Trail Mates (8 page)

“If you want my opinion, he’s still hopeless—I mean hopelessly in love with you!”

“I think you’re right—and I can assure you that one day of perfectly awful stable chores hasn’t done anything to change his mind. Some bright idea. All it got me was a bunch of blisters!”

“Sorry about that,” Stevie said. “I tried!”

“I’m sure,” Carole teased. “Next time, you do the mucking out, okay?” She laughed. “I’m just joking. Those stables needed cleaning anyway, and at least I got some help doing it.”

“So it wasn’t such a bad idea after all.”

“Well … anyway, it didn’t accomplish what we wanted to accomplish.”

“Relax, Carole,” Stevie said soothingly. “I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve yet.”

“That’s what I was afraid of!” Carole said, laughing. One thing she knew she could
always
count on was that Stevie would have big ideas. And no matter whether they worked or not, it was one of the reasons Carole like her so much.

They passed the point where Patch had bolted. Soon after that, the trail crossed the meadow. The three girls sat down in their saddles while their horses continued trotting and then touched the horses behind their girths on one side. Soon the horses were cantering, the wonderful rocking-horse gait. Carole sat deeply into the saddle, moving forward and back with the horse’s motions. She loved almost everything
about riding, but it was hard to think of anything more fun than cantering gently across an open field on a graceful horse like Diablo, with the bright, warm sunshine beaming down from above. The tangy smell of the hay in the meadow blended perfectly with the rich smell of horses and leather. Carole was content.

When they had crossed the meadow, the girls drew the horses to a walk so they could cool down for the last ten minutes of the ride until they reached the creek.

“Okay, lunchtime!” Carole announced, dismounting. “For the horses, of course.”

The Saddle Club knew the horses came first. There would be plenty of time for the girls to eat and relax once they had tended to the horses.

The girls loosened the girths and put halters over the horses’ bridles so they could snap lead ropes onto them. In spite of cowboys who tied their horses’ reins to hitching posts in movies, The Saddle Club knew that it was very bad for the horse, and the reins, to use them that way. The girls led the horses to the creek and let them have a cooling drink, but not too much. A whole lot of cold water in a horse’s stomach on a hot day could lead to digestive problems very quickly. When the horses were refreshed, the girls tied them up where they could reach sweet, fresh grass for snacking. After the horses were tended, it was the girls’ turn to rest.

“Last one in is a rotten egg,” Stevie said, removing her boots. She rolled up her pants legs and then sat on a big flat rock that bordered the creek. She dangled her feet in the water. “Heaven,” she announced. Carole and Lisa quickly followed suit.

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
step
mother.”

“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.

“M
Y 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?”

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?”