Ranch Hands

by Bonnie Bryant

  “More like ‘home-ruined’ meals every night, you mean, and maybe I’ll alternate it with ‘home-burned’ some nights,” Carole said despondently. She took a bite out of the hamburger and grimaced.

  Colonel Hanson tried the browned beans. Then he turned his attention to the potato. The news wasn’t any better.

  “Let me show you an old cook’s trick,” Colonel Hanson said. He picked up his plate and Carole’s and took them over to the counter.

  “This is the beginner chef’s most valuable tool,” he said. And with a flourish, he picked up the telephone and ordered a pizza for the two of them: pepperoni, green pepper, onions, and mushrooms. It would arrive in a half hour.

  Carole was hungry, and the pizza sounded awfully good to her, but it wasn’t what she’d had in mind. She apologized to her father for messing up the dinner and even told him how she’d done it.

  “Oh, don’t worry about it,” he assured her. “I’ve boiled more hamburgers than I care to remember—although I think one boiled hamburger qualifies as more than I care to remember.” The corners of his mouth twitched a little as he tried to suppress a chuckle. It didn’t work. He couldn’t hold it in. He started laughing. Carole couldn’t help herself. She started laughing, too.

  “I was just trying to do something nice,” she said. Then she scraped her failed dinner into the garbage. Her father did the same.

  “I know, honey. It was nice, too. At least the idea was nice. What I’m wondering, though, is what was distracting you so badly that you boiled the hamburgers?”

  “And fried the beans and chilled the potatoes,” she reminded him. He nodded. “Well,” she began. “I got a letter from Kate …”

  “Eli’s ranch?” Colonel Hanson asked.

  “You know about it?”

  “Frank Devine called me this afternoon,” he said. “He told me that Eli’s hoping to get some real work out of you girls. I told him I wasn’t sure you’d want to spend the whole time working with horses, feeding, grooming, riding, instructing—not when there was a chance to go to cooking school.…”

  “Dad!”

  Colonel Hanson knew when to stop teasing, too. “Actually, Carole, it’s perfect,” he said. “I got word yesterday from our commanding officer at the base that I’m going to have to go on an extended inspection tour. I knew I could take you along, but I also knew you would have been bored to tears. So, of course I told Frank it was okay by me if you went to Eli’s ranch—that is, if I could talk you into it.”

  “Just try me,” she said, unable to hide her grin of utter joy. She was going to the ranch!

  They spent the next hour eating every bit of the delicious and perfectly cooked pizza and talking about Carole’s summer on the ranch. They had a wonderful time, and in the end Carole concluded that the only bad thing about going to Eli’s ranch was that she really was going to miss her dad.

  LISA PULLED HER chair into the table and put her napkin on her lap. She’d spent the last hour in her room trying to figure out how to talk her parents into letting her go to Eli’s ranch. It wasn’t going to be an easy job, but she was sure she could manage it. The strongest point would be that Eli was expecting the girls to work. It really was more of a summer job than a summer camp. Eli needed their help, and it was going to be a real work experience. “Imagine how that will look on my college applications!” she’d say. She figured her parents would love that.

  She had also decided that she should bring it up early in the meal—as soon as the last plate was served.

  Lisa’s mother nodded to Mr. Atwood, who began to serve. He finished his wife’s plate and passed it to her. One down, two to go, Lisa told herself. He put the food on her plate and handed it to her. “Thank you,” she said out loud. Two down, one to go, she said to herself.

  “Lisa, we’ve got some wonderful news for you,” her mother said.

  “We sure do!” said her father, putting his own plate down in front of himself. Three down …

  “You tell,” said Mrs. Atwood.

  “No, you do it,” said Mr. Atwood.

  And so she did. Lisa’s mother told her that the three of them were going to Europe for a full month! They were going to leave in two weeks. They would go to England, France, and Italy. They would see everything! Her parents had been planning this trip to be a surprise for her for months.

  “We started planning it right after Christmas,” her father said.

  “We know you’re going to love it!”

  Lisa listened. She was too stunned even to speak. All her life, she’d dreamed of the day she might take a trip to Europe, but not now. Not this summer when she could go to the ranch with Carole and Stevie. Not when she could spend the summer riding Western ponies and being a real hand on a real ranch, helping Eli and teaching little kids. Not when something else so wonderful was going on.

  “Isn’t it exciting?” Her mother’s face positively glowed with excitement. Lisa nodded numbly.

  “We knew you’d be surprised,” said Mr. Atwood. “And we wanted it to be a surprise, too. You can’t imagine how hard it’s been.…”

  Lisa’s father began a long explanation about how the phone call Lisa thought was a wrong number the other day had actually been the travel agent. Lisa barely heard the story. All she really heard was Europe and four weeks. She’d even be gone before her friends would leave for Eli’s. She’d be in places where they didn’t have horses, where they couldn’t ride every day. She’d even be in places where they didn’t speak English and didn’t know her and she didn’t know anybody. She wouldn’t have any friends around, just her parents.

  Lisa looked at the two of them. They’d seen the blank look on her face and took it to be excitement. Lisa was glad of that. She loved her parents. She couldn’t disappoint them when they had gone to so much trouble for her.

  “… the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre. And don’t forget Nôtre Dame. I read that there’s a boat trip you can take on the Seine through the city. They call it The City of Lights, you know.…”

  The City of Lights—a place she’d never been, filled with strange people, strange foods, strange words. What did it hold for her? Not much, Lisa thought. She wanted to go to the ranch. She wanted to ride and be with her friends.

  She had to try to tell her parents. She took a deep breath and interrupted an explanation about the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

  “Kate Devine’s invited us all to go to a Western riding camp that Eli’s running this summer. It’s called High Meadow. We’d be working—”

  “No work for you this summer. Just pleasure!” her mother interrupted.

  The ranch trip was dead and Lisa knew it. She was going to Europe with her parents.

  She felt totally overwhelmed. She couldn’t even take a bite of the meat loaf. She just put down her fork. She had to be alone. She wanted to cry, and she didn’t want her parents to know how disappointed she was.

  “Excuse me,” she said. She stood up from the table and headed for her room as quickly as she could.

  “She’s going to call her friends and give them the good news,” she heard her mother say to her father.

  The tears welled up in Lisa’s eyes. The terrible news she silently corrected her mother.

  * * *

  A PEA FLEW across the table and hit Stevie squarely on the forehead. She stuck her tongue out at her twin brother, Alex.

  “Stop that!” Mrs. Lake said to Stevie.

  “He threw the pea at me!” Stevie protested.

  “What are you talking about?” Alex asked sweetly. “Of course I didn’t throw a pea at you—though, of course, I might have if I’d thought of it, because a certain sister of mine is a total dirty rotten fink.”

  Stevie knew what he was talking about, but she didn’t agree that she’d been rotten. After all, if Alex actually liked Melissa Sanders and thought she was cute, what was wrong with Stevie letting Melissa know it? How could she have anticipated that Melissa would then post a large, public note on Alex’s locker saying
she wouldn’t go out with him if he were the last boy on earth. Stevie hardly thought she should be held responsible for that. It was Alex’s poor taste in girlfriends that brought it on, not her telling Melissa that Alex thought she was cute.

  “I’m going to get you,” Alex said. “Every day this summer I’m going to hide by the trails at that precious stable and scare your horse as you ride by.”

  Stevie sneered. “Shows how much you know,” she said. “I won’t be here this summer.”

  There was a silence at the table.

  “Just where do you plan to be?” Mrs. Lake asked.

  “Out West,” she said. “See, Eli is running this Western riding camp, and he’s asked The Saddle Club to come help him. We’re going to be like junior counselors.”

  “No,” her parents said in a single voice. That surprised Stevie just a little bit. Normally, it took a few seconds for them to veto one of her plans.

  “… and maybe some days I’ll put a burr under your horse’s saddle,” Alex continued, totally ignoring Stevie’s announcement. “And it seems to me that your friend, Phil, ought to know that you wrote his name one hundred times in your history notebook. And then there were the other doodles …”

  Phil was Stevie’s boyfriend. She’d met him at riding camp. He had two sisters who teased him as much as Stevie’s three brothers teased her, so he was pretty understanding when Stevie’s brothers gave him a hard time. She really didn’t want him to know about her history notebook, though. She blushed just thinking about it. Then she took more direct action. She threw a pea at Alex.

  “Stevie!” her mother said sternly.

  “Alex!” Mr. Lake scowled.

  Pretty soon Stevie’s other brothers joined in the fray. It wasn’t clear who was taking which side. It was only clear that there was loud accusatory shouting going on.

  Stevie yelled at Alex, but she was also keeping an eye on her parents because she noticed that they’d exchanged a look.

  “You know,” Mrs. Lake said to Mr. Lake, ducking a flying pea, “maybe a month out West would be a nice change for Stevie.…”

  And that was how Stevie found out that she was Westward bound.

  THERE WAS SO much to do and so little time to do it. Lisa hurried out of her mother’s car and darted through the crowd at the mall. She was meeting Stevie and Carole for a final Saddle Club meeting before she left for Europe.

  It still hurt to know that she wouldn’t spend the summer at High Meadow with her friends. It had taken her two days to be able to tell them. As it turned out, they’d all cried. It was a funny cry, too, because although Lisa was terribly disappointed not to be going to High Meadow, there was a part of her that was excited about going to Europe.

  “They do have horses in Europe,” Stevie had reminded her.

  “Not at the Cathedral of Nôtre Dame in Paris,” Lisa said.

  “Well, the Queen of England rides a lot,” Stevie said, trying desperately to find a bright side.

  “Yeah, and I’m sure to be invited for a hack with her in Hyde Park, too.”

  “You never know,” said Carole, joining in on the cheering-up work.

  “Oh, yes, I do,” said Lisa.

  Of course her friends knew she was right.

  The Saddle Club had only one more day together, and they needed to spend it at the mall—not that they minded. Each of them had a shopping list of essential items for the summer. And they could stop and have a sundae when they were done. That would be their farewell Saddle Club meeting.

  Lisa stood on tiptoe, looking over the crowd for her friends. She spotted them easily because Stevie was waving frantically. Another giveaway was the fact that Stevie and Carole were stationed in front of Riding Togs. Naturally, it was their favorite store.

  Stevie greeted Lisa with a brief hug and the announcement that Riding Togs was having a sale on cowboy hats.

  “Come on in. Help us choose!” Lisa followed gladly.

  They found Carole trying on an oversized black felt hat with a silver band.

  “I don’t think it’s you,” Lisa said mildly.

  “Definitely not, but isn’t it hysterical?” she asked, her eyes sparkling.

  Lisa nodded and then glanced at the selection. She was a logical thinker, and her sense of logic made her eliminate the impossible options: hats that were too big or too bizarre. It didn’t take her long to narrow down the selection.

  “Here, this tan one for you, Carole. And Stevie, I think you should go with a black. It’ll bring out the light colors in your hazel eyes.”

  Both Carole and Stevie took Lisa’s suggestions. They were tempted to buy the hats without even trying them on because Lisa was so convincing, but they did slip them onto their heads and agreed that Lisa knew what she was talking about.

  “Now to kerchiefs,” Stevie said.

  Once they’d chosen their hats, the rest was easy. They both needed riding jeans, meaning jeans without a seam on the inside of the leg. It was much more comfortable in the saddle that way. Stevie treated herself to two kerchiefs despite Carole’s saying she looked as if she were about to rob a bank when she pulled one of them up over her nose.

  “It’s to keep the dust out of my mouth,” Stevie said. “Remember how dry and dusty the trails get?” Carole did remember. That inspired her to buy herself a couple of kerchiefs, too.

  After Riding Togs, it was Lisa’s turn. She wanted to go to the bookstore.

  “I’ve got to get books about French and Italian. They don’t speak English there, you know.…”

  “There are some people who say they don’t speak it in England, either,” Stevie teased.

  Lisa laughed and then browsed through the foreign language section. “Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Danish.… Boy, there certainly are a lot of languages I don’t know. It’s sort of overwhelming.”

  The minute she said the word, she felt the feeling: overwhelming. It was frightening to her. Stevie seemed to sense that she needed some reassurance. That was one of the nice things about Stevie.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” she said. “You’ve been studying French. You’ll have the phrase books. And don’t forget, a lot of the people over there speak perfectly good English, too.”

  “Name one,” Lisa said glumly.

  “I’ll name four,” Carole chirped in. “Remember the Italian boys?”

  Lisa did, of course. Four Italian riders had come to Pine Hollow to do a demonstration of their riding skills as part of an international Pony Club exchange program. They’d all been wonderful riders, which the girls had expected; they’d also spoken excellent English. And, best of all, they’d been really nice guys.

  “Right!” Lisa said, cheering up with the thought. “Maybe I’ll run into them.”

  “Sure,” said Stevie. “I’m positive all of their parents will have just decided to drag them all over every tourist spot in Rome, and you’ll definitely be there at the same time. I bet they’ve never been to St. Peter’s before, and this is the time they’ll do it.”

  Lisa got the point. She and her parents were going to be at all the main tourist attractions, hardly the places where she’d expect to run into their friends. Still, it made her feel better just thinking about the boys. They’d been so nice that she became more confident that the other people they’d meet there would be nice, too.

  “Here’s just the thing for you,” Stevie said, pulling another book off the shelf and handing it to Lisa.

  “British English for Americans,” she said, reading the title out loud.

  Lisa flipped the book open.

  “ ‘Smashing,’ ” she read. “Says here it doesn’t have anything to do with crumpling or breaking anything up. It means ‘totally awesome.’ ” She made a face. “I think I could have figured that out.”

  Stevie took the book and glanced at a page. “Sure, everybody knows about ‘smashing,’ but do you know what ‘bangers and mash’ are?”

  “What?”

  “ ‘Bangers and mash,’ ” Stevie said smugly.
“That means sausages and mashed potatoes. If you’re not careful and don’t watch what you’re doing, you could get that in a restaurant.”

  “Don’t worry,” Lisa assured her. “I would never order something called ‘bangers and mash.’ ”

  Stevie put the book back on the shelf, and the three girls made their way to the cash register where Lisa paid for her books.

  “Next?” Carole asked.

  “A stationery store,” Lisa said. “If I can’t be with you guys and talk to you and ride with you, the very least I can do is to write you loads of letters.”

  “But we won’t be able to write you back,” said Carole. “You and your parents will be moving around so much we won’t know where to find you.”

  “Then you’re just going to have to keep a diary and let me read it when I get back. It’ll be like three weeks’ worth of letters all at once.”

  Stevie thought that keeping a diary sounded like something one of her teachers would suggest to her—the sort of thing that might be a makeup assignment for time off from school.

  “No thanks,” she said. “I’m not really good at doing things regularly like that. I’m not the reliable, organized one. That’s you.”

  “I’ll keep a diary,” Carole volunteered. Although she wasn’t writing in one now, Carole had used a diary before. She’d kept a diary when her mother was ill and found it was a wonderful source of memories for her. She thought if she kept a diary while she and Stevie were at High Meadow, that could be a wonderful source of memories for Lisa. “I think it’s a good idea. I’ll even get one without a lock so you can look at it any time.”

  Lisa pored over the stationery, finally selecting some pink paper with flower-lined envelopes. Carole chose a no-nonsense diary, a plain, leather-covered book with lots and lots of lined pages. She also bought one for Stevie, just in case she changed her mind.

  While Carole and Lisa were busy making their selections, Stevie chose a pen for Lisa as a farewell present. It had scented ink.

  “It says it’s ‘balsam,’ ” Stevie explained when Lisa joined up with her at the cash register. “Personally, I think it smells like a pine tree, and that’s to remind you of Pine Hollow.”