’s actions, her overbearing enthusiasm about Carole’s outfit, and the dance Carole had been “persuaded” to attend.

  While Carole completed her description of the day, Stevie leaned back on the rock, resting her head on the saddlebags, which had held their picnic. Her feet were still dangling in the cool water. She kicked gently, stirring up the creek and sprinkling her friends with occasional drops of water. It was her way of thinking.

  “I think Lisa said the key word,” Stevie said after a few minutes of thought. “And the key word is ‘mother.’ ”

  “What are you driving at?” Carole asked.

  “It sounds an awful lot to me like Lynne is trying to be somebody’s mother, specificially your mother—make that your stepmother.”

  “You think she wants to marry Dad?” Carole yelped.

  “Yes, I do,” Stevie said positively. “Especially from the part about the dinner dance and the cozy table for four.”

  Carole eyed her friends. They looked at her expectantly. “When you put it that way, the symptoms are clear, aren’t they?” Carole asked. Her friends nodded. “Just great,” she said with a sigh.

  “I thought you wanted your dad to go out on dates,” Lisa said.

  Carole looked thoughtfully at the water as it rolled slowly past her feet, constantly changing and swirling around her. “I did. I mean, I do. He should have fun,” she said sensibly. “I even thought it would be nice for him to have a serious girlfriend. The problem isn’t him having a girlfriend. The problem is the girlfriend being Lynne. She’s okay, in some ways, but I can’t see spending all of my teenage years trying to deal with her.”

  The girls were all silent for a while. The only sounds were the contented munching of the horses and the girls’ feet splashing idly in the creek.

  “Looks to me like we’ve got another problem,” Stevie announced. “And we’re going to have to solve it.”

  One of the things Carole liked about her friends was that when she had a problem, they always wanted to help her solve it. When you had friends like The Saddle Club, you were never alone.

  “MY TURN TO lead,” Stevie announced, mounting Comanche. The horses were rested, the picnic was finished, and it was time to return to Pine Hollow.

  “Okay, but wait a second,” Lisa said. “I’ve got to get my boots back on. It’s not easy in this heat!” Stevie favored cowboy boots for riding, and those were always easy to slip into. Carole usually wore low jodhpur boots. But Lisa’s boots had been selected by her fashion-conscious mother and they were high black riding boots. They were designed to be pulled on with special hooks.

  Carole stood behind Lisa and helped her tug until the boots finally came up over her calves. “Remind me to buy my own riding clothes next time,” Lisa said dully. “I’d much rather have low boots than these things.”

  “They really ought to have built-in hooks,” Carole remarked as she mounted Diablo. Then she and Stevie waited until Lisa was ready to go. Soon Lisa, too, was mounted. Before they left the picnic site, the girls carefully scanned the area to be sure they hadn’t left any garbage behind. It was an unbreakable Pine Hollow rule that no litter would ever be left behind. Since today’s picnic was a special privilege, they wanted to make especially certain that they were observing the rules. Satisfied that the area was the same as they had found it, they followed Stevie along the trail.

  Stevie, their fearless leader, chattered continuously as they walked their horses through the glen.

  “Okay, now the first thing you do with Lynne is to turn her off your dad. You can talk about all his other girlfriends.”

  “You don’t know Lynne,” Carole said. “I think that’s the sort of thing she’d take as a challenge. I mean, we’re talking about one determined woman. You should have seen her at the mall with me. As long as she thinks Dad’s interested in her in the slightest, she’ll hold onto him like a tick to a horse’s belly!”

  “What a disgusting thought!” Stevie said, turning around in the saddle to make a face at Carole. Carole shrugged.

  “Okay, then, instead of making him a challenge for Lynne, how about you tell her all about him—you know, his deepest secrets and nastiest habits?” Lisa suggested.

  Carole furrowed her brows. “Trouble with that is that I think he’s just fine. How can I make him sound bad to her? He doesn’t really have many bad habits, anyway.”

  “What about all those awful old jokes he’s always telling Stevie?” Lisa asked.

  “What’s the matter with old jokes?” Stevie demanded.

  “All right, all right. But not everybody likes them, and not everybody likes ancient movies, either,” Lisa said.

  “I do,” Carole said. “You should have seen the one we watched the other night—The D.I. This guy, supposedly a Marine Corps drill instructor, gets all these guys digging up sand, looking for a tsetse fly one of them slapped when he wasn’t supposed to. Another bunch is digging a huge trench that’s supposed to be a grave for the tsetse fly …” Carole’s shoulders began shaking with laughter. Soon she was laughing so hard that she couldn’t go on with the explanation of what was apparently hilariously funny to her.

  Lisa and Stevie exchanged looks. “Maybe it’s one of those things where you just had to be there,” Lisa suggested tentatively.

  “Whatever it is, I can assure you that Carole loves old movies just as much as her dad does and there’s no way she’d ever convince Lynne it’s a bad habit.”

  “You got that right,” Lisa agreed.

  They continued riding along the trail quietly. The silence of the forest was broken occasionally by snorts from Carole as she recalled other tidbits from the movie she had watched with her father.

  “Oh, and there was the time the guy—”

  “Spare us!” Stevie cried, cutting her off. “Lisa and I will rent it one night and see it on our own. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Carole agreed, still giggling to herself.

  “Now, back to the business of de-Lynning your father. How about you tell her how much fun it is to live with somebody in the Marine Corps—like how you have to move all the time, and how your dad has to make long trips and you can’t go along with him? Remember the four months he spent in Kodiak, Alaska?”
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  Carole shook her head. “For one thing, Dad’s senior enough now that he’s not likely to get moved unless he wants it. And, for another, if he were to go off to Alaska for four months again, Lynne would absolutely insist on staying with me and taking care of me. I don’t even want to mention the possibility. She’d move into our house in the blink of an eye!”

  “You could stay with me,” Stevie said.

  “Or me!” Lisa added. “We’d be glad to have you. We even have two extra bedrooms. No problem. I’m pretty sure my mom would agree.”

  “Well, I know my mom would. Since there are already four kids in the house, she probably wouldn’t even notice,” Stevie said. “It would be great—”

  Carole grinned. “Listen, I appreciate the invitations, you guys, but that’s not exactly the problem we have to solve right now. The problem is Lynne, not me.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Stevie said. She had gotten distracted by the exciting idea of having Carole live with her for a few months.

  “Why don’t you make up some bad habits for your dad?” Lisa suggested.

  “Like collecting beer cans, matchbook covers, bugs, stuff like that?” Carole asked suspicously. “This is beginning to sound an awful lot like the bright ideas you had about Scott, which didn’t work. Maybe I should get good old Lynne to muck out some stalls!”

  “Now there’s an idea,” Stevie said. “Only problem is that it would be sure to confuse Max even more. He’s still going around mumbling about the ‘wonder boy’ who cleaned out the stalls the other day—”

  “Uh, I hate to interrupt your brainstorm, Stevie,” Lisa said, “but where are we?”

  “We’re on the—why?”

  “Just wondering. Are we lost?”

  “How can we be lost if we’re here?” Stevie countered.

  “Where’s ‘here’?” Lisa asked persistently.

  Stevie glanced at the woods around her. “Carole, you tell her,” Stevie said.

  Carole looked around for familiar landmarks, but there weren’t any. “You’re the trail leader,” she said. “You get to tell her—and me too,” she added pointedly.

  “Well, we’re almost to, uh, and we can’t be far from, the, ah, you know.”

  “Does this mean we’re lost?” Lisa asked, turning to Carole.

  “Sounds like it to me,” she said, laughing at Stevie’s antics. But she wasn’t really worried. She knew they couldn’t have ridden too far; they would come across a familiar landmark sooner or later. “Aren’t you glad Stevie’s in the lead?”

  “Yeah, it reminds me of my first trail ride. Remember her ‘shortcut’?”

  It would have been hard for anyone, but especially Lisa, to forget Stevie’s shortcut that day. Stevie had taken them through a field inhabited by a very unhappy bull. The three girls had ended up jumping over a big fence—a difficult feat for an experienced rider, an astonishing feat for Lisa, who had only been riding for a few weeks at the time.

  “Hey, there’s a road up ahead,” Stevie said. “At the least, we can follow the road signs—”

  “To Timbuktu!” Lisa finished her sentence for her. Riding with Stevie, it seemed, was always an adventure.

  Rather sheepishly, Stevie led the way onto the two-lane road. “Which way, fearless leader?” Carole asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Stevie told her. “But either left or right, I think.”

  “What thinking!” Lisa teased.

  “All right, my mind’s made up,” Stevie said. “We’re turning left.” With that, she turned Comanche to the left and got him walking along the edge of the road. Smiling at each other, Lisa and Carole followed her.

  It was a little annoying to be lost, but the girls knew perfectly well that they couldn’t be too far from the stable and they would get back there before long.

  A few cars whizzed past them as they continued along the road, alternately walking and trotting. Since Stevie was supposedly leading them, it was up to her to stop somebody to ask where they were.

  Another car came up from behind them but it didn’t pass. It just kept going slower and slower.

  Then a familiar voice spoke from the car’s window.

  “Carole?” Carole turned to see Scott, waving at her. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “We’re having a sort of off-trail ride,” she explained.

  “Max told me you guys were on a trail ride, but I thought you’d be heading home by now.”

  “We are,” she said.

  “But you’re going away from the stable,” he said.

  “We are?” she responded, only a little bit surprised.

  “Sure, Pine Hollow’s back that way. We just came from there,” he said to her. “We took a left off of Attington Way into this old road.”

  So that’s where they were! That meant this was the old country road that skirted the forest land outside the town of Willow Creek. It led to a camping area. Since people who lived in Willow Creek didn’t usually camp there, it wasn’t familiar to The Saddle Club. They were really lucky that the Babcocks had come along that route. It might have been another hour until they got to the camping area and realized their mistake!

  “Yo! Lisa, Stevie!” Carole called. When her friends turned around to see why she was calling, she waved them over to Scott’s father’s car. “We’ve certainly enjoyed this scenic tour, Stevie,” Carole teased as they joined her. “But I think it’s time to head back to Pine Hollow now, don’t you?” She really didn’t want Scott to know they had been lost, but she wasn’t fooling him at all.

  “Does that mean I’ve saved your life now?” he asked.

  She smiled at him. “I suppose so,” she admitted. “I guess that makes us even.”

  “Right,” he said, grinning back at her. “Anyway, I’m glad I could help you out.”

  “So am I,” she admitted. “We’ve got to get the horses back now, though. See you around.”

  “Sure,” he said, waving as she walked off. Then, before his father had a chance to start the car moving, Scott turned in his seat and hung out of the window of the passenger side of the car. “In fact, how about Saturday? Could I see you then? Want to go out?”

  Scott caught her by surprise. She glanced quickly at her friends, who were unsuccessfully suppressing grins.

  “Uh, w-well …” she stammered. Then she realized that this might be a blessing in disguise. “Hey, there’s a dance at the Officers’ Club I have to go to. Want to go to that?”

  “Do I ever!” he responded.

  What was she doing? she asked herself.

  “Okay, then, come to my house about six-thirty, okay?”

  “I’ll be there,” he said, drawing himself back into the car. His father started driving away. Carole watched as the car suddenly screeched to a halt and backed up to where she was still halted on Diablo.

  Scott’s embarrassed face emerged from the window once again. “Uh—where do you live?” he asked.

  She told him, and the Babcocks drove off for the final time.

  “You really know how to shake off a guy, don’t you?” Stevie asked in mock admiration.

  “Well, I’ve got to have a date for this dumb dance, so it might as well be dumb old Scott,” Carole retorted. “Besides, maybe it’ll be easier to kill two birds with one stone, don’t you think?”

  “No,” Lisa and Stevie said at the same time.

  CAROLE GAZED AT herself in the mirror of her bedroom on Saturday evening. All week long, it had seemed as if she couldn’t make up her mind whether she wanted Saturday to come or stay away. Now, here it was Saturday and she still couldn’t make up her mind. Stevie and Lisa were having a sleepover at Stevie’s house. She wished she were there.

  Then she glanced over at her bed, where her new white dress was laid out. She smiled. It was pretty. She really liked the neckline and the simple eyelet lace. She slipped the dress on over her head and zipped it up. She was trying to reach the hook to fasten it when she passed her mirror again. Studying her reflection, she deci
ded she was glad it was Saturday after all.

  Carole heard the Babcocks’ car pull into her driveway. She glanced out the window and watched Scott emerge. He gazed up at the house uncertainly and then approached the front door. Carole heard the doorbell ring. Her father answered it. A few seconds later, Dr. Babcock drove away.

  There was a knock at her door. “Honey, I know you saw the car so you know Scott’s here. I’m pretending you don’t, though, so I have a chance to come see you and see if you need any help. Any hooks that need hooking?”

  Carole smiled to herself. Her father was just about the neatest guy in the world. No wonder Lynne couldn’t leave him alone. “Yes,” she said. “There is one.” Her father came into her room and helped her with the hook at the top of her zipper. When it was all done, she wrapped Lynne’s shawl around her shoulders and spun around for effect.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “Well, what?”

  “Well, how do you like it?”

  “I love it—except for the shawl. Where did that come from?”

  Carole giggled. “Lynne loaned it to me. She said it ‘accents the outfit perfectly.’ I think I have to wear it, Dad,” Carole said.

  “Oh.”

  “It’s time now, huh?”

  He nodded, then offered Carole his arm.

  * * *

  “ARE THE MARSHMALLOWS melted yet?” Stevie asked Lisa. The girls had shooed everybody out of the kitchen right after supper so they could make a special dessert for themselves.

  “What are you making?” Stevie’s twin brother, Alex, asked from outside the kitchen door. “It smells great. Can I have some? Please?”

  Stevie turned to the closed door and put her hands on her hips. “None of your business. No. And no.” She turned back to Lisa. “You are so lucky, having only one brother. You don’t know.”

  “Maybe,” Lisa said noncommittally. “But there’s always so much going on here. It’s exciting. Fun! My family is just plain boring.”