The Right Thing Easy

by Laina Villeneuve

  She paused for a moment before she placed her palm in mine, almost as if she was afraid to touch me. “I’m so glad that it worked out.” Her words carried none of the hesitancy her touch did.

  Her palm slipped away, leaving mine feeling empty. She looked uncomfortable, which puzzled me. What reason did she have to be uncomfortable around me?

  Gabe brought me out of my musings. “We should get the stock back.”

  My mood brightened. Maybe it wasn’t me. Maybe she was just thinking about how ridiculous it was to stand in the middle of the road with a bunch of mules. I nodded in agreement. “Swing your rig around,” I said. “I’ll hold ’em from the tailgate.”

  I held all the stock as the two headed for their cars. I wanted to say something to Hope. I wanted for her to like me and feel at ease around me. She gave me no chance, slamming the door and starting up the car. I figured she was angling to get in front of us. Interestingly, she didn’t. She waited for me to hop up on Gabe’s tailgate and give him the thumbs-up. Facing her over five sets of mule ears and rumps, there were a thousand other places to look, yet I couldn’t take my eyes off Hope.

  She followed unhurriedly, and I took this chance to study her further. I wanted to know more about her, why she was buying cereal for Mrs. Wheeler, why Gabe said that when she asked you to do something, you did it. I smiled, then, thinking that if she asked me to go buy a box of cereal to replace the one the mules had eaten, I would have jumped right to it. Though she couldn’t have known what I was thinking, Hope smiled back.

  Chapter Eight

  “Sounds like that new professor has made quite the impression on everyone in town,” Pauline said the next time Hope volunteered at the library.

  “Really?” Hope feigned disinterest. Everyone in town was talking about her. Even Mrs. Wheeler prodded her for more information when she apologized for sacrificing her cereal. She wanted to hear again how Hope had set Dani up to rent from Gabe. She herself had asked if Dani was single which had seemed strange to Hope at the time. Now she realized the entire town was simply smitten with her.

  “She’s already been out with at least three of the single male professors on campus,” Pauline began. “Plus, you know how my cousin works at the lumberyard?”

  “Yeah?”

  “He’s going to the movies with her.”

  “That’s nice,” Hope said.

  “I wonder how long it’ll take for her to make her way down the line of single guys in town.”

  Hope busied herself behind the desk, certain that everyone was misreading Dani. She’d seen the way Dani had looked at her. Hadn’t she? She straightened the edges of the stack of book returns she’d pulled from the bin. Maybe she had completely misread Dani when they’d met on the road. What if she was projecting her own desire onto the woman?

  “Who’s she gone out with on campus?”

  Pauline smiled at the question, ready to dig into the gossip more seriously. She ticked the men off on her fingers. “Martinez.”

  Hope frowned. “You know he’s just a creep. He wouldn’t even care if she was married. I’m sure he just wants to show off his ‘nature shots’ again.”

  “Hope!” Pauline gasped. “Who told you?”

  “C’mon. You’re not the only one in town who gossips, and not everyone feels the need to protect me that you do.”

  “I just didn’t want to give you a heart attack.”

  Hope turned her back to her friend. If only she knew the places in nature that she, herself, could have been caught in the nude. Add to that that she wasn’t alone… Somehow the town had adopted the image of Hope as the good girl. She played up her naïveté, never discouraging the blush that burned on her face when people talked about sex. She’d used it to her advantage for years. “Who else?”

  Pauline ticked her second finger. “Tim Keith. Someone saw them up at Buck’s Lake over the weekend”

  “Saw them what?” Hope asked. Why was she even asking? If she was going out with these men, maybe she was straight. That was a good thing, wasn’t it? She wasn’t in any trouble if this woman wasn’t lesbian after all.

  “They took an all-day ride out of the pack station up there.”

  Work, Hope thought, dismissing the idea of it being a date. “You said three.”

  “And the photography teacher. They’ve had several lunches together on campus, and my source says they’re quite intense.”

  “What does it say about us that we’re standing here gossiping about someone else’s dating life?”

  “A—that I’m an old married woman. B—you’re chronically single without any excuse and C—she’s hot.” Pauline counted out, putting her fingers to use again. “If I weren’t married, I’d give lesbianism a try if she asked.”

  “Pauline!” Hope said, smacking her arm, genuinely floored by her friend’s remark.

  “What? You’ve heard her talk. That Texas drawl just melts me at my core. Speaking of, I hear you had a whole conversation with her out on Quincy Junction.”

  Hope’s stomach had dropped out for a moment when she thought her friend had noticed her own reaction the day she’d seen Dani in the library. “Hardly,” she said, recovering. “I stopped some of Gabe’s mules that were loose on the road.”

  “Gabe Owens. If I were single…there’s another one I’d go after.”

  “Single and thirty years younger. Is there something you’re not telling me about you and Burley?”

  “Course not. It’s just fun remembering the single life, not that you have any fun with it, but I did.” A sly smile crossed her face.

  “Burley did the whole town a favor when he married you.”

  “And Portola and Greenville.”

  “You’ve completely shattered my perception of the chaste old maid librarian whose house is full of books and cats.”

  “You’re talking about yourself, and you’re not even a librarian. What about you and Gabe?”

  “Been there,” Hope answered.

  “In high school. It doesn’t count. He wasn’t a man yet.”

  Hope hid her blush that had nothing to do with Gabe and everything to do with the fact that she’d dated him briefly because of the crush she had on his sister, Kristine. Remembering the moment she saw that Gabe really liked her and had no clue about her feelings for Kristine still knotted her stomach. “He’s still not Mormon.”

  Pauline waved off her words, dismissing her reason. “You know that excuse of yours would hold a lot more weight if you actually went to church. I’ve always thought that it was just that—an excuse.” She arched her eyebrow, challenging Hope to disagree. When Hope didn’t, she continued. “Your brothers are Mormon. Halley is Mormon. You? I can’t believe that you buy into it, and I hope you know that I’m saying that as your friend.”

  “Some of your best friends are Mormon,” Hope teased, trying to regain their lighter tone.

  “You know we’ll never agree when it comes to the church. You still support Halley’s idea of going on a mission?”

  “Of course,” Hope said without hesitation.

  “It’s one thing for the boys…” Pauline started. She sighed and pursed her lips into a tight, white line. Hope knew that she had to fight to contain the speech she’d like to unleash.

  “I think I’ve exhausted the volunteer chores,” Hope said, removing the temptation. “I’ll see you.”

  “Hope?” Pauline said, stopping the other woman before she pushed open the door.

  Hope paused, looking back at her friend.

  “I worry about you.”

  “I know. But you don’t need to,” she lied. She put on her smile and waved as she slipped outside.

  Hope shoved her hands in her pockets and walked down the street to Cup of Joy. Pauline never liked the secrets of the church and believed it to be too patriarchal to be trusted. Hope felt stuck. She knew that if she dared talk with the bishop, he’d tell her to trust the church’s plan, that finding a good Mormon man would take away the doubts she had about her
sexuality. She thought about how alive she felt when Dani stood near her. Out on Chandler Road, she’d felt like every step Dani took stoked the fire within her. She wanted to step toward that fire. But fire was dangerous. A relationship with a woman would burn itself out, burn Hope up. Eventually, the fire would burn out, leaving her abandoned. The church would never abandon her.

  Her friend was the complete opposite. If she found out what Dani did to her, she’d throw her into the fire herself. She wouldn’t understand the panic Hope felt when she thought about leaving the church. If Hope expressed concern about her spirituality, Pauline would suggest one of the other churches in town, as if choosing religion was as simple as shopping, selecting a brand of bread. White? Wheat? It’s still bread to make a sandwich. For Pauline, the decision would be just that, a decision. She didn’t understand that being Mormon was who Hope was, and she would lose part of herself if she left the church, which she would have to if she chose to live her life with a woman.

  No, she couldn’t confide in either person, each too prejudiced to stop and hear what she needed to resolve deep within herself. She had come to accept that she was on her own in figuring it out. For so many years, she had thought walking between the two paths would satisfy her, a few steps to the right or left could take her back to one path or the other. She realized now that the longer she walked, the more each path moved away from her. If she continued in the middle, she’d find herself lost with neither.

  Chapter Nine

  “Sis!”

  Hope sat at her desk in the back, the room almost dark, massaging both her temples with the palms of her hands. “Back here,” she said, knowing both that Halley wouldn’t hear her and that her sister already knew where she was anyway.

  “Sis, I neeeeeed…” The door swung open. “Oh gosh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you had a headache. How bad is it?”

  “It won’t get bad if I stay like this.”

  Halley crept up behind Hope and started massaging her shoulders. “Do you need your medicine?”

  “No. It’ll be fine. Just keep doing that and tell me what has you screaming across the restaurant like that.”

  Halley squeezed harder, clearly worked up about something. “You would not believe my riding class today. Well, actually I didn’t ride today because Blazer…”

  “Blazer?”

  “That’s what our professor has us call her. It’s what they used to call her on the circuit. Anyway, Blazer said I shouldn’t even step foot in the stable in sneakers, but today was just the learning how to saddle part, so she said that even though it was ‘beyond her better judgment…’”

  Hope smiled at Halley’s imitation of her professor’s drawl and at Halley’s shot-fast delivery.

  “She would let me keep up with the class as long as I promised to get myself a decent pair of ‘shit kickers’ to keep my foot from going through a stirrup and that made me realize that Mom probably had a pair, didn’t she? I bet you anything my feet are just the same size. Can you come home now? Say you can come home now. You’re the boss. Just take a half-hour break. No one knows where anything is in the garage but you. I wouldn’t even know where to start looking, but I bet you could find the right box in three minutes.”

  Hope took a deep breath, wishing her sister would keep talking because her fingers moved in time with her mouth and felt heavenly on her tight muscles. “That sounds like a challenge,” she finally mumbled.

  “I gave you a handicap since your head is hurting.”

  “You have to drive.”

  “Of course!” Halley said with an extra exuberant squeeze of Hope’s shoulders.

  Halley let the waitress and cook know that she was stealing her sister while Hope squinted her way to the car. She lay back against the passenger-side seat with her eyes closed, already visualizing the box with her mother’s things tucked inside.

  She and her father had sorted through her mother’s closet together, sending most to the thrift store, but he’d let her keep a box of the things she wanted. Every once in a while, when she was missing her mother the most, she crept out into the garage and pulled the box from the shelf, carefully removing the top and burying her face in the fabrics her mother had once worn that still smelled ever so faintly of her perfume.

  Halley climbed in the car carefully, now fully aware of just how bad Hope’s migraine was. Before Halley put the car into gear, Hope felt her sister’s fingers at her temple, gently wiping away a tear that had escaped. “It’s worse than you said?”

  Hope sighed and tilted her head toward her sister. “I’m okay. Just…Mom would love that you’re taking a riding class.”

  “Yeah,” Halley whispered. “I was thinking that, too.” Hope could hear the smile in her sister’s voice. Halley slipped her shades onto Hope’s face. “Wear these. They’ll make your head feel better.”

  “Thanks. Sorry to be a baby.”

  “No. I’m sorry. I didn’t think…”

  Hallelujah had only been five when their mother died. Hope couldn’t be angry with her sister for remembering their mother differently, more with a curiosity for what life had been like when she was alive than the deep loss that Hope felt. Hope didn’t bother turning on the light inside the garage. The light from the open door was enough to find the box. She opened the ladder, but Halley wouldn’t let her climb.

  “Pull down Christmas number three. It’s behind that. It’s got a purple lid.”

  “I wish sometimes I had some of your organizational skills,” Halley said, descending with the box in hand.

  “I get to open it,” Hope said, sitting cross-legged on the cool cement floor.

  They sat opposite each other with the plastic box in between them like a treasure chest.

  Hope popped off the purple top and took a deep breath. Her sister followed suit. “It still smells like her,” Halley said, amazed.

  Hope nodded and lifted out some of her favorite things—a blouse, the dress her mother had always worn when they went to visit a temple. At the bottom were her riding things—a faded pair of jeans and the cowboy boots. She stroked the fancy stitching on the soft leather before she handed them to Halley.

  Halley kicked off her sneakers and pulled on the left boot. A slow smile spread across her face as she pulled on the other and stood, testing them out.

  “How do they feel?”

  “Like I’ve been wearing them for years,” Halley whispered. “Would you mind if…”

  “Of course not. She would be so thrilled,” she said, carefully replacing the lid.

  As Halley walked across the garage again, Hope lay down and the cool concrete soothed her throbbing temple. She closed her eyes, letting the footfalls be her mother’s walking around in her boots, getting ready for her afternoon ride. No one else in the family had any interest in riding, and she used to say it suited her just fine because it was her escape.

  “Hope!” Halley must have turned around. “Let me take you inside.”

  “No. This is perfect. Being right here is perfect. Tell me about the lesson. You said it was amazing.”

  Halley settled down next to Hope and stroked her hair. She removed the small clip on top of Hope’s head that kept her hair from falling in her face. “I got there a little early, and Blazer was still working with the Intro to Training class that’s getting the colts ready for the spring sale. She was on one of the three-year-olds trying to get it to walk over a tarp she put in the arena. I wish you’d been there to see it. That horse was doing everything it could to run away from the tarp, and she just kept pointing it back again. She didn’t get angry or frustrated, just kept at it.”

  Hope couldn’t help but think of meeting Dani on the road and how powerful her own impulse to flee had been.

  “You could see that she was working hard. She had this fierce look of concentration on her face, but she was so calm, and the whole time she had this running monologue for the class, telling them exactly what she was doing. She said there’s this famous horse trainer, Ray Hunt,
who says you’ve got to make the wrong thing hard and the right thing easy.”

  She slipped into Dani’s drawl, “‘All y’all have to do is open the door for him and get him to see that what you want is the best choice he’s got. He’s just being a horse, and his horse brain is telling him to run, so you close that door, and every time he thinks about running, you just keep closing the door until he can see that walking across the tarp, or whatever it was he didn’t think he could do, is really the simplest thing.’”

  Just like catching five mules out on an open road had been for her, talking someone with no experience with horses or mules through how to keep them interested and distracted from the halters that were coming. Or how she’d figured out how to get Gabe’s truck and the animals back to the pasture without making two trips. She thought of Dani sitting on the tailgate with the animals following her as if it were the simplest thing. Why had Dani smiled? And why had she smiled back?

  Halley continued, still sounding mesmerized. “She just kept talking like that, saying she was shutting a door with her leg, a little pressure on the rein, her hips. Half the time, I couldn’t even see what she was doing, but you could tell the horse knew. And then, all of a sudden, the horse just relaxed and walked across the tarp like it was nothing.”

  “You make her sound like a magician,” Hope said, feeling like Halley had just described her whole encounter with Dani on the road. She had wondered if Dani was even aware of the way she had diffused Hope’s anxiety.

  “It was exactly like that. The whole class clapped. Spooked the horse.” Halley laughed. “It was just something. You’ve got to come see her. You could come early with me sometime and then stay to watch me ride.”

  Hope nodded. “I’d like that. I’d like that a lot.” She still felt a zing of excitement at the thought of seeing the professor again, but it didn’t come with the fear she’d been feeling. Maybe Dani was the neutral person she’d been waiting for, someone who could hear her struggle and guide her, make what felt so difficult seem easy.