Stray Horse (9 page)

“Maybe,” Carole said. “I bet your mother would like to have you with her at this time.”

“I left the house early again,” Lisa said. “I mean, I left a note and all, not that that kept my parents from freaking
out yesterday when I left a perfectly nice note. They said something about wanting to see me. Well, if they want to see me, they always know where to find me. It’s either here or at CARL. I’ve got a lot of work to do. People count on me, you know. I guess I mean really that horses and other animals count on me, at least at CARL.”

There was a pause in the flood of words and Stevie had the feeling there must be something to say, but she was still tongue-tied.

“So you’re going home now?” Carole asked. It sounded more like a suggestion than a question.

“Okay,” said Lisa. Without another word, she walked out of the room.

Stevie and Carole listened while their friend picked up her backpack and took her jacket out of her cubby. They heard her even steps retreating down the aisle.

“Divorce?” Stevie said, for the first time able to speak the word out loud.

“I guess,” said Carole.

“Well, she seems to be taking it pretty well,” Stevie said.

Carole regarded her quizzically.

“You mean she isn’t?” Stevie asked.

“I don’t think so,” said Carole. “Look, we’re her best friends in the whole world. She was with us for what, like, three hours before she finally told us. She announced it
like she was telling us they were having chicken for dinner.”

“And she didn’t talk about it after that, did she?” Stevie said, understanding that that wasn’t very much like Lisa. “I guess she’s upset after all.”

“Wouldn’t you be?” Carole asked.

“That was the first thing I started thinking about,” Stevie said. “I mean, how I would feel. I didn’t like the thought at all. But I wasn’t expecting this. I mean, her parents are always so quiet and reserved.”

“You should have seen them the other morning,” Carole said, and then she told Stevie about the incident with the milk.

“And?”

“It was so angry,” said Carole.

“That doesn’t sound unusual to me at all. My brothers talk to me like that all the time.”

“Sure, and your parents probably gripe at one another sometimes, too. I know my parents did. Every family’s different, though.”

“You mean like we’re weird that we yell at each other all the time?” Stevie asked.

“No. Not at all, that’s normal—for you. Lisa and I have talked about it because we both live in such quiet homes. For us, it’s just me and my dad and we sometimes get annoyed
or angry with each other, like when I have to point out to him that he’s not quite as perfect as he thinks he is.” Carole smiled, thinking about her father.

“Well, he pretty much is,” Stevie said.

“Anyway,” Carole said, “we don’t yell at each other, and that’s normal for us. We do, however, on occasion, find it necessary to point out flaws in the other, like he has this silly notion that I spend too much time here. The point is that we say that stuff. In Lisa’s house, Lisa’s mother often criticizes her, but Lisa never returns it, and you never, ever hear her parents disagreeing about anything, even when it’s clear that they don’t agree. It’s a little weird.”

“Yeah,” Stevie said, recalling examples of what Carole was talking about. She remembered a really awful dinner conversation about whether Mr. Atwood was going to cancel a business trip so that he could go to Mrs. Atwood’s second cousin’s niece’s wedding. Even then, it hadn’t made any sense, but nobody had raised their voices. In Stevie’s family, nobody would have had such a dumb argument in the first place, but peas would fly across the table over lost homework.

“You know what it made me think?” Carole said. “It’s like every family has its own volume level. Your family is definitely High. Whenever anybody has something to say, they say it or yell it or even throw it. And it’s all on the
surface. Dad and I talk to each other, too—we just do it without the flying food. The real trouble comes when nobody’s talking. The Atwoods are set on Low, and until recently, like when Lisa began mentioning that her mother complained about all the traveling her father does, nobody ever snapped or complained to anybody about anything. When the volume changes, it means there’s trouble.”

“Like the milk thing?”

“Exactly,” said Carole.

“And I guess what you’re saying is that that milk thing wasn’t any more about milk than Lisa’s recent speech was about driving tack.”

“Exactly,” Carole said.

“Oh no,” said Stevie.

“Exactly,” Carole said again.

“And the only thing worse than a low volume going up is when it goes to Off,” said Stevie.

“It’s a good thing we’re here to help her,” said Carole.

“Exactly,” said Stevie.

M
RS.
A
TWOOD WAS
standing at the sink when Lisa came in, almost exactly the same way she had stood the night before. This time, though, she was making a small salad.

“I’m home, Mom,” Lisa said.

“Yes, I see, dear. Dinner will be ready in a few minutes. Why don’t you clean up and then come give me a hand?”

“Okay,” she agreed. She hurried upstairs to shower and change. It felt very normal. Her mother usually wanted her to help. Lisa usually had to shower and change first.

She noticed that the house seemed quiet. It wasn’t because her father wasn’t there. As her mother reminded her many times, he often wasn’t there because he traveled so much. Lisa shrugged it off. She pulled on some clean and comfortable clothes and put her books on her desk so that she could do her homework as soon as she was finished with dinner.

Lisa always kept her room very tidy. Her mother insisted on it, but she would have done it anyway because it was her nature to be organized. It seemed a little odd, then, to see a crumpled mass of papers in the middle of her floor. She bent down to pick them up. She only had to begin to unfold them before she realized what it was. It was her list of all the good things she’d been doing—all the things she’d wanted to share with her parents, especially her father. She dropped the papers back on the floor and went downstairs.

Normal. That was how everything felt. Her mother was pulling a casserole out of the oven, and the table needed to be set.

Lisa pulled three place mats, three forks, and three knives out of the drawer. Then she realized her mistake and replaced one mat and one set of silverware, hoping her mother hadn’t seen her error. One look and she knew that her mother had. She didn’t say anything, though.

Lisa put the settings on the table, poured a glass of milk for herself, and asked her mother what she wanted.

“I’ll have milk, too,” said Mrs. Atwood.

That was odd. She usually had a glass of wine with dinner, even when it was just the two of them.

Lisa gave her mother milk. She brought the salad over to the table and put out plates for each of them. Her mother brought the casserole to the table, and they sat down. Mrs. Atwood served Lisa a plate and then served herself. Lisa gave herself some salad and then passed the bowl over to her mother.

They ate.

“Where’s Dad?” Lisa broke the uncomfortable silence.

Her mother looked stunned. “We told you. We’re separated,” she answered.

“I know, but where is he?” she asked.

Mrs. Atwood appeared shaken. “He’s staying in a hotel downtown for now,” she said. Then her voice wavered. “Once the divorce is final, he’s moving to California.”

Lisa stood up and took her plate, stacked her mother’s
on top of it, and walked toward the sink. The world around her seemed to melt a bit, distorted like one of those mirrors in a fun house.

“Mom—” she began.

“Don’t worry,” said Mrs. Atwood. “I’ll do the dishes. You can just get to your homework.”

Lisa felt the plates slip out of her hand. There must have been a sound, a loud one, but she didn’t hear it.

“Okay,” she said mechanically. Then she went up to her room and started her homework.

N
OTHING
M
AX COULD
have said would have prepared The Saddle Club for the Wainwright Jump Team.

“Let me see if I’ve got this right,” Stevie said to Carole. “Mrs. Wainwright has Red measuring the temperature of her horse’s drinking water?”

“You’ve got it right. I guess ‘cold’ isn’t good enough. It’s got to be exactly forty-three degrees Fahrenheit,” Carole told her.

“Mr. Wainwright isn’t so fussy, though. He told Denise it needed to be between forty-three and forty-five degrees. Max warned us, didn’t he?”

“ ‘Fussy’ really didn’t cover this. How can Red stand it?”

“Easy,” said Carole. “He can stand it because you and I are doing everything else.”

“Where’s Lisa?” Stevie asked, realizing that their threesome was looking a lot more like a twosome.

“She’s with PJ,” Carole said.

Judy had given PJ a clean bill of health on Thursday, and Lisa had brought him over to Pine Hollow Thursday afternoon. It was a short walk from CARL, so she hadn’t even needed to wait until she could get someone to drive a van. She hadn’t wanted to waste a second until she got him to Pine Hollow.

“I see what you mean,” Max had said, admiring his newest tenant. He gave PJ a pat on his face. The horse flinched. “Did I hurt him?” he asked.

Lisa shook her head. “No,” she said. “He’s just like that sometimes with people he doesn’t know.”

“Well, I hope you’ll arrange an introduction for me soon,” he teased.

Lisa hadn’t thought it was a funny joke. In fact, it worried her. If PJ misbehaved, Max might say he couldn’t stay at Pine Hollow no matter how many chores she and her friends did. Lisa couldn’t let that happen. The only way to make sure he didn’t misbehave was if she was with him and kept him from misbehaving.

A day later PJ was still edgy, and Lisa was unwilling to leave his side.

“I guess we have to let her stay with him, huh?” Carole said, thinking about PJ’s behavior.

“It seems to me we’re making a lot of allowances for her, Carole,” Stevie said.

“But her parents …,” Carole said.

“Right, and we know she’s going nuts about this horse. But it turns out that we’re doing all the work that’s making Max agree to let PJ stay here.”

“You! What’s your name?” A voice boomed behind her. Stevie turned. It was Mr. Wainwright. She wasn’t absolutely sure she wanted him to know her name, but she had to cooperate for Max’s sake.

“Stevie Lake,” she said.

“What kind of name is that?” he demanded.

“Short for Stephanie,” she said, though she didn’t think he had the right to insult her name. His name was Marion. Stevie kept her thoughts to herself.

“Where’s the hoof polish?” he asked.

“In the cabinet in the tack room,” Stevie told him. “Right over there.” She pointed.

“Get it for me, please,” he said.

Now she was in a quandary. The Saddle Club’s job was to do everything but work for the Wainwrights. On the
other hand, their job really was to make Max happy, and Stevie had the sneaking suspicion that keeping the Wainwrights happy would keep Max happy.

“Of course, sir,” she said.

As soon as she delivered the pot of polish to Mr. Wainwright, she hurried back to Barq’s stall, which she and Carole had been mucking out together.

“We’d better hurry,” Carole said. “It’s almost time for the afternoon feeding.”

“And watering,” said Stevie. “Do you think the stable horses are going to die of jealousy if they just get cold tap water, not cooled to forty-three degrees?”

“Don’t tell them, okay? As long as they don’t hear about it, we’ll be safe.” The girls laughed.

The entire stable was abuzz with activities centering around the adored and pampered horses of the jumping team. There were four riders on the team, but only Mr. and Mrs. Wainwright were at the stable that afternoon. Their competition was starting the next day, and the horses would be there for a good part of it. It was something everybody at the stable was looking forward to.

“O’Malley!” cried Mrs. Wainwright. “Where’s the special grain blend?”

Nobody ever called Red “O’Malley.” Stevie and Carole gaped while he rushed to bring her the “special grain
blend.” He didn’t even make a face or a smart remark. He didn’t even look as if he minded when she apparently forgot to say thank you.

“How do you suppose Dorothy stands it?” Carole asked. She really felt sorry for their friend, who worked on training these jumpers.

“I think she stands it by sending them to every competition in the country so that they’re never anywhere near her stable,” Stevie said.

“Clever woman,” said Carole.

The girls finished the mucking and then handed out feed to each of the horses, plus fresh hay and water (from the tap, no ice). When they were done, they decided they’d earned a break and went to find Lisa.

She and PJ were in the schooling ring, far away from the hubbub inside the stable.

“Everything okay?” Stevie asked, climbing onto the fence.

“Just fine,” said Lisa. “I thought he might like some fresh air. He probably got used to being outdoors while he was lost in the woods. I think it’s a little, well, claustrophobic for him inside.”