Over the Moon at the Big Lizard Diner

by Lisa Wingate

  Vanita Blue poked her head out of the Big Lizard, waved, and said, “Hey, there! You two need drinks for the road or anything? I heard you were headed out to fix windmills.” I glanced from the diner to the store and back, wondering how word had traveled from there to here in the time it took Zach and me to walk across the parking lot.

  “I need to pay my tab,” I answered, but Vanita shook her head.

  “Don’t worry about it, hon. Zach already took care of it.” Waving again, she added, “Have fun!” and disappeared back inside.

  “Guess I need to settle up with you, then,” I said to Zach.

  He shook his head. “My treat.” He frowned as I unwrapped one of the burgers for Mr. Grits. “But if I’d known they were for the dog, I would have let him get his own tab.” Patting Mr. Grits, he checked the dog’s eyes and teeth.

  “I know, I know.” I sighed playfully. “Dog food for dogs. People food for people. Do you work for a pet food company or something?” It occurred to me to wonder what, exactly, he did in the real world. Collie had said he was a vet and traveled a lot, but that was all I knew, except that he didn’t come home much.

  “I’m a section vet for the USDA,” he said. “It’s been a few years since I’ve been into casting broken doggy legs and prescribing diet food for overweight house cats.”

  Something told me there was more to the story, but it was obvious that he didn’t want to talk about it. Leaving off the subject, I handed Mr. Grits a cheeseburger. Engulfing it in one bite, he thumped his tail, and smiled at the remaining burger. “Here you go.” I unwrapped the prize, and he inhaled it, then licked his chops, resting his chin on the truck like a hairy Kilroy. “Sorry, that’s all there is, big fella.” Reaching up, I fixed his Barbie hair band and patted him fondly, even though he had been a very, very bad dog that day.

  Shaking his head, Zach opened the truck door for me, waiting like a valet while I climbed in. “You’re going to have that dog completely ruined before I ever get him to Collie’s house,” he joked, but I could tell he’d given up on his plan to shanghai the dog and surprise Collie’s little girl with it.

  “You can’t ruin something by loving it.” An unusually soft and New Age comment for me.

  “You sound like Jocelyn,” Zach quipped, and I chuckled. Pausing with his hand on the door, he watched as a rusted B & B Windmills truck pulled into the parking lot and stopped on the other side of my Jeep. Hooking an arm over the door, Zach waited while two men in dusty coveralls and ball caps disembarked the truck and started toward the café.

  “In a rush today, Bo?” Zach asked, and one of the men started, surprised by our presence there.

  Before he could answer, the shorter man stepped forward and stuck his hand out, smiling at Zach through a set of teeth that needed dental attention. “Hey, Zach,” he said enthusiastically. “I didn’t know you was back in town. How you been doin’?”

  “OK, Benny.” Zach shook the man’s hand with a brevity that said he wasn’t looking for friendly conversation. “Don’t suppose you boys are headed out to fix Pop’s windmills today?”

  Benny turned questioningly to the taller man, who shook his head and rubbed the back of his neck, looking at the ground. “Well, dang, I wish I could get out there today, Zach. Sorry I missed you yesterday. I got tied up with a job down toward Austin and couldn’t make it back. Anyway, I’ll give ya a call and we’ll get out there real soon about putting in some new windmills. I hope I didn’t put a hitch in your day yesterday.”

  Zach glanced at me, losing his ire for a moment; then he turned back to the two men. Pushing off the truck, he stood at his full height, towering over both of them. “Why don’t we just skip that altogether, Bo.” His tone was flat, leaving no room for argument. “Because I’ve checked the windmills, and they don’t need to be replaced. All they need is some oiling and some maintenance, which, come to think of it, is what Pop pays you boys for.”

  Bo, disappointed at the prospect of losing a sale, quickly began backpedaling. “Oh, well, since we’d decided to replace the old ones anyhow, I just figured, why not save Pop some money on the maintenance? That’s all it was. Not a lot of need to fix windmills we’re gonna replace, right? We’re a little behind schedule in putting in the new units, but we’ll be there.”

  “What say we skip it?” Zach’s gaze was cool and unwavering. He leaned comfortably against the door again as the other man shoved his hands into his pockets and jingled coins.

  “Well, Zach, it’s really Pop’s decis—”

  Zach cut him off. “If you bring this up with Pop, you and I are going to have a problem. We don’t have a problem, do we, Bo?”

  Shaking his head, Bo backed away, his pale blue eyes shifting back and forth. “No … sure, of course not, Zach. Listen, we’ll get out there and get those old units running.”

  “Don’t bother.” Zach pushed off the truck again. “I’ll take care of getting the units going again. I’m not going to cancel the maintenance contract, because that would upset Pop, but once I get them running, I expect every one of those windmills to be as slick as a Sunday-morning skillet. You’re going to give Pop what he’s paying for. We clear?” He stuck his hand out, and Bo took it with an audible sigh of relief.

  “Sure thing, Zach.” Pulling his cap off and mopping his balding brow, Bo backstepped toward the café. “Thanks for being understanding. It’s been tough keeping up with the business since Dad passed away.”

  Zach didn’t answer, just shook his head as Bo and Benny Bales turned around and scooted off toward the café. Sighing, Zach glanced at me with a sardonic smirk. “Sorry I didn’t introduce you.”

  “It’s all right,” I said, suspecting that the Bales brothers weren’t anybody I wanted to meet. From the café window, I heard someone hollering out a jovial greeting as they went in.

  Zach stiffened, listening a moment, then shook it off and closed my door before he walked around the truck and got in. We drove in silence for a while as we left the Big Lizard and turned onto the gravel country road that wound like a lazy brown snake toward the gateway of the Jubilee. Zach, I noted, was not the wild speed racer I had anticipated from our earlier trip through the pasture. He drove at a leisurely pace, his body slowly relaxing in the seat, elbow resting on the open window frame, so that the breeze blew under his shirt and puffed the chambray fabric out like a parachute.

  Since Zach wasn’t in the mood to talk, I watched the miles pass in an airy rhythm, considering the rich golden glint of the sun on the dry native grasses, and the faraway hills, stacked row upon row, like torn strips of colored paper on the horizon. A study in shades of green—sage, dusty green, forest green, and a rim so far away it was some hue between green and pale sky blue. Somewhere in that mix was the color of Zach Truitt’s eyes… .

  Slowing the truck, he drove past the Jubilee gateway and continued on the road to the camp. I was glad when we stopped to put cow food in several feeders and perform minor repairs on a barbed-wire fence. It was a welcome distraction from watching Zach brood about Pop and the Bales brothers. By the time we’d finished feeding cows and fixing fences, Zach was his usual jovial self. Unfortunately, I could feel my mood deteriorating as we drew nearer to the therapy camp. I knew we were going to pass by the horse corral and I was going to feel guilty because the other horses were out in the grassy pasture while Sleepy stood locked in the dusty paddock. At least I wouldn’t have to face the other campers as we drove through. By now they would be entrenched in the afternoon sharing session down by the river, where they would cheer their horse psychology successes and emote about all the things they had learned. Why was it that every one of them could make friends with a horse, and I couldn’t? What was wrong with me?

  When we came within sight of the camp headquarters, Zach gave me a contemplative look that made me wonder if he was reading my thoughts. “So how did horse therapy turn out?”

  Failure slipped over me like a dark cloud. “I flunked. Jocelyn made Sleepy stay in the corral because
I couldn’t catch him. All of the other horses got to go to the pasture and eat grass.” Slouching in the seat, I tried to decide whether to laugh it off or succumb to a bout of general insecurity and latent feelings of inadequacy. Somehow Zach’s presence made the latter seem like a nonpossibility. I’d just had my first real kiss in … well … counting the years was humiliating, so I didn’t bother. Actually, I didn’t think I’d ever felt that way during or after a kiss. There was a giddiness buzzing around like a bee in my brain, stirring up my thoughts and keeping things slightly out of focus.

  I had the misty thought that there were things I should be doing, rather than trekking out to perform first aid on a windmill. I should be retrieving Caroline Truitt’s notes from Pop, or searching for Melvin’s mystery dinosaur. With a femur so perfectly preserved, there were bound to be other components of the fossil, perhaps even enough to positively identify it as a tyrannosaurus.

  A species heretofore unconfirmed in Texas …

  An exciting possibility that didn’t seem to matter in the least right now.

  Hard to explain, even to myself.

  “You couldn’t catch Sleepy?” Zach asked the question with the kind of disbelief that might have accompanied words like, The sky turned polka-dotted and a UFO landed in the horse corral? Really?

  “Sleepy and I did not get along,” I said defensively. “He didn’t like me and he wouldn’t let me get close.” I left out the part where Jocelyn said that I was keeping my distance from the horse as much as the horse was keeping his distance from me. “It just didn’t go very well. I’m terrified of horses.” And relationships, actually.

  Funny, I didn’t feel terrified right now. Just disappointed in myself for having flunked horse psychology.

  “But you couldn’t catch Sleepy?” Zach repeated. “I grew up on that horse. He loves people.”

  “He didn’t love me.” I craned to see around the barn as we came within view of the corral. “I’m not very good with animals.”

  Zach eyed me with disbelief. “Oh, come on, any girl who can rescue an outlaw dog with a stadium seat and a folding umbrella can’t be too bad with animals.”

  The image made me laugh. Who’d have thought, as I was fending off Zach with my stadium seat and my umbrella, that a day later I’d be kissing him under the Lover’s Oak? How was that possible? “The dog was a fluke. He was desperate. There was a big, bad cowboy out to do him harm.”

  Zach grinned and said, “Well, the cowboy was having a big, bad day until that point.” The earnest admission stirred my emotions like a mixer on high.

  “Did it get better after that?” I couldn’t believe I’d said it. My heart did a strange tattoo, waiting for the answer.

  Letting the truck roll to a stop beside the horse corral, he looked sideways at me like he was bemused by the strange chemistry between us. “Yeah, it did. There haven’t been”—he clipped off the sentence, turned away, and finished with—“a lot of laughs around here lately.”

  I wondered what he’d intended to say before he stopped himself. I wanted to peer into his mind and see what the words were. As he gazed at Sleepy in the corral, I saw a mirror of the loneliness I felt. But maybe I was only projecting my own needs onto him. It was impossible to tell. Even the horse, standing forlornly in the long afternoon shadows beside the barn, seemed like a portrait of my feelings.

  “Poor thing,” I said. As if on cue, Sleepy lifted his head and nickered at us. Far away in the pasture another horse answered, and Sleepy whinnied so hard his entire body shook. “Can we let him out?”

  “Sure.” Zach stepped from the truck, and I followed him through the gate into the corral. Nickering, Sleepy crossed the enclosure and stuck his head against Zach’s chest like a big lapdog. Scratching the tuft of long hair between the horse’s ears, Zach commented, “See? He’s friendly.”

  Even as he said it, I could see Sleepy watching me with one eye, plotting strategy. “To you, maybe, but he doesn’t like me.” Equine-o-phobia crept up inside me like the mercury rising on a thermometer, until my stomach knotted and my body went stiff. Swishing his tail, Sleepy kicked a back foot against his stomach, and I jumped. “See? He’s trying to kick me.”

  “He’s chasing flies.” Zach had the nerve to loop an arm over Sleepy’s neck and use him as a leaning post. Eyes drifting closed, Sleepy rubbed lovingly against Zach’s shirt. “The first thing you have to know about horses is they don’t like or dislike anybody. They just react to trust, or the lack of it. Sleepy’s an old grouch, but he understands people. He spent years in the summer camp string.” Scuffing the ground with his boot, he watched a filmy puff of dust rise and settle, then smiled and shook his head. “Sleepy’s mother, Belle, was one of the original camp horses, and I think she taught Sleepy everything she knew. Belle understood kids, and the kids loved her. Every year, when we’d come here to help get the horses ready for the camp, Dad would put Belle in the camp string. Belle was really supposed to be my horse, so I’d cry and fuss and carry on.”

  Resting against the fence, I pictured Zach as a little dark-haired boy with a big pouty lip. I chuckled, and he smiled sideways at me.

  “Hey, now, this was serious business. Belle was the only thing around here that was the right color for playing Lone Ranger. Pop gave her to me for that very reason.”

  I imagined Zach as a pint-sized Lone Ranger. Adorable in little Western boots and a big white cowboy hat, like the pictures of my older brothers the Christmas that Santa brought cowboy suits and Red Ryder BB guns. For the strangest instant I yearned to be the mother of sons and buy them tiny Western boots and little cowboy outfits. I realized I probably never would. There was just Sydney and me, and probably that was all there would ever be.

  I laughed, a slightly wistful laugh. Half at him, half at my own misguided train of thought, off on a track that came from some uncharted part of myself and led to somewhere I couldn’t imagine.

  “It’s no laughing matter.” He drew me back from the train trip to divorced-mother despair. “You can’t say ‘Hi-ho, Silver’ on a brown horse. It just doesn’t have the same effect.”

  “I can see where it wouldn’t.”

  “Pop had some sympathy for me.” There was a hint of the little boy as he went on. “Pop would put Belle back in the barn, and Dad would put her back in the camp string, and they’d go back and forth about it for a while, until finally Dad won out. I’d stomp off, thinking my father was the meanest man in the world. I’d sit down by the river and plan to make a raft and run away. Dad would let me stew for a while, and eventually he’d come around and tell me how Belle was the only horse he could count on to babysit any kid who came through the camp—even the ones who were scared to death of horses, or the ones who wanted to pick a switch off a tree and make the horse go faster, or the ones who yanked the reins too much. By the time Dad was done with the team-player talk, I felt like Belle could cure world hunger, end the Cold War, and make the Cubs win the World Series all on her own.”

  Giving Sleepy an adoring look, he smoothed the long white hair tenderly away from the horse’s cloudy eyes. For an instant I was jealous of the horse. “You know, the day Sleepy was born was the day I knew I’d go into vet med. Belle was old by then, and she had a hard time foaling because one of Sleepy’s legs was folded back. Old Doc Ham from Lampasas pushed him back in, pulled the leg around, and out Sleepy came. I thought,‘Man, I want to know how to do that.’ ” A flutter of amusement formed crinkles at the corners of his eyes. “Which was a pretty profound thought for me at the time. I was sixteen and didn’t think about much except baseball and girls. Watching Belle have Sleepy gave me the guts to tell Dad I didn’t care about getting a college baseball scholarship, that what I really wanted to be was a vet. Dad wasn’t thrilled, but Pop thought it was a fantastic idea.”

  “That’s a great story.” I had new respect for Sleepy—babysitter, patient teacher, friend to would-be Lone Rangers and frightened summer campers far away from home. Dividing line and bridge between
father and son. A lesson in life. “He must be quite a horse.”

  “Yes. He is,” Zach agreed, walking to the gate. “Of course, he’s old and arthritic now. It’s hard on him standing in the pen all day.”

  A mammoth slab of guilt fell on my shoulders. “I know. Let’s bust him out of here, OK?”

  “Good idea.” Grabbing a head harness, Zach tried to hand it to me.

  I held my hands up like a traffic cop signaling halt. “Oh, I didn’t mean … you just go ahead. I don’t know how to put the harness on him or anything.”

  “Halter,” he corrected, holding up the tangled mess of nylon webbing and rope. I vaguely remembered throwing it in the dirt and stomping on it in a fit of frustration earlier that day. Straightening out the apparatus, Zach shook off the dust and held it up, demonstrating the proper working of the buckle. “This way. That part goes over his nose, and this buckles behind his ears. It’s pretty simple.”

  “For you, maybe.” I knew I was being a baby. Zach was offering to help me redeem myself, and I was wimping out. “I can’t do it,” I admitted, rubbing my forehead, feeling like the lost, ragged woman who had arrived in Texas yesterday morning. “I’m scared to death of horses, all right? It’s like a phobia. I can’t do it.”

  “Come on, anyone can catch a horse,” he said, his eyes acute in a way that made me suddenly aware of his nearness. He stepped closer, and I forgot all about the horse. My body crackled with latent electricity. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

  That couldn’t have been farther from the truth. “I’m not worried,” I lied. “I’m terrified.” The truth.

  “Don’t be.” His voice was low and thick, and for a moment I thought he was going to kiss me again. It seemed like a good idea. I arched onto my tiptoes and started to tilt my face upward, gazing at the suntanned contours of his face… .

  And then I felt him slipping the halter into Horse Psychology Lindsey’s arms, turning her around slowly, his hands on hers, moving her like a limp puppet toward the horse, guiding her fingers upward to stroke the soft gray velvet muzzle. His fingers curled over her fingers, intertwined with them in a way that was both natural and frightening. She drew back just enough to feel the barrier of Zach’s body curved against hers, the caress of his breath on her skin.