Driving Team

by Bonnie Bryant

  “Get busy and sort out this tack,” said Stevie. “This is what we’re going to use in our demonstration.”

  Veronica sighed again and flopped down on the floor. She poked around in the box for a moment, then pulled out an odd-shaped piece of leather that was studded with brass buttons.

  “Ugh,” she said, holding up the dirty piece of tack as if it were a strange object from outer space. “What in the world is this thing?”

  “I don’t know yet,” said Stevie. “This is kind of like a big puzzle. Why don’t you saddle soap it and put it over in the mystery pile? Then we can piece everything together later.”

  “Oh, whatever,” groaned Veronica. She got up and walked to the tack room, returning in a few minutes with some saddle soap and rags. Stevie watched her as she gingerly rubbed the soap into the leather, then polished it to a soft, supple glow. Though she was careful not to chip her nails or get any dirt on her clothes, Veronica was actually doing a halfway decent job of cleaning the tack.

  “Looks good,” Stevie said as Veronica’s pile of clean tack slowly grew.

  “Hnnnh,” Veronica grumped. “I thought this was what they paid people like Red O’Malley to do.”

  “Yes, but it’s fun to learn how to do it yourself, don’t you think?” Stevie replied pleasantly. If she was going to be stuck with Veronica, they might as well try to get along.

  “I don’t see any point in learning to do anything that you can pay somebody else to do for you,” Veronica snapped. “Particularly when you’re only going to do it once in your entire life.”

  “But you don’t know that,” said Stevie. “You might love driving and want to do it all the time. It looks like a lot of fun to me.”

  “Some of the driving costumes look fun,” replied Veronica. “I’ve seen pictures of great teams of horses pulling these magnificent coaches. And all the drivers and passengers are dressed in satin clothes and white wigs. And there’s even a footman who rides in the rear and blows a horn to announce their arrival!”

  Stevie snickered at the idea of Veronica blowing a horn to announce the Pine Hollow wagon. “I don’t think we’re quite ready for a horn-tooting footman. And everybody would die laughing if we showed up in satin clothes and white wigs!”

  Veronica shot a look at Stevie. “Well, what had you planned on wearing for this demonstration?”

  Stevie shrugged. “I thought our good show outfits would be okay.”

  “Our good show outfits?” Veronica rolled her eyes. “Oh, please. We’ve got to come up with something else. My oldest, most worn show outfit makes your very best one look like something from the rag bag. You’ll only embarrass yourself if you wear it.” Veronica sniffed. “You’ll embarrass me, too, come to think of it.”

  “And just what’s wrong with my good show outfit?” Stevie was suddenly so mad the tips of her ears were hot. She loved that outfit; she had worked hard babysitting to earn the money to buy it.

  “Well, it’s just so … so … so prêt-à-porter,” Veronica sniffed. “Off the rack. Ready to wear. My coats and breeches are all specially tailored at Horseman’s Haberdashery in Washington.” She gave Stevie an indulgent smile. “They even have a special dressmaker’s dummy with my name on it.”

  “What an honor!” cried Stevie. She could no longer resist temptation. “Now not only one, but two dummies are named Veronica diAngelo!”

  “How dare you—” Veronica’s words were cut short by a muffled beep. Stevie watched as she withdrew a tiny cell phone from the pocket of her breeches. “Hello?” she said quietly, turning her back to Stevie.

  Stevie started working with the tack again as Veronica got up and paced around the hallway, murmuring into the phone. Finally, as Stevie heard her say good-bye, she could have sworn Veronica’s voice cracked with some kind of strong emotion. She looked up. Veronica was quickly stuffing the cell phone back in her pocket.

  “I’ve got to go,” Veronica announced, her voice like ice.

  Stevie frowned. “Go? You just got here.”

  “I know, but something’s come up. My parents are sending their car. I’ll meet you here tomorrow morning.”

  “Well, all right,” Stevie said in amazement, watching as Veronica wiped at one eye and strode off toward the locker room.

  Stevie turned her attention back to the box as Veronica disappeared down the hall. How strange, she thought. Veronica shows up here to work for about five minutes, then she gets a phone call and leaves. She stood up and looked out the window. Just as she turned to gaze out at the wide front drive, the diAngelos’ white Mercedes came rolling to a stop. Stevie leaned against the window and watched. In a moment Veronica came hurrying out, once again dressed in her cashmere sweater.

  “They must be having a big sale at the mall,” Stevie said aloud as Veronica got into the backseat of the car. “Or maybe the Horseman’s Haberdashery is having a closeout on everything that fits Veronica’s dummy.”

  She gave a big sigh and turned back to the box of tack. She wished she were with Carole and Lisa at the library. “At least they get to be together,” she grumbled out loud. “And they get to be together miles away from Veronica and her stupid dress dummy.”

  Oh, well, she thought as she picked up a set of blinders. Tonight she would call both of them. They would probably enjoy getting an earful about creepy Veronica, and giving it to them might make her feel a little better.

  “THANKS FOR THE lift, Dad,” Carole said as her father, Colonel Mitch Hanson, pulled up in front of the library. “Looks like Lisa’s already here.”

  “Where?” Colonel Hanson steered the car close to the curb.

  Carole pointed to a small figure in a red jacket. “Up there. Sitting by the lion.”

  “Oh, I see her.” Colonel Hanson waved at Lisa as Carole unbuckled her seat belt. “Now, tell me again what you two are planning today?”

  “First Lisa and I are going to work on our driving team project all morning, then Mrs. Atwood’s going to take us to the mall.” Carole smiled at her father as she hopped out of the car. “I should be home around suppertime.”

  “Sounds like fun. You guys work hard and I’ll see you later.” He chuckled. “Don’t buy out all the stores.”

  “Right, Dad, like I’ve got thousands of dollars to spend!”

  Carole hurried up the steps of the library, where Lisa was waiting. “Hi,” she said. “Sorry I’m late. My dad wouldn’t leave the house until he’d finished the Sunday comics.”

  Lisa smiled. “Don’t worry. I’ve only been here about five minutes. Let’s go on inside and get started. Two weeks seems like a long time away, but it’s really not.”

  “You’re not kidding,” said Carole. “We’ve really only got today and whatever time we can squeeze out next weekend. Then it’ll be two weeks, and we’ll be standing in front of everybody from Horse Wise and Cross County, too. Thank goodness the library’s open Sundays during school or we’d really be in trouble!”

  Lisa gave a little shudder as she opened the door. “I know. If we aren’t prepared, we’ll just stand up there and make fools of ourselves. I think we’d better get a lot done today.”

  Inside, the library was just as warm and cheery as it had been the day before. They looked around the main reading room and saw Mrs. Davidson giving them a friendly wave from behind the checkout desk.

  “I guess we’d better go get all our reserved books,” whispered Lisa.

  “Okay. Let’s take them to that table in the corner,” Carole said as she followed Lisa to Mrs. Davidson.

  “Hi, girls,” chirped Mrs. Davidson. “I see you’re here bright and early today.”

  “We’ve got a lot of work to do.” Lisa glanced at Carole. “We didn’t get quite as much done as we needed to yesterday.”

  Mrs. Davidson smiled. “Well, I’ve got all your titles on reserve. Would you like them now?”

  “Yes, please,” said Carole.

  “I’ll go get them, then.” Mrs. Davidson bustled over to a small area beh
ind the counter where several piles of books lay. She picked up about a third of Lisa and Carole’s stack and lugged them back to the counter. “Here are a few. It’ll take me a moment to get the rest.”

  “Thanks,” said Carole. “We’ll take these over to that table in the corner.”

  It took several trips, but finally Carole and Lisa had carried all forty-two books to the library table.

  “How are we ever going to plow through all these pages?” Lisa wondered aloud, eyeing the stacks of books. “That’s thousands of years of horse driving history, and we’ve only got two weeks to get it all together!”

  Carole sighed. “I know. And there are so many things we need to include, too. Like how they drove teams in the military, in transportation, and in farmwork.”

  “And don’t forget the fun stuff,” added Lisa. “Like racing and horse shows.”

  “I guess we’d better start reading,” Carole said. “All this information isn’t going to just jump inside our brains. Why don’t I go sharpen our pencils while you get out our index cards?”

  “Okay,” said Lisa. “I’ll be right here when you get back.”

  Carole got up and walked to the other side of the library. There was a pencil sharpener next to the children’s section. She had just shoved the first pencil into the sharpener when she glanced over at a child-sized desk. A familiar little blond girl sat there, hunched over a copy of Misty. The book was opened to the exact place where she and Lisa had stopped reading the day before, and the little girl was tracing the illustrations with her finger.

  “Cynthia!” Carole whispered. “You’re here again!”

  Cynthia looked up and smiled. “Hi, Carole,” she greeted her shyly.

  “How come you’re here so early? Most people don’t come to the library on Sunday mornings unless they have important research to do.”

  Cynthia shrugged her tiny shoulders. “Oh, I don’t know,” she replied. “I guess I just like it here a lot.”

  Carole began to sharpen her pencil. “What time did you get here?”

  “Oh, right when they opened,” answered Cynthia.

  “And did your mother bring you?” Carole smiled.

  “Yes.” Cynthia looked down and rubbed a page of the book.

  “Is she here?” Carole looked around to see if there were any motherly-looking women nearby.

  Cynthia gave a slightly embarrassed grin and said nothing.

  Suddenly Carole caught on. “She dropped you off here again, didn’t she, Cynthia?”

  “Well, kind of,” Cynthia admitted.

  “Just so she could go shopping?”

  Cynthia lowered her eyes and did not reply.

  “That’s incredible!” Carole cried, jamming the second pencil into the sharpener and turning the crank furiously. “The idea of someone leaving a little kid here two days in a row just so she could go to the mall!” She turned to Cynthia. “You stay right here. I’ll be back in a minute!”

  “You’re not going to tell Mrs. Davidson, are you?” Cynthia cried, a look of panic on her face.

  “No,” Carole said. “I promise I won’t!”

  She hurried back to where Lisa had just opened a big black book called Horse Transport in Ancient Rome.

  “You’ll never guess who I just ran into.” Carole pulled out the chair next to Lisa’s and sat down hard.

  “I don’t know.” Lisa barely looked up from the pages. “Somebody from school?”

  “No. Cynthia!”

  “Cynthia?” Lisa looked up and blinked in amazement. “She’s here again?”

  Carole nodded. “Her mother has dropped her off here two days in a row! Can you imagine a parent acting like that?”

  Lisa shook her head. “My mother gets pretty crazy about shopping, but she would never have dropped me off in a library all by myself. Not without a couple of armed guards, anyway.” Carole nodded. She knew that Lisa’s mother could sometimes be a little overprotective.

  “This makes me so mad!” Carole fumed. “It’s so sad to see Cynthia sitting there, just looking at the pictures of Misty and not being able to read a single page!”

  “It is sad,” agreed Lisa. “But what can we do?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is that Cynthia needs help. She needs to feel like somebody likes her, that she’s not just a pest to be dropped off somewhere on the way to the mall.” Carole chewed her thumbnail for a moment, then looked at Lisa, her brown eyes sparkling.

  “I just had a great idea! I know we’ve got all this research to do, but it doesn’t mean we have to do it together, all the time. Why don’t we take turns? One of us can work on the history of driving while the other reads Misty to Cynthia.”

  “Okay,” agreed Lisa. “That way she won’t feel like such an outcast, and at least one of us will be getting some work done.”

  Carole frowned. “Pretty soon we’ll have to come up with a way to get her mother to quit doing this altogether, but for now I can’t think of a better thing to do than to make this little girl feel special.”

  “I think you’re right. Let’s start this minute,” said Lisa. “Do you want to read first or do research?”

  “You read first,” replied Carole. “I’ll get started on this.”

  “Great,” Lisa said. “Let’s go tell Cynthia.”

  “Wait.” Carole scooted back in the chair. “Don’t let her know how upset we are about her mother. That’ll only make her feel worse than she already does.”

  “Okay.”

  Lisa and Carole walked back to where Cynthia was still tracing over the pony illustrations.

  “Hi, Cynthia,” Lisa said as she and Carole sat down at the tiny table. “Want to read some more of Misty?”

  Cynthia looked up at them, her blue eyes wide. “Sure I do. But aren’t you two working on some school project?”

  “Well, we decided to take turns,” explained Carole. “We had such a good time reading to you yesterday that we thought we could at least read a little bit more today.”

  Cynthia beamed. “But we won’t read anywhere near Mrs. Davidson, will we? She almost saw me this morning when she was getting a huge stack of books from behind the counter. I had to run to the back of the children’s section as fast as I could.”

  Carole and Lisa shared a guilty look. The only reserve books Mrs. Davidson had doled out that morning had been their own stack. “Oh, no,” Carole reassured Cynthia. “We’ll stay far away from Mrs. Davidson.”

  “Okay,” Cynthia agreed excitedly.

  “Let’s go find a quiet corner,” Lisa said. “I’ll read the next couple of chapters, then Carole and I will switch off and she can read.”

  “That sounds like fun!” said Cynthia.

  They got up from the table and walked toward a little nook in the wall, close to the reserved book counter.

  “What’s your mother like, Cynthia?” Lisa asked as they squeezed between two tall bookcases.

  “She’s real pretty and sweet,” Cynthia said, smiling. “She let me adopt a kitten from the animal shelter, and she pops me popcorn and reads lots of books to me when we’re at home.”

  Carole was curious. “What does she like to buy at the mall?”

  “Red pocketbooks,” Cynthia giggled. “She has a whole collection of them. They’re all great big and she carries them over her shoulder. People tease her about them all the time.”

  They reached the little nook, which was empty. Lisa and Cynthia sat down together on the floor. Carole smiled. “Well, I guess I’ll go back to our work. Come and get me when it’s my turn, Lisa.”

  “Right.” Lisa opened the book to where they’d stopped the day before. “See you in a little while.”

  Carole turned and had begun to retrace her steps toward their table when she saw Mrs. Davidson heading for the reserved books. An elderly woman followed close behind. For an instant Carole panicked. If they kept going straight, they would certainly see Lisa and Cynthia. Carole hurried toward them.

  “Hi, Mrs. Davidson,” she
called loudly. “Anything I can help you with?”

  “No, dear, I was just going to get Mrs. Lovejoy her books on mushrooms.”

  “Mushrooms?” Carole cried. “Really? I love to read about mushrooms! Why don’t you let me get Mrs. Love joy’s books? That way I can have a peek at them before I get back to my own work.”

  Mrs. Lovejoy smiled while Mrs. Davidson just looked confused. “Well, uh, I guess that would be all right. If you don’t mind, that is.”

  “No, no,” said Carole. “I’d love to!”

  She waited for Mrs. Davidson to turn back to the checkout desk, then hurriedly picked up Mrs. Lovejoy’s mushroom books and deposited them on the table she’d chosen.

  “Don’t you want to look at them first, dear?” said Mrs. Lovejoy.

  “Uh, maybe later,” said Carole, who was watching Mrs. Davidson at the checkout desk again. She was talking to a man and pointing in Lisa and Cynthia’s direction. “Right now I’ve got to help Mrs. Davidson.”

  She hurried back up to the counter. “All the Italian dictionaries are located just this side of that big globe,” Mrs. Davidson was telling the man. “If you follow me, I’ll be happy to show you where.”

  “Uh, did you say Italian dictionaries, Mrs. Davidson?” Carole leaned forward.

  Mrs. Davidson blinked with even more surprise, then nodded. “Why, yes, dear. This gentleman needs to translate a letter.”

  “I’d be happy to show him where they are,” Carole blurted out. She shrugged. “I mean, it’s on my way back to my table, and I look at the Italian dictionaries a lot. I’m going to take Italian when I get to high school. I might even go live in Italy someday.”

  Mrs. Davidson looked mystified. “Well, of course, if you’re sure you know where they are.”

  “Oh, I do.” Carole turned and smiled at the man. “Just follow me, sir.”

  She led the man to the dictionaries, deciding that it wasn’t exactly a fib she’d just told. She supposed she could take Italian once she got to high school, although she really hadn’t given it a single thought. She snuck a quick glance at Lisa and Cynthia reading away as she passed. Thank heavens, she thought. So far, so good.