Carole sat glumly while the talking was going on. She didn’t like any of it, but nobody was asking for her opinion.
Before the dance contest began, she found herself being settled in the back seat of the Babcocks’ station wagon, to be taken home by Scott and Dr. Babcock. Oh, sure, she thought, her father waving as they pulled out of the parking lot. Your dumb old dance with Lynne is more important than your own daughter!
The good news was that the doctor thought her ankle was just mildly sprained and she would be back up and around by Tuesday. The bad news? It seemed to Carole that everything else was bad news.
ON MONDAY MORNING, Stevie stood in the aisle of the stable with her hands on her hips. It was chore time and she was in charge of getting fresh water for the horses. It wasn’t a bad chore, as chores went, but the buckets could get very heavy. Usually, Carole would help her, but Carole was staying home to take care of her ankle and, Stevie suspected, to mope. Saturday night had not gone at all the way Carole had wanted. Carole was convinced her father was going to marry Lynne, and Scott had been so nice to her that she hadn’t made any headway at all in discouraging him.
Stevie felt bad about all of Carole’s troubles, but it wasn’t helping her get water for the horses. She sighed audibly. Then she blinked her eyes. Could she be seeing things? Or was it a dream come true?
“Scott? Is that you?” she asked. It was hard to see in the dim light of the stables, particularly with the bright morning light streaming in from behind the tall figure who had just entered the stable.
“Yes, it’s me,” he answered. “Is Carole here this morning?”
“No, she’s not coming today. I talked to her before breakfast, though. She said her ankle was better, but she’s not coming in until tomorrow. She doesn’t want to push it.”
“I was just passing by,” he said casually, but Stevie didn’t believe it for a second. The place Scott was staying was miles away from Pine Hollow. Nobody just passed by from that far away. “I didn’t talk to her yesterday so I thought maybe her ankle would be better by now. I’ll stop by again tomorrow.” He turned to leave, but Stevie didn’t want him to go. Stevie’s mind was always quick, but two things could make it particularly quick. One was when she might be able to find somebody to do chores for her and the other was when she could do a favor for a friend. She had the sneaking suspicion she could accomplish both at the same time if she could get Scott to stay.
“Gee, Scott, as long as you’re here, could you give me a hand with something?” she asked. Then she held her breath.
“Mucking out stables?” he asked with a smile.
Stevie stifled a giggle. “Oh, no. It’s just carrying heavy buckets.”
“No problem,” he said.
That’s what he thought!
Each horse had a large blue plastic bucket suspended from a hook in his stall. They all needed fresh water in the morning and that meant hefting the empty buckets to the faucet, rinsing them out with cold running water, and then lugging the full buckets back to the stalls. The full buckets were very heavy. But luckily, Scott was very strong.
As good as he had been with mucking out stables, he was even better with the heavy buckets. Soon, Stevie found herself trotting along beside him as he took over the task. With her hands free, she was able to concentrate solely on the job she had put to herself—breaking up Scott’s romance with Carole.
“You have a good time on Saturday?” she asked innocently. She needed some way to get to talking about Carole so she could give Scott the impression that Carole wasn’t his kind of girl at all. Her mind was racing.
“Sure did,” he said. “Carole’s a terrific dancer.”
“Really? I would have thought she spent too much time with her stamp collection to learn to dance.”
Stevie thought stamp collections were too dull for words. She hoped Scott agreed. But he didn’t seem to notice.
“And she was wearing the prettiest dress,” Scott remarked.
“Oh, sure. She makes all her own clothes,” Stevie told him. She had once met a very drippy girl who sewed a lot. “Most of them come out okay. Well …” She paused dramatically. “There was the one … but I shouldn’t mention it.”
“I thought all Carole cared about was horses,” Scott said.
“Yes,” Stevie said. “Perhaps that was what was wrong with that dress.”
“Huh?” Scott said.
“Well, it wasn’t a dress exactly—just a sort of lace horse blanket.”
“Hey, I didn’t know she had a stamp collection. Has she got stamps from a lot of interesting countries?”
“She told me she has one from Canada,” Stevie said. “And I think one from Kansas.”
“Kansas is part of the U.S.”
“I told her that,” Stevie said. “Did Carole tell you about the contest she won last year?” Stevie had another bright idea.
“No,” Scott said. “She doesn’t talk too much about herself, you know.”
“Well, she usually brags about this. I’m surprised.”
“What kind of contest was it?” he asked.
“Frog jumping. Her little Mortimer went over thirty feet.”
“Frog jumping?”
“Yeah, and a champion frog little Mort was, too.”
“Was?” he asked dubiously.
“Until she had him stuffed. Keeps him on her bed-side table. Gives all the live ones in her room something to live up to.”
“She keeps frogs in her room?” he asked.
“Oh, yes. And she hasn’t had a fly in there for years! The frogs eat ’em up as soon as they come through the window. There’s a big future in frogs, you know.”
“I thought Carole wanted to be a vet and work with horses.”
“A lot of people make that mistake about her,” Stevie said, groping to think of an explanation. “See, when she says vet, what she means is that she wants to be able to march in the Veterans Day parade. Wear one of those funny little hats, you know?”
“That’s her life ambition?” Scott asked. Stevie liked the tone of his voice. It sounded like he was really getting worried. She was obviously succeeding in making Carole sound perfectly awful.
“Well, one of them,” Stevie said. “Her other ambition is to learn to be a study-hall monitor. She always says it takes a certain kind of person to do that.”
“It does,” Scott agreed.
Right, Stevie said to herself. It takes a real dweeb! She was sure Scott was buying her story and that one of Carole’s problems was about to be solved.
“Then, if she does well at that, maybe they’ll let her have a whistle and a clipboard and she can be in charge of fire drills!”
“I had a friend once who was in charge of fire drills,” Scott said.
“Really?” Stevie said.
“Well, he was supposed to be, but he was so stupid …”
“How stupid was he?” she asked automatically.
“He was so stupid that when the alarm went off he ran down to the home ec kitchen.”
“Why’d he do that?” Stevie asked.
“So he could watch the rolls burn!”
“Huh? What are you talking about?”
“Not such a hot joke?” He paused, waiting for her to answer. She didn’t know what to say. “Did you get that? Hot joke?”
Stevie looked at him quizzically. “Why are you telling me a joke?” she asked.
“Because you were telling me jokes,” he said. “But I think your routine is better than mine. Carole told me you were very funny, and she’s right.”
Stevie couldn’t believe it. She thought he had believed her! Well, maybe she had gone just a little bit too far with the lace horse blanket.
“Listen,” he said. “You work on that routine a bit and you’ll be on a stage very soon.”
“Yeah, I know. The one leaving town, right?”
“That was the one I had in mind,” he told her with a grin. “There. That’s the last bucket, isn’t it? It’s been fun w
orking with you this morning, Stevie. I’ll probably stop by again tomorrow. I think it’s time I tried my hand at soaping tack.”
As they stepped out of the final stall, Scott bowed to Stevie graciously, and then turned and walked away. After he had gone a few steps, he turned around to wink at her.
Stevie put her hands back on her hips. “Well, I’ll be,” she said.
“Be what?” Lisa asked from behind her. “Late for class?”
“Not another comedian!” Stevie groaned. Lisa gave her a weird look. Stevie shrugged. “I’ll tell you later,” she said. “Maybe.”
CAROLE’S KITTEN, SNOWBALL, was very busy. Every time Carole moved the shoelace she was twiddling with, Snowball pounced.
“You’re crazy, you know that, Snowball?” she asked. The kitten didn’t pay any attention to her. In fact, he never paid any attention to anybody. He was the most contrary animal Carole had ever known. That was why she had named the coal-black kitten Snowball. Somehow, it just seemed to fit the little mischief-maker.
Carole heard a car in the driveway. It was midafternoon on Monday and she was home alone. Her father didn’t usually get home until about five-thirty, but that was unmistakably the sound of their station wagon. She would recognize the noise of that faulty muffler anywhere!
She hobbled downstairs to greet her dad. Her ankle was a lot better, but it was still going to be a few days before she could get her boot on, much less ride. At least it was only a few days—not a few weeks, as Lynne had said. Carole curled her lip in distaste just thinking about the woman. She was still so upset about what had happened Saturday night that she had barely spoken to her father on Sunday. It was a rare thing when Carole didn’t want to talk over something with her dad, but that was the case in this situation.
“Is something wrong, Dad?” she asked as he came in the door.
“Oh, no, honey, but things were slow at the office, so I signed out. I’d much rather be here with you. I want to be sure you’re taking care of that foot.”
“Oh, my foot’s fine,” she assured him.
“Well, I brought something for it anyway,” he told her, showing her a special ice pack he had purchased. “This is an external pain-killer and here’s something for internal application!” He held up a bag from TD’s, the girls’ favorite ice cream parlor at the shopping center.
“Hot fudge?” Carole asked.
“The very thing,” he told her. “One for you. One for me. Now, sit down in the lounge chair and put your leg up on the footrest.”
Smiling to herself, Carole did as she was told. Her father placed the new cool pack around her ankle gently and then he brought her a spoon and the sundae. He took the other sundae for himself and sat down on the sofa opposite her. They were quiet for a few moments while they opened their sundaes and had their first bites. Then the colonel looked his daughter square in the eye. “Okay, now I want you to tell me what the problem really is,” he said. “You’ve been wandering around in a mopey state for a week and it got a lot worse on Saturday night. And I don’t think it was because of your ankle.”
“You mean I haven’t fooled you?” she asked, toying with her spoon.
“Not a bit,” he said. “And you haven’t fooled anybody else, either. Scott called me at my office this morning to tell me that you were crying on Saturday before you hurt your ankle. Why don’t you just tell me about it, honey? I hate to see you so unhappy—and I’ve got some wonderful news for you!”
Those were the words Carole had been dreading! She decided she might as well get it over with. “You first,” she said, taking a deep breath. “Tell me your wonderful news.” She couldn’t bring herself to sound enthusiastic.
“You were sound asleep on Saturday, and holed up in your room yesterday, so I didn’t have a chance to tell you that Lynne and I won the twist contest at the dance after you left. We were far and away the best.”
“I knew you would,” Carole said dully. “You’re a great dancer. So where are you two going?”
“Us two?” the colonel responded, his face revealing his confusion.
“Yeah, you two won the contest, so you two will go someplace wonderful with the first prize, right?”
“Oh!” Colonel Hanson said. “No wonder …”
“No wonder what?” Carole asked.
“No wonder you’ve been so upset. You thought Lynne and I were going someplace and leaving you alone? Oh, honey, I’m sorry. This was all supposed to be a surprise, but surprises can backfire, I guess. No, the tickets were supposed to be for you and me. We were supposed to use them to go visit the Devines!”
“You and me, together, alone, at the dude ranch?” Carole asked, feeling a surge of hope. “But what about Lynne? What about your honeymoon?”
“Honeymoon! Oh, Carole!” The colonel shook his head with a rueful smile, then gave his daughter a fond look. “So that explains why you’ve been so upset. There’s nothing really serious going on between Lynne and me, but I should have realized that you’d be wondering. But let me put your mind at ease. Carole, I’m not going to marry Lynne. She’s nice enough, I guess, and she sure cares a lot, but she’s the most bossy woman I’ve ever met! She’s forever trying to change me.”
“Me, too!” Carole said. She couldn’t help grinning. So, her father thought Lynne was a pest, too!
“I mean, she’s okay as a friend,” Colonel Hanson continued. “And she’s a good dancer. But I don’t want to marry her.” He came over to the chair and put his arms around his daughter. “If I ever do think about getting married again someday, you’ll be the first one I talk to about it. After all, that would affect your life as much as mine. Your opinion would be very important in making a decision.”
Carole gave her father a big hug. He did understand! She could see now that she had blown everything out of proportion.
“I’m glad you aren’t going to marry Lynne. But shouldn’t she get one of the tickets anyway, since she won the contest with you?” Carole asked.
“She probably should,” he told her. “But she’s scared to death of airplanes. Wouldn’t think of traveling anyplace by plane. I’m afraid we’re stuck with the tickets.”
“Oh, wow!” Carole said, feeling comfortable for the first time in a long time. “So, when are we going to the dude ranch?”
“That’s the bad news, Carole. My leave’s been canceled because General Melendez has planned an inspection. So I just can’t be away right now. And unfortunately, we have to use the tickets by a certain date, and I don’t think I’ll be free before then.”
“Old General ‘White Gloves’ Melendez, you mean?” Carole said with a grin. She had always loved that nickname for the general who was famous for his tough inspections. Then she sighed. It would have been great to visit Kate with her father, but at least he wasn’t getting married!
“The very one,” her father said. “Anyway, I’m sorry to have to disappoint you, but we still have the tickets. Two of them. I thought that, considering how much fun you and your friends had with Kate when she was visiting, you might want to invite one of them to go along with you, using the second ticket. I wish I had three, but …”
“Oh, Dad! That would be fabulous! I can’t believe it. I could actually go with one of my friends! But I can’t stand to leave you.”
“Stand it,” he said reassuringly. “I’ll be just fine. Besides, you know I’m no fun to be around when ‘White Gloves’ is on the base.”
“You turn into an old grouch,” she teased him.
“Maybe if I do, it’ll be a way to convince Lynne that I’m not the man for her.”
“Hey, that’s a good idea. But how will I convince Scott I’m not the girl for him?” Carole asked.
“I didn’t know we had the same problem,” the colonel said.
“Neither did I,” Carole said.
“What have you tried to solve it?” the colonel asked.
“I had him mucking out stables for an entire day. He loved it!”
“You should hav
e seen Lynne on the obstacle course!”
“You took her on the o-course?” Carole asked, astonished. Quantico was famous for its rough physical training. It was hard to imagine Lynne swarming up a twenty-five foot rope.
“She told me it was better than her health club!”
“We should get these two together,” Carole said. “Lynne and Scott would make quite a pair.”
“That’s true, but I don’t think it will solve our problem. In fact, it could compound it.”
Carole was thinking about what her father had said when the phone rang.
“I’ll get it,” she said.
“I thought your ankle still hurt,” the colonel said in surprise.
“Not when the phone’s ringing,” she told him, springing to her feet.
In fact, her ankle was feeling a lot better. And the rest of her was feeling better, too. She reached for the phone. It was Stevie.
At the sound of Stevie’s voice, Carole recalled that she still had a few little problems to solve. One of them was going to be deciding which one of her friends she would invite to the dude ranch. That was a problem she wasn’t ready to solve yet. On the spot, she decided not to mention it to Stevie.
Stevie didn’t notice her hesitation. She was talking too much and too fast to be aware of Carole’s uncertainty.
“… And Scott carried one zillion water buckets for me. I thought maybe I could help you by telling him all the things about you that aren’t so nice—”
“Like what?” Carole demanded.
“Oh, well, you know, like how you make your own clothes and you want to be a study-hall monitor and march in the Veterans Day parade. Well, that sort of thing.”
“Stevie! Those things aren’t true!”
“I know. I was just trying to help,” she said.
“By making me sound like a nerd?”
“Don’t worry, Carole. He didn’t believe a word of it anyway. If you want, though, I can try again tomorrow. He’s coming to clean tack with me.”
“Thanks, but no thanks! This guy is too much,” Carole said after a moment.
Trail Mates Page 8