If Wishes Were Horses

by Barbara Morgenroth

  I watched as we passed the orange trees and avocado orchards, and wondered how the apples were here. We had apple trees at the house in Connecticut, the ones on the ground, the windfalls, were for Bijou, and my mother used the rest. She was nearly famous for her pies with the flaky crust she sold at the general store/post office.

  I missed summer back home and missed rain already. Everyone told me it didn’t rain from May until November. No one mowed the lawn either because it didn’t grow in the summer. When the irrigated lawn in front of the library was being mowed a week ago, I nearly fell down face forward to smell the grass.

  I might as well have been on another planet it was so strange here.

  We turned up the eucalyptus-lined driveway for the barn. The school was farther into the hills, a huge Spanish style building that overlooked the Santa Vidiana River. There were already riders on horseback warming up in the large field.

  Mill parked the truck and we got out.

  “Is there anything I can do to help?” I asked knowing how a second pair of hands was always welcome when I had been in Pony Club.

  “You want to walk Gee Whiz out of the trailer or you want to handle the ramp?”

  “I’ll take him,” I replied opening the trailer’s side door and stepping up.

  A dark, seal brown gelding looked at me as I approached him.

  “Hey, you’re cute.” I rubbed his forehead for a moment before undoing the quick release knot. The back ramp went down letting more light into the trailer.

  “Are you ready?” Mill asked standing by the tail bar.

  “Any time.”

  The tail bar dropped and I backed Gee Whiz out of the trailer then handed the lead shank to Mill. I stood by and helped when I could but he was the type of person who could do everything on his own.

  My friends back home were probably doing much the same thing, except it was three hours later and they were finishing up the riding lessons or trail rides because it was getting hot already. I had grown up with them. I had gone through Pony Club with them, the lessons, the being dragged by unruly ponies, stepped on, thrown into jumps, smacked in the face by branches and dumped into streams.

  I had never imagined it was going to change. I guess I thought that was my life and it was going to stay like that.

  “Miss Wish.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re daydreaming,” Mill remarked.

  “Yes, I was.”

  “Stop it.” He took the reins from my hand and in one easy motion, mounted. “This is where you are,” he said and rode off to join his teammates.

  Finding a seat on the bleachers, I watched the proceedings along with a handful of other spectators.

  A couple minutes later, a few girls riding gorgeous and obviously expensive horses, the kind that cost as much as a Mercedes-Benz, stopped nearby. They knew everyone and periodically I could hear a little of the conversation. I could really hear it when they whooped and hollered. One apparently considered herself Mill’s cheerleader and I imagined that was probably last night’s date.

  After about fifteen minutes, I couldn’t stand it anymore so I climbed down off the bleachers to get a better look at her. She was nearly as beautiful as her horse, which figured.

  “Cap!” I turned to see Emma hurrying up, concern on her face. “Are you okay?”

  “Why? Is my aunt alright?”

  “I don’t mean that, I mean about The Today Show.”

  Maybe I wasn’t awake yet, still. I was confused. “What about The Today Show?”

  “Did you see it this morning?”

  “No.”

  “Your father was on.”

  Now I was really confused. What was my father doing on television?

  Emma looked at me sympathetically. “With his wife!”

  Chapter 5

  “My father doesn’t have a wife that could be on television with him. My mother is at the hospital. They’re divorced anyway. So technically he has an ex-wife.”

  Emma touched my arm sympathetically. “You don’t know.”

  “Know what?”

  “He was always married.”

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  “To two women,” she said softly.

  “What?!”

  Everyone stopped what they were doing to look at me. My voice was echoing off the Santa Vidiana Mountains. Birds rose into the sky in fear. Probably the entire West Coast ground to a screeching halt to wonder who was shrieking. The girls on the expensive horses were laughing.

  Emma tried to guide me toward the trees and away from the others but I was rooted to the spot. Frozen. Paralyzed.

  “He’s a bigamist,” she whispered.

  “WHAT?!” The ground was undulating under my feet. Was this the big one? I looked around and no one else seemed to be grabbing something solid to hold onto. This was my own personal earthquake.

  “And proud!” Emma added.

  “Huh?” My brain was stuttering.

  “He has a family. Besides you.”

  “Huh?”

  I heard hoof beats, one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, Humiliation, perhaps. A moment later, Mill stopped alongside us.

  “Can you two keep it down? You’re scaring the horses.”

  “She’s having a crisis here,” Emma replied as my stomach churned faster than what was required to turn cream into butter.

  “Another one? Did the soufflé fall?”

  “Mill. Stop it. This is serious.”

  He threw his leg over Gee Whiz’s neck and slid down to the ground. “What now?”

  “Her father’s a bigamist! He was on The Today Show this morning bragging about it. He’s written a book telling the world all about it.”

  The sky tilted, the world went dark and I fell into a soft cloud of absolutely nothing.

  “Caprice. Wake up.”

  I heard his voice as if I was at the end of a long dark tunnel. Maybe all I had to do was walk toward the light and I could get away from this disaster.

  “Caprice.”

  Go away. I need a time-out.

  “Does anyone have smelling salts?” Someone asked.

  “No, but my horse just peed on the hay. That’s ammonia. That’ll wake her up and clear her sinuses at the same time.” Someone else replied not so helpfully.

  There was no choice. I opened my eyes, saw strangers staring at me and closed my eyes again. Let me have a do-over, I prayed. Let me go back to sleep and wake up and find out this is a by-product of eating another piece of cake before going to bed. But that was not meant to be. Someone was tapping their hand against my face and none too gently. It could only be Mill.

  I opened my eyes again. “Quit it.”

  “Then get up.”

  “Don’t rush her, let’s get her to the infirmary,” an adult said. It must have been the polo coach.

  I started to get up. “No, I’m fine.” I do this all the time, it’s a nothing little thing. Just happens when I have horrible shocks. I keel over, perfectly normal reaction to learning your father is a bigamist.

  Mill took my arm and pulled me to my feet. My head was spinning faster than a whirligig in a strong breeze.

  “Way to go, Miss Wish,” he said.

  “That’s not my name. Is it?” I replied. It didn’t sound familiar.

  “Do you want to go to the hospital?” Someone asked.

  “Too crowded,” I replied.

  “No, it won’t be crowded.”

  “She probably means her mother is already there,” Mill explained and I felt surprised but was sure I didn’t look anything except out of it. He brought me to the trailer, sat me on the step and handed me a jug of water. “Drink.”

  I took a sip.

  Emma slipped a halter over Gee Whiz’s head and tied him to the trailer. “Now what?”

  “Where’s Dad?”

  “Not close enough to help. He went to SLO, remember?”

  “Right.”

  “Where?” I asked, my eyes finally able to f
ocus.

  “San Luis Obispo,” Emma replied, handing me a tissue she had soaked with water from a bucket for my face.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “Just point me to the nearest cliff where I can jump off.”

  “You can do that after lunch,” Mill said. “Get in. I’ll drive you to the restaurant.”

  Gee Whiz was untacked and put back in the trailer. In a few minutes, we were driving through the center of town with Emma sandwiched between us on the seat of the pickup truck.

  “Are you sure it was my father?” It was a little late to ask and it was grasping at straws but still an effort had to be made.

  “How many guys with your last name has a daughter with your name?”

  “This is a big country, it could be a lot,” I replied.

  “A handful.”

  “Was he from Connecticut? That would lower the chances substantially.”

  “Did you DVR it?” Mill asked.

  I don’t think I ever met anyone more practical than he was.

  “No, I was caught off guard and then totally dumbfounded,” Emma answered over me. “It’s not that bad.”

  Mill and I looked at her.

  “Three thousand miles separate you. That’s a good thing, right?”

  Talk about grasping at straws. How anyone could put a positive spin on this was beyond me.

  Mill pulled up in front of the restaurant and waited for us to get out. “Do you think you two can stay out of trouble while I bring Gee Whiz home?”

  Emma nodded. “I think so.”

  I reached into my pocket for the key to the front door of Bagatelle and put it into the lock. If I had felt isolated before, now I was adrift in the middle of the Pacific unable to see anything on the horizon but water and sky.

  “It’ll be okay. It’s a shock,” Emma said as we walked inside, “but you’ll get over it. Everyone has these incidents.”

  I looked at her.

  “I admit it that this is a little extreme. Okay, very extreme, but in time, you’ll look back on this and laugh.”

  “How many years is that going to take?”

  “More than the fingers on both hands.”

  I flipped the light switch for the kitchen, opened the back door for Dorinda and went to the refrigerator to get some boysenberry cobbler from yesterday. This called for sugar, fat and carbs. Salt would have to wait for later, like in a massive serving of french fries. I placed the cobblers on the table and poured two glasses of milk then sat down.

  “Tell me exactly what was said.”

  “Matt Lauer said something like Greg Rydell loved being married so much, he did it twice. The only problem was instead of sequentially, he did it concurrently.”

  “Someone must have written that laugh line for him.”

  “The camera guys laughed.”

  “Wonderful. Then what?”

  “I mean no offense, but your father is kinda goofy. He was dressed for a day at the beach. Sort of...um... a Jimmy Buffett type.”

  “Yeah, that’s him.”

  “An aging surfer dude with long, thinning hair and a retro Hawaiian shirt. No socks.”

  “Yup.” I had another bite of cobbler. It wasn’t making me feel any better against this tidal wave of unwanted news.

  “They showed pictures of Family 2.0.”

  “Was I version 1.0?”

  “They didn’t say which family was first, the other kids look pretty old, though.”

  I put my head on the table. “His kids?”

  “He said so.”

  I sighed and sat up. “How many years has this been going on?”

  “Many. I’m not trying to assign blame, but didn’t you notice he wasn’t around about half the time?”

  “Yeah. We noticed, but he had an explanation for it.”

  “Which was?”

  “Work.”

  “He doesn’t look like the type unless he found treasure while beachcombing with one of those hand-held metal detectors.”

  “He’s smarter than he looks.”

  “I find that hard to believe,” Mill said as he came in from the back.

  “He’s got a knack for the stock market,” I replied.

  “How did he explain all this time away from home?”

  “Checking out companies to invest in.”

  The Crockers looked at me as if they had never met anyone as naïve as I was.

  “Okay, it sounds lame today but it didn’t seem lame before.” I ate some more cobbler and had a hard time swallowing. “So he’s had another family on the side, and he writes a book. Why?”

  “He’s proud of it,” Emma said. “He has a surplus of love. Too much for just one family.”

  “Jerk,” Mill said under his breath as he sat across from me.

  “How would he know that, when he was never there? It was like living with the Invisible Man but at least he was there even if you couldn’t see him. My father was, well, where was he?”

  “Deadman Cay. It’s by Key West or something. He owns the whole island,” Emma said, suddenly an authority on my father.

  “That explains the tan,” I said and pushed the cobbler over to Mill. There had only been two servings left. “He was better at the stock market than we thought.”

  “Sue him,” Emma said. “Ask my father for advice. Hire a lawyer and take the dipquack to the cleaners.”

  “Spoken like the daughter of an attorney. What would I sue him for?”

  “Emotional distress.”

  Actually, that sounded reasonable in the middle of a morning where nothing seemed sane.

  “Do you think that’s why your mother divorced him?” Mill asked.

  I paused for a moment. “No, but I think she believed he was having an affair. Isn’t this bigamy? Isn’t this against the law? Can’t he go to jail for this?”

  “Yes,” Mill replied.

  “You can’t just go marry people willy-nilly, as many as you want. Isn’t it one per customer?” I asked standing up, getting more angry as I considered the betrayal. “It’s sick.”

  The phone started ringing.

  “Don’t answer it,” Mill suggested as I went to the phone.

  “It’s probably customers for lunch.”

  “Don’t.”

  I picked up the phone. “Bagatelle.”

  “Hi, doll! I have a favor to ask.”

  “First, I have a question.”

  “Shoot.”

  Tempting, but no. “If they can put a man on the moon, why can’t they put you there?”

  Mill finished the cobbler and pushed the bowl away. “Ouch.”

  “I guess you saw my interview,” her father said.

  “No, but the rest of the town did.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet you are.”

  “I got a call from the cable news channel, ZNN, and they’d like to have us on tonight.”

  “Excuse me? Have who on where?”

  “On the Sharpe Show.”

  I turned and saw the Crockers were watching me. “What’s the Sharpe Show?”

  “Top rated,” my father replied.

  “It’s tabloid television,” Emma told me. “Must Flee TV instead of Must See.”

  “Say no,” Mill said.

  I was just about to say no then started to rethink it.

  “How does this work? I’m three thousand miles away.”

  “You’ll go to the Los Angeles studio and they’ll do a satellite feed.”

  “Satellite feed...”

  “Say no,” Mill repeated.

  “I don’t have a way to get there, sorry.”

  “They’ll send a limo for you but you have to hurry. The show airs at nine pm so that’s six your time. Where’s your mother?”

  Why should I tell him? “She’s busy.”

  “They want to interview her, too.”

  “She’s got a restaurant to run or did you forget about that?”

  “No, and I think it’s a terrific idea. Cute, name,
too. I’ll bet you have lots of patrons.”

  Was my father always so dopey and I didn’t realize it or hadn’t I seen him enough to get the full impact how shallow he was?

  “That sounds like a good idea,” I said. “Have them pick me up.”

  “Thanks, Cap. Love you,” he replied.

  “Not mutual at this moment,” I said and hung up.

  Mill stood. “I guess some people would allow themselves to be humiliated on television provided they got their fifteen minutes of fame. What do we owe you for the dessert, Miss Wish?” He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket.

  “Mill, quit calling me that and you don’t owe me anything. I’m not doing it for the fame.”

  “No, she’s doing it for the...” Emma leaped to my defense. “Why are you doing it?”

  “The national television audience, of course. It’s a platform where I can say anything I want.”

  “Before they hit the kill switch,” Mill pointed out. “You realize they have a seven second delay. You can say a lot in that time that will never be heard.”

  No, I didn’t know anything about television technology. “Maybe it will be,” I replied. And if not, at least I will have said it.

  “She should get the opportunity to rebut her father,” Emma added.

  Rebut? She had been watching too many episodes of Law & Order, or had paid too much attention to her parents. Either way, it wasn’t a good thing.

  “She’ll dig herself in deeper,” Mill replied.

  “How?” I asked.

  He turned toward me in disbelief.

  “No, really. Tell me. I want to hear whatever you have to say. Especially in a crisis, and this counts as one, everything is happening so fast, you miss the obvious.”

  “It’s the law of unintended consequences,” Mill said, standing up. “You do something for one reason and something else entirely happens. What you have is a house of cards or the domino effect. You touch it and it falls.”

  “So you don’t know what could happen,” I replied.

  “No and you don’t either, that’s the point.”

  “I have an idea,” Emma said. “We’ll send Mom with her.”

  “I can’t afford a lawyer, but thanks anyway.”

  “She’ll do it as a favor.” Emma pulled her cell phone out of her pocket. “Especially if I’m with you.”

  “Emma, there’s no reason for you to go to LA. There’s plenty to do here.”