Horse Love

by Bonnie Bryant

  “Think so?” Stevie asked.

  “I know so,” said Mrs. Reg, patting Stevie on the shoulder. “You’ve been working so hard on this project that I may just let you off the hook for tack polishing for a long time to come!”

  “You mean, like months?” Stevie asked. It was unlike Mrs. Reg to let any opportunity pass to put a rider to work on something—especially tack cleaning.

  “No, I mean like two or three days!” she teased.

  “Whatever,” Stevie said, sweeping her hair off her forehead with a paint-splattered wrist, leaving a long white smear as she went.

  Stevie and Mrs. Reg were still admiring the freshly painted hat wall when Veronica sauntered past.

  “What’s that?” she asked, brushing some plaster dust off her otherwise immaculate riding pants.

  “The result of something known as w-o-r-k,” said Stevie.

  Veronica didn’t respond to the snide remark. Instead, she just walked up to the hat wall and began moving the helmets around. In a few seconds, she’d transformed the M into a T and the exclamation point into an I. “Taxi!” she called out, as if she were flagging one for herself—and just to make sure everyone noticed the clever transformation she’d managed.

  “I’d be glad to call you a taxi,” Stevie said. “To take you home!”

  “Hey! You’re a taxi!” said April, giggling at her own joke.

  Veronica walked on, still brushing at the long-gone plaster dust.

  Stevie shifted the hats back to MAX!, not minding that Veronica was being a pain. Even Veronica couldn’t spoil a day like this.

  She went back into the tack room to find Carole. It was time to begin thinking about what kind of celebration they’d have.

  JANE HAD BEEN right. Tec wasn’t going to be in the show and Lisa had no intention of begging him. He’d already made a plan for the afternoon to go on a cruise in the resort’s boat. A lot of the other kids were going, too. She knew she’d have fun if she went with them, but she was committed to the talent show, and that afternoon she was going to do her audition. In a way, it almost made it better. That meant Tec would be in the audience. She was good onstage, and now Tec would see it from the best possible perspective. She’d sing “Tomorrow,” and he’d know it was for him.

  “I would have told you about the cruise so you could have come along,” he had said while they were at the buffet, getting desserts.

  “It’s okay, really. I don’t mind. I’ve got something I want to do this afternoon, so even if you could get me a reservation now, I wouldn’t be able to go. But it sounds like fun.”

  “Sure,” he said. “But it would be more fun if you were going to be there.” He reached out and patted her cheek, which was, by then, totally red with a blush.

  “Well, I’ll see you at dinner,” she said.

  “It’s a deal,” he told her. “Bye for now.”

  He tucked an apple and two cookies into his shirt pockets and left the dining room, followed by most of the group of kids they’d been with at the beach that morning. Shelley linked her arm through Tec’s on one side and Brian’s on the other as they walked out.

  Yech, Lisa said to herself. She was having a lot of trouble warming to Shelley.

  Lisa rejoined the few kids who weren’t going on the cruise and finished her dessert without saying much to them. Their conversation revolved around things that had happened at the disco the night before when Lisa had been sound asleep. It had nothing to do with her. When she’d finished her fruit salad, she excused herself and headed for the theater.

  Jane was there, working on some of the blocking and waiting for auditioners.

  “No singing partner?” Jane asked.

  “Off on a cruise for the afternoon,” Lisa said.

  “I’m sorry,” Jane said.

  “I’m not,” Lisa told her. “You were right. He’s got a lot going on, and I guess he’s going to be too busy for rehearsals anyway. It’s just me.”

  “And that’s fine, too,” Jane said. “Now, sing for me.”

  It took Jane a few minutes to find the right sheet music, but once she had she sat down at the piano and struck the series of chords that were totally and wonderfully familiar to Lisa. She began, “The sun’ll come out tomorrow.…”

  Jane played all the way through the song, and Lisa was delighted to sing all the verses, which she still remembered perfectly. She’d never performed it without other people onstage, but she took to the solo role just fine, judging by the grin on Jane’s face.

  “You’re great!” Jane said after she’d finished playing the last notes. “I don’t know why you thought you needed a singing partner for anything at all. The audience is going to love you!”

  Lisa was pleased, and she had no intention of telling Jane that she didn’t care a whit what most people in the audience thought of her. There was only one person there whom she wanted to have love her, tomorrow and always.

  “I’ve got several other people to hear now, and then we’re going to work on costumes. Like I said, I think we’ve got something that’ll pass for Annie’s dress. In the meantime, you can help Eddie sort out the fairy costumes.…”

  Lisa helped Eddie sort out the costumes. She also helped him iron the frog’s outfit and sew up the split seam on the back half of the cow. After that, she and Eddie and Ramon put sparkly paint on the undersea flats and hammered in some loose nails on the barnyard fence.

  In the background, she could hear other people auditioning for solos. There was a woman who was under the severe misimpression that she could carry a tune—so severe that she’d brought her own sheet music and costume with her. Jane had to explain to her as nicely as possible that the show was already too long and, well …

  It turned out there was a juggler in their midst. A man from Idaho had a wonderful act in which he juggled a conch shell, a chunk of coral, and a beanbag. He was very funny, sitting on a stool pretending he was on a unicycle. Jane explained to him that the show was not too long at all and they’d be more than happy to have him join the cast.

  A couple of other singers and a piano player auditioned as well, and Jane conceded that the show had room for one more singer and one more piano player. Lisa was impressed with the way Jane handled the talented and the untalented. She was pleased to be among the former and was happy to tell the juggler how funny he was when he joined the crew and began juggling stuffed chickens from the barnyard set.

  “Okay, costume time,” Jane said.

  The juggler didn’t need anything, and the other singer was just going to wear her own dress, so that wasn’t a problem. The piano player said he’d do just fine in shorts and a T-shirt, so the only person who needed a costume was Lisa.

  “I can just wear my own dress,” she told Jane.

  “Like I said, I think there’s something very Annie-like in here.”

  Lisa followed her into the costume room. It reminded her of nothing so much as the tack room at Pine Hollow. Gowns, pants, shirts, skirts, and crazy hats seemed to flow out of the wall, and she strongly suspected there was as tight an organizational plan in effect here as there was at Pine Hollow.

  Jane walked right to the dress she wanted. “Here we go,” she said, pulling a hanger off a rack. The dress was, in fact, Annie’s very red dress, a mere two sizes too big for Lisa.

  “Eddie! Ramon! Get in here!” she called out.

  Eddie and Ramon arrived.

  “Not a problem,” Ramon declared.

  “Follow me,” said Eddie.

  Lisa did.

  Fifteen minutes later, she was back out in the sunshine, having been told to relax until the official rehearsal began.

  It wasn’t easy resting when so much was going on in her mind. In one corner, she was wondering how the cruise was going, hoping that Tec was having fun (but not too much fun), and sort of hoping that Shelley wasn’t having any fun at all and that Kiki had fallen overboard. In another corner, she was running over the steps in the dances she was doing and making sure she rem
embered all the words to all the songs (she did). In most of her mind, though, she was thinking about how much Tec was going to love it when she sang to him—not that anyone else in the audience was going to know that that was what she was doing.

  An hour later she was too busy to think. The rehearsal was extremely intense and extremely tiring. A lot of the participants had forgotten words, cues, and dance steps. Lisa seemed to have a better memory than most and helped out.

  Then the time came for her to sing her solo for the performers.

  They loved it. They clapped and stomped for her and patted her on the back and told her she was great.

  Lisa grinned, feeling even better inside than out, because she knew it was going to be great.

  Then Eddie and Ramon came out from backstage and gave her exactly what she needed—a completely resized Annie dress.

  “Perfect!” she declared.

  Tec was going to love it!

  “THAT’S IT, STEVIE,” Adam reported, flashing a small salute. “The last bridle is back in its place!”

  “I can’t believe it,” Stevie said. “Done, and we still have a couple of days to go before Max gets back. You guys are something!”

  “We couldn’t have done it without, um—” Betsy began and then paused.

  “Our boss,” April supplied. Stevie suspected that was nicer than what Betsy had been going to say, but she knew that everybody was proud of the job they’d done, and even if she’d been a little bossy from time to time, it had worked.

  There was a general cheer before the helpers began picking up the paintbrushes and putting the equipment away.

  “I’m going to give the feed room a final check,” Carole said. “It would be really easy to leave a bridle or a box of bits or a bunch of stirrup irons in there.”

  “I’ll come check, too,” Stevie said, following her friend down the hall.

  What they saw in the feed room really surprised them. It was the feed room all right, and it didn’t look one tiny bit different than it had four days ago, before the whole project had begun. And that was the problem.

  It was a mess. The paint was old, dusty, and peeling. The ceiling was dark with a generation of dirt.

  The girls didn’t say anything. Stevie just glanced at her watch, and they returned to the bright and clean tack room.

  “We think you’d better come see this,” Carole said to the remains of their afternoon work crew.

  The crew followed Carole and Stevie back to the feed room. Nobody said anything, because everybody saw the obvious.

  “I don’t want to do the ceiling again!” Joe wailed.

  “I guess it’s my turn for the really ugly tall-person job,” said Adam, now recovered from the flu.

  “You’ve got a deal,” said Joe.

  Without further ado, the crew began to move the feed bins to the center of the room. This job was going to go much faster, partly because it was a smaller room, but mostly because they didn’t have to take everything out of it. All they needed to do was to shove everything in the center and put a drop cloth over it.

  Stevie and Carole knew they’d be ready to begin serious painting by the time the late-afternoon crew showed up. One coat tonight, one tomorrow …

  “OH, YOU SHOULD have seen your father trying to get out of that sand trap! We might just as well have stayed at the beach for all the time he spent digging in the sand!” Mrs. Atwood teased. Lisa’s father was smiling at the ribbing.

  The three of them were sitting together over dinner. There had been no sign of Tec, but the smiles on Lisa’s parents’ faces had been very inviting, and she was glad to be with them when they were in such good moods.

  “I was really awful!” Mr. Atwood told Lisa. “On the other hand, your mother gave me some lessons in three-putting.”

  “And one in four-putting!” her mother said.

  Lisa didn’t know much about golf, but she knew that her parents had obviously had a good time playing, even though apparently they hadn’t played very well.

  “So who won?” Lisa asked.

  “We both did,” her father said. “I can’t remember when I’ve had that much fun!”

  “Me either,” said Mrs. Atwood. “And what did you do?” she asked.

  “I was here,” Lisa said. “Actually, I spent most of the afternoon in the theater, working on the talent show. It’s going to be great.”

  “Of course it is,” said her mother. “You’re going to be in it.”

  “Mom,” Lisa protested.

  “Your mother has a point,” said her dad.

  “You’re just saying that because you’re my parents,” Lisa joked.

  “We take our job seriously, as you can tell,” her mother said. “And besides, you are talented and you always make us proud when you’re onstage.”

  “Thanks. I hope this won’t be an exception. I’ll probably do okay, but the highlight is the juggler, believe me!”

  “I’ll be surprised if we like his performance better than yours,” said her father. “But this is a week with a lot of highlights.”

  “I agree,” said Lisa’s mother, beaming.

  “Me too,” said Lisa.

  “Family vacations are a good idea,” said Mrs. Atwood.

  “This one certainly is,” said Mr. Atwood.

  After dinner, her parents were going to play bridge with a couple they’d met at the golf club. They told Lisa she was welcome to sit in. Lisa couldn’t imagine that that would be any fun at all—especially if she could find Tec anywhere.

  “No thanks,” she said. “I’ll see you around, though.” She excused herself and headed for the lounge, where she expected to find what she was beginning to think of as The Group.

  There was no sign of them. Lisa was pretty sure they’d all be finished with dinner, so she kept on walking, wondering where to look. Perhaps the game room, though she wasn’t much looking forward to another game of Ping-Pong. Fortunately they weren’t there, and Lisa didn’t have to go much farther to find them.

  They were on the volleyball court, which was lit for night play.

  “Hey, Lis! How’s it going? Want to play?” Tec invited her as soon as he spotted her.

  “Sure,” she said.

  “Come play on our side,” Brian said. “We need all the help we can get!”

  “Okay,” she said, a little disappointed to be playing against Tec rather than with him, but it didn’t matter. Volleyball was a fun game and a sport that she was good at. This would be fun no matter which side she played on.

  Fortunately she was wearing sneakers and shorts, so she didn’t have to change to join the game. She stood at the spot Brian indicated and waited for the serve.

  It was a lively game. The ball swooped back and forth over the net and the teams were fairly well matched—until Shelley rotated into the front row of Lisa’s team. She was wearing the skimpiest of string bikinis. In fact, it was the same one Lisa had seen her wearing the first time she’d seen her in the swimming pool. It might have been proper wear for a swim, but it hardly seemed adequate for a volleyball game. Shelley jumped and twisted, bumping and spiking. She was actually quite a good athlete, but Lisa was dead sure that that was the last thing that any of the boys on the other team—or even on her own team—were thinking about as her lithe, skinny body did those amazing things to the volleyball.

  “Fifteen to four!” Brian declared. They’d won handily. Lisa was glad her team had won, but considering their secret weapon, she wasn’t convinced any boy on the other team even noticed.

  They played another game with approximately the same result. By then it was nine-thirty, and some of the kids—including Shelley—were talking about changing their clothes before going to the disco. The group dispersed with vague promises of see you laters, leaving Lisa and Tec and the volleyball, which had to be returned to the game room. They walked there together.

  “How was the cruise?” she asked.

  “Uh, oh, right. It was okay,” he said.

  “Were
most of the kids there?”

  “A lot of that crowd. I don’t remember who, exactly. I missed you.”

  “Well, I missed you, too,” said Lisa, smiling at him.

  “What was it you were doing?” he asked. Lisa wondered why he didn’t remember, but decided to take advantage of it with a surprise when the talent show came along. “You’ll see, all in good time,” she said. “On Saturday,” she added.

  “A surprise?”

  “I think so,” she said. She handed the volleyball to the clerk in the game room and the two of them turned toward the ocean. Tec took her hand and they began another wonderful walk in the starry moonlit night.

  “It’s hard to imagine this is all almost over,” said Lisa. “It’s going so fast!”

  “Sure is,” said Tec. “And even though I’m staying longer, it still seems like it’s flying by.”

  “That’s the way it is when you’re having fun,” said Lisa.

  “Definitely,” Tec agreed, squeezing her hand.

  Lisa slipped out of her sneakers and began sloshing in the gentle waves that lapped at the shore. Tec joined her, taking her hand again.

  “One of the things I haven’t had a chance to do is teach you how to ride,” Lisa said.

  “Oh, right,” said Tec.

  “There’ll be time when we get back to Virginia, though,” she said.

  He looked at her curiously. “We may be in the same state, but we live pretty far apart,” he said.

  “We’ll find a way,” she said, certain that somehow their love for one another would surpass the miles.

  “My best friend’s boyfriend lives far away, too,” she told him. “And he comes over to our stable to ride all the time.”

  “Really?” said Tec. “Horses?”

  “Sure, that’s what we ride at Pine Hollow. You’re going to love the place. The owner is a guy named Max and he’s the greatest instructor. I mean, I can give you an idea of what you should be doing, but Max’ll have you in top form in no time. There are a lot of great horses there. You’ll probably start on Patch. Everybody does. But when you get a little better, Max might let you ride Topside. He’s a Thoroughbred, like the horse I usually ride, Prancer. Both of them belong to the stable.”