If Wishes Were Horses

by Barbara Morgenroth

  IF

  WISHES

  WERE HORSES

  a novella

  Barbara Morgenroth

  Copyright ©2012 Barbara Morgenroth

  Chapter 1

  “It’s a million degrees in here!” I flung the dishtowel across the kitchen and it landed on the floor. No one ever praised me for my pitching arm.

  “Not even close; it’s 95,” my mother replied not even bothering to turn toward me as she diced cucumbers. “The air conditioning guy is on the way.”

  “I hate it here! I want to go home!” My tee shirt was stuck to me in the most unpleasant, almost wet-contest like way.

  “This is it. This is our new home.”

  “You didn’t even ask me.”

  She turned. “I did.”

  “No. You announced it.”

  “I didn’t have much time, did I? I did the best I could. We live in a beautiful town and we have a way to earn money. Be grateful.”

  “Why couldn’t we stay in Connecticut?”

  “Because this was a restaurant I could afford.” She used the same tone of voice when I was six.

  “There wasn’t anything closer within three thousand miles? Why don’t you tell the truth? You don’t want to see my father anymore.”

  “That’s true, too,” my mother admitted.

  “I do, though.”

  With a shrug that made me want to throw something else, she turned back to the huge bowl of salad being prepared for lunch. “I guess since you hardly ever saw him when we were married, it’s probably natural you’d like to see him afterwards.”

  I struggled to untie the apron around my waist. It was wet, too, since I’d been wiping my hands on it all morning. Pushing it down over my hips, I stepped out of it and kicked it toward the refrigerator.

  “Your temper tantrum can last fifteen minutes, I need help with lunch.”

  “I don’t want to serve people!”

  “We own a restaurant, that’s what you do.”

  “That’s what you do!”

  I grabbed my bag and headed out the back door into the blazing California sunshine. Did it ever get cloudy? Did it ever rain? We’d been in Cadiz for six weeks and there hadn’t been one drop of water falling from the sky. How was it possible for it to never rain in the summer? There was a huge ocean just over the mountain range. Wasn’t that wet? What about condensation? What about all the maps of the world, where there was green along the coastlines of every country? What made California different? Why did I find myself in this aberration of geography?

  I went down the alley and found myself on the main street. It was quaint. That was one of the draws of the town, that it was cute. Cadiz was almost not a real town but more like Old California Town would be at Disneyland. The only thing we lacked was an animatronic Zorro and a couple senoritas with fans.

  Every building was white adobe with red Spanish tile roofs and wherever possible, archways and porticos dripping with hanging baskets full of cascading flowers. There was, also, a strip mall part of town with the businesses you find everywhere; but in the center of Cadiz, the illusion was preserved that we left the modern world behind.

  The charming, if rather falling apart, little town in Connecticut where I grew up, where all my friends still were, where I felt part of something, where my life was, was real life. There was nothing phony about Old Newbury.

  This place was bright like a hundred watt bulb burning at one-fifty. It was unnatural. Everything was so much. The flowers were more vibrant, the trees were bigger and there were real mountains. And not a drop of rain.

  There was a bench facing a fountain in the middle of a roundabout so I sat down. I didn’t understand the attraction to this place. California dreamin’ was an illusion.

  I just wanted to go home.

  At least there was some water, splashing enthusiastically in the true Californian mode, in the fountain.

  “Hi.” A girl with a mass of tangled dark hair sat beside me and began brushing dust off her bares legs to no great success. “Your mother said you were out here somewhere.”

  “Yup. Somewhere.”

  She smiled, another blissfully happy Californian. I didn’t smile back. Why was it so hard to be left alone in my misery?

  “Excuse me. Who are you?”

  “Sorry. Emma Crocker. My father supplies the restaurant with vegetables. It’s delivery day.” She put her feet up on the bench.

  I nodded, beginning to wilt under the relentless sun and her upbeat personality.

  “You’ll get used to it here.”

  “Is that a threat?” I asked.

  She laughed.

  “Maybe we won’t stay. Maybe we’ll go home.”

  “East Coast?”

  “Connecticut.”

  “What do they have that we don’t have?”

  “My life as I knew it.”

  “Oh.” She twirled a strand of hair around her fingers.

  “Are you going to Country Day School?”

  “If I’m still here.”

  Emma smiled. “If you’re still here, you’ll like it. It’s a good school. My brother and I go there, but he’s graduating in a year.”

  From the distance, north of town there was the sound of singing or chanting and some drums beating.

  “What’s the noise?”

  “It’s Rose Geddes Day,” someone said from behind us.

  I turned to see an older woman whose gray hair was pulled back into a long braid.

  “Hi, Ivy,” Emma said. “This is Caprice.”

  “What a delightful name! Are you capricious?”

  “No, and Cap’s more than enough,” I replied feeling the flush of embarrassment that had plagued me my whole life.

  “Ivy is Rose’s sister. She owns the art gallery,” Emma explained and pointed to a store behind us.

  “Why does your sister get to have her own day?”

  “Give her the long version,” Emma urged. “She needs to catch up on local history.”

  Ivy smiled as she sat down next to me on the bench. “My sister and I were from a fine Philadelphia family, the kind that summered in Europe and wintered in Palm Beach. We were debutantes but neither of us fit into society. Rose had excelled in the arts at École Redon and wanted to go to New York City, get an apartment in Greenwich Village and do her sculpture. My parents were horrified at this notion and immediately got her engaged to a proper young man to keep her out of trouble. We put our heads together. There were so few choices. Rose would get married or we’d run away from home so we packed one bag each and came to California many, many years ago looking for a great adventure.”

  “Did you find it?” I asked.

  “It found us,” Ivy replied, her eyes glinting merrily. “Many of the streets weren’t paved yet and we didn’t have running water in our cabin but the valley had just been discovered by artists from all over America. There was Charles Marshall Moore, the great water colorist, and Tsygan who could do everything, just to name two.

  “I began to study Native American pottery and Rose did her sculpture.” Ivy pointed at the fountain.

  I looked at the imposing statue of a woman arms rising skyward, broken shackles dangling from each wrist.

  “That’s Lösesegen, the Blessing of Release. Some consider this Rose’s finest work and she was offered a great deal of money for it. There was a buyer in Paris but she wanted it here at this very special place.”

  “Aqua Olvidado,” Emma supplied.

  “Yes,” Ivy said almost reverentially. “The Forgotten Water.”

  “There’s water here now.”

  “Oh yes, now, but not the first winter we were here. There had been a well for many years but it suddenly dried up. The townspe
ople had given up looking for water there. Rose didn’t believe it was truly lost so she dug and dug and she dug down deep enough to find the water that was forgotten by the earth.”

  The chanting and singing grew louder. I could see a procession walking down the middle of the street, colorfully dressed, dancing women.

  “Every year to commemorate finding the lost run, people come to throw a coin into the fountain and make a wish.”

  I looked at Emma doubtfully.

  “What do you wish?” Ivy asked us.

  “Stay away from my sister, you lunatic.”

  I jumped up in surprise and turned.

  “That’s my brother, Mill,” Emma said. “His manners leave something to be desired.”

  “And your work ethic stinks. I had to unload everything by myself.” He was not a happy Californian and I wondered if the Smithsonian should be contacted to take him in for testing.

  “Where was Dad?”

  “Talking to her mother,” he said jabbing a thumb in my direction. “Let’s get going.”

  “No. The parade just got here.”

  Without the scowl, he probably would have been considered devastatingly handsome to any female not dead and moldering in the grave. With sun streaked dark brown hair and eyes that seemed to match the same tones, he was tan, tall and it looked like his tee shirt was one size too small.

  “Throw a coin,” Ivy encouraged me. “Make a wish for your future.”

  “If wishes were horses, that accounts for all this horse manure,” Mill replied.

  Ivy’s smile didn’t leave her face as she regarded Mill with limitless tolerance.

  The women had surrounded the fountain and were chanting "Leap forth from the fetters, escape from the foes! Leap forth from the fetters, escape from the foes!"

  Drums were banged. Tambourines were shaken.

  “I have so nothing to lose.” I dug into my bag for my wallet.

  “You can’t be serious. You believe all this earth magic manure?” He asked us. “Then you deserve exactly what you’re going to get.”

  I found a quarter and paused while formulating my wish, then flipped the coin into the water. I gave him a toss of my head.

  Then, with a glance down at my bag, realized I had just pitched the uncirculated quarter my grandmother had given to me the day I was born.

  Chapter 2

  All around me, handfuls of coins were splashing into the water.

  “That’s my coin!” I shouted.

  “That’s what you do; throw your wish away and let it come to you as it will,” Ivy replied.

  I rushed to the edge of the fountain, bumping into a large woman wearing a long multicolored skirt who reeked of patchouli. “No, my grandmother gave me that quarter. I want it back.”

  With complete lack of respect for the moment, Mill put his booted foot up on the rim of the fountain.

  Moving past him, I tried to see into the rippling water. “It must be on top.”

  “Two words,” Mill said. “It’s gone.”

  “No!”

  “The creaky mechanism of the universe is now grinding. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. Miss I-Wish-I-May-I-Wish-I-Might has requested a shiny sports car from the Great ATM in the sky.”

  “There’s nothing I need less than a sports car.” A pickup truck and horse trailer were much more my speed.

  Mill shrugged. “What do you want then, Miss Wish?”

  “It’s none of your business, is it?” I replied irritably. I had had enough of his unsympathetic comments.

  “No, it’s not. Come on, Em, we have to get back to the ranch.”

  Emma came over to me. “We can’t leave her in the middle of a crisis.”

  “Some crisis. If you bought a lottery ticket, you would lose four times as much and still be out less than a King-size Snickers bar. And you,” Mill said pointedly to me, “are needed at the restaurant. Lunch time.”

  What did I care about lunch? These laughing, happy Californians would probably be parading themselves right into the restaurant and asking for salads with dressing on the side. Without looking where I was going, I pushed into another woman and stepped on someone’s foot as I stared into the water.

  “There it is!” My quarter had landed near the foot of the unbound Valkyrie, or whatever she was.

  “Be sure you get your own coin,” Ivy warned me.

  “Will you stop it?” Mill shot back. “Let her take whatever quarter looks like hers. The infinitely wise spirit of the fountain knows there’s little difference between them,” he added.

  “Once she made a wish on her coin, that made it special.”

  “Very special,” he replied sarcastically.

  I plunged my hand into the water and extracted my coin in triumph.

  “Numismatists from the four corners of the earth will flock here just to get a look at this unique in all the world quarter.” He waved his hand at it with a flourish.

  “You’re being mean,” Emma told him.

  “Maybe so but I’m not demented.” Mill turned and walked down the street.

  “Is it something about me or is he always like that?” I asked Emma as we walked back to the restaurant.

  “It’s not you, Mill hates the fountain.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “What did the fountain do to him?”

  “Family history that would probably bore you to tears,” she replied as we entered the front door of the restaurant. My mother was standing next to what had to be Emma’s father because he looked like an older more rugged version of Mill, blue jeans, faded chambray shirt, boots, tanned.

  Why was she smiling? It was more than smiling. Glowing. Or maybe it was just the heat of the kitchen.

  He was smiling back.

  My mother saw me and beamed in a way I hadn’t seen in years. “Soule, this is my daughter,” she said by way of introduction.

  “Caprice, it’s good to meet you.” He smiled broadly and showed straight white teeth. Wow.

  Everyone in California was so pretty, so vibrant, like the flowers, it made me feel pale and all East Coasty in comparison.

  “Cap’s sufficient.” More than enough.

  “Your mother says you brought your horse with you; you’ll have to ride with us.”

  I heard Mill groan all the way from the kitchen. No debate on where he stood. He made his feelings crystal clear.

  “Thank you. I don’t ride western.”

  “She probably does dressage,” Mill commented most haughtily, though still unseen.

  Emma smiled. “We don’t ride Western. Dad and Mill play polo, I just ride.”

  “They rode before they could walk,” Soule assured me with a laugh and my mother laughed leaning in toward him.

  Such merriment.

  “We’d better hit the road,” Soule said as he turned to leave through the kitchen.

  “Stop by for dinner,” my mother called.

  I’m sure my eyebrows had just set a new height record on my forehead.

  “I think we’ll take you up on that offer,” he replied as they left.

  I could understand how my mother felt she had just traveled three thousand miles and was starting a new life, but wasn’t this a little fast? The divorce had barely gone through, literally we left the day after the court appearance. Weren’t you supposed to have a period of mourning after your marriage died, like a couple years to get over it and sort things out?

  I understood that it hadn’t been a perfect marriage but such things only existed in Hollywood and then only on film as testified by the revolving door quality marriages had between stars. In real life, people bumped up against each other and made allowances for the little quirks. True, my father was a little quirkier than most and he was away on business quite a bit, but that was hardly a crime.

  When the divorce was inevitable, my mother explained that when she married she thought he would be around more than half the time but as it turned out, he wasn’t, and it wasn’t much of a relationship for her. It wasn’t much of
a relationship for me either but I had remained hopeful. Now that we were three thousand miles from home, the chance of being with my father was remote.

  “Come on, sweetpea,” my mother said.

  “Is that what’s in the salad today? Sweetpeas?” Back home, if you had salad, it was made with lettuce. Out here, people expected edible flowers.

  The front door opened behind me. The happy wishing women paraded in.

  “Bagatelle! It just opened,” one of them exclaimed.

  “I’ve heard it’s good, with terrific personalized service.”

  My mother came forward buttoning her clean white chef’s jacket to personalize the service.

  ***

  I spent the next two hours serving huge platters of salad and removing empties. These women were eating more roughage than my horse. Luckily, the Crockers had forked plenty into the hay mow or refrigerator as it was known in the restaurant biz. And that was a business I didn’t want to be in.

  My mother loved to cook. She liked all that fussing around mixing and experimenting, always had and to get even more proficient at it had taken classes at the CIA. No, not the Central Intelligence Agency, that would have at least been somewhat interesting and maybe she could have become like MacGyver, able to turn common food products into rocket fuel. Instead, she went to The Culinary Institute of America.

  Coming to Cadiz and finding a restaurant that had recently closed with all the equipment intact, was a dream come true for her. “Oh look, Cap, a Hobart!” She cried with delight when we entered.

  A what? Such glee should be reserved for newborn foals, puppies and little ducks not a huge mixer so big it stood on the floor and sent clouds of flour into the air as it rotated with planetary action whatever that was.

  As soon as the lunch crowd ceased lingering over their iced herbal teas and lemon wafers, it would seem I would have a couple hours to myself but that was far from the case. There was all that cleaning up to do, followed by prepping for dinner. It was making me long for September so I could go to school and get out of the kitchen.

  My mother didn’t have any choice but to rely on me. The restaurant had only been open a few weeks and there wasn’t enough money to pay for help. I didn’t object to helping her, it just the sort of work I’d do after trying every single other job conceivable. Pouring concrete, directing traffic or spending six months conducting weather experiments at Antarctica were all more appealing.