Horse Play (9 page)

T
HAT NIGHT
, S
TEVIE
studied the bottles of nail polish in front of her. Carole and Lisa were at her house for an after-dinner Saddle Club meeting. Stevie had decided that they could polish their nails while they talked about horses.

“Carole, you try the sparkly pink. I’m going to use the deep red. Lisa, you get green.”

“Green? Why
me
?”

“It’ll be good for you,” Stevie told her. “You always want to do what people expect you to do. So, do something different. After all, it’s the silly season, isn’t it?”

Without further comment, Lisa reached for the green
nail polish and unscrewed the top. She took out the little brush and began painting her nails a deep forest green. She finished one nail.

“I don’t know if it’s still the silly season,” she said, admiring her green pinkie nail. “I think it may be the mystery season. Not only is my mother up to her same weird stuff, but my father’s getting mysterious, too—”

“Pickles and ice cream?” Stevie asked. “Dad always teases Mom about the strange stuff she ate, especially when she was pregnant with Alex and me. Maybe that’s why I’m so weird!”

Lisa and Carole smiled at their friend.

“No, Dad promised me she’s not pregnant,” Lisa said. “He’s noticed her doing weird things, too, but he didnt’t tell me what was causing the situation, or what he was going to do to solve it. Just said he had an idea. Wouldn’t say what.”

“Speaking of not saying
what
,” Carole said. “What is going on with Max?”

“Now that
was
weird,” Lisa said. “Maybe some sort of mysterious disease is sweeping the adult population these days.” Lisa had finished one hand. She held it out so her friends could admire her work. “Now, I think I’ll do the other hand in bright red. Then I can cover my face with my hands and hide in a Christmas tree!”

Stevie grinned, and then turned to Carole. “See, it’s working,” she said.

Carole began giggling. “You really think you can keep
Lisa from being logical and normal just by having her polish her nails?”

“In the silly season, anything can happen!” Stevie declared, reaching for the green nail polish herself.

“C
AROLE
, L
ISA, AND
Stevie, please report to the office. Carole, Lisa, and Stevie!”

Carole cocked her head in curiosity. She and her friends were in the middle of their afternoon chores before their drill practice, though Carole didn’t know why they were bothering with drill practice after Max’s edict the other day.

What on earth could be so important that Max would have then interrupt
chores
? She took one more shovelful of wood chips and spread them on top of the peat in Diablo’s stall. He watched her silently, but responded with an affectionate nicker when she patted him on his silky neck.

“Don’t know what this is about, boy,” she whispered into his ear, “but I hope Max isn’t still angry with us.”

The horse nuzzled her neck and tickled her. Carole stowed the shovel in the equipment closet and headed for Max’s office.

She met up with Lisa and Stevie at the door to Max’s office. Lisa had her hands shoved into her pants pocket. Carole glanced at her.

“I didn’t have time to take off the red and green polish,” she explained. “I don’t want Max to think I’m crazy.”

Standing between them, Stevie put a green-polished hand on Lisa’s shoulder and a red-polished one on Carole’s. “He already knows I am,” she joked.

They went in.

“Stop and go?” Max asked, looking at Stevie. He had noticed her nails first thing.

Stevie and Carole relaxed a bit. If Max was joking, then he wasn’t angry any more. But Lisa blushed and shoved her hands further into her pocket.

“Listen,” he said. “Mrs. Reg told me that you girls told her about the show and she okayed it. So, it turns out that the problem is really that I should have told her about
my
plan, but it was supposed to be a surprise. She assumed you’d already told me about yours. I assumed she knew about what I was doing. She couldn’t tell you because she didn’t know what it was that I hadn’t told her and the whole problem comes down to the fact that I’ve been busy out of my mind with one billion new students here which is great but it’s awful, too. You know what I mean?”

The girls exchanged glances. Carole wondered briefly if Max was losing his mind. She’d never heard him say anything so garbled.

“Are you okay, Max?” she asked, genuinely concerned.

“Oh, sure,” he said. “I’ve just been too busy to pay attention to things I ought to be paying attention to,” he explained. “And it’s gotten me in trouble.”

Trouble was where they had begun, and trouble seemed to be where they still were. There had been too many secrets for too long. Stevie, never very good at keeping secrets anyway, couldn’t hold it any more.

“That’s what we trying to help with!” Stevie blurted out. “You should be able to spend your time teaching and running the stable and not worrying about Mr. diAngelo!”

“What’s
he
got to do with this?” Max asked.

Carole poked Stevie in the ribs. Stevie clapped her green-nailed hand over her own mouth.

“Nothing,” Carole said. And then to switch subjects as quickly as possible, she asked, “What was it you didn’t tell Mrs. Reg that you should have told her?”

“Huh? Oh, that,” he said. “Well, that’s what I want to talk to you about. I thought it should be a surprise, but I’m beginning to get the feeling that surprises aren’t always a good idea.”

He paused. Carole had the distinct feeling that that was as much of a lecture as they were going to get. It was enough, though. They all certainly got his point.

“You remember me talking about my student, Dorothy DeSoto?” he continued.

Of course, they all knew who Dorothy DeSoto was. She was one of Max’s most famous students. She’d gotten her start at Pine Hollow and had gone on to be a very successful and famous rider. She’d even been on the last Olympic team and had gotten a silver medal.

“Is she coming for a visit?” Lisa asked, awestruck.

“Better than that,” Max said. “She’s coming to do a demonstration for all of my students, especially you three. I’ve been planning this with her for weeks and it’s scheduled for exactly the same time as you girls want to do your drill show. Dorothy is a very busy woman and I can’t ask her to change her schedule—”

“But Max, we put all those signs all around town. Lots of people are going to show up for it.…”

“Most of them relatives,” Max suggested.

Of course, that was true. The girls hadn’t liked to think about it, but the chances of luring a lot of total strangers to an amateur drill show by three young riders were actually pretty slim.

“And those who do come will have the
extra
treat of watching Dorothy DeSoto do a dressage demonstration.”

“Extra?” Carole asked suspiciously.

Max smiled slyly. “Sure, why not? We’ve both planned something for the same time. We can do both. Dorothy’s demo will take about fifteen minutes. We’ll put the two together and really give the audience a treat.”

“You mean we’re going to be on the same bill as Dorothy DeSoto?” Stevie said, obviously stunned. Carole thought it was very theatrical of Stevie to refer to it as “being on the same bill,” but then, Stevie was a very theatrical person.

“Yes, that’s what I mean,” Max said. “Six o’clock on Friday. Don’t be late. Don’t make any mistakes. You’ll go
first.” Max stopped abruptly and looked at Lisa in surprise. She was so excited about the idea of performing for an Olympic rider that without thinking about it, she’d pulled her hands out of her pockets and was holding them against her cheeks.

“Go and stop?” Max asked. At first, Lisa didn’t know what he was saying. Then she realized that she’d revealed her silly fingernails. Blushing deeply, and unable to answer, she shoved her hands back into her pockets.

“It’s part of the drill exercise,” Carole explained. “Has to do with left and right.”

Max nodded. The answer seemed to satisfy him. “Anything to make things simpler,” he said. “Now I just wish somebody could make
my
life simpler.”

“That’s what we were trying to do,” Stevie said. Knowing that Stevie was reverting to her earlier topic, Carole glared at her. It sometimes seemed that Stevie’s worst enemy was her mouth.

“How’s that?” Max asked.

“I mean, putting both demonstrations on the same bill,” Stevie stammered.

One of Max’s eyebrows went down; the other went up. The look on his face was of total skepticism. “That doesn’t make sense,” Max announced. “Why don’t you tell me what you really meant?”

Stevie scrunched up her face. She’d blown it and she knew it. “We were just trying to help,” she began.

“With what?” Max asked.

Their goose was cooked. Stevie glanced at Carole for help.

“It was your idea. You’d better tell him,” Carole said.

“Yeah,” Stevie agreed unenthusiastically. “Max, we wanted it to be a secret, but we’ve just been trying to help you out so that you could pay off Veronica’s father, see, because we hate the idea that he’d take over Pine Hollow and Veronica would be even more awful then—”

“Veronica’s father?” Max said. “What’s he got to do with this and besides that, how
could
Veronica be …” His voice trailed off. Carole had the feeling he didn’t want to finish the sentence. “Anyway, for the third time, what does Mr. diAngelo have to do with this?” Max started to get a very serious look on his face—maybe even stormy. Carole was getting a bad feeling about the situation.

It was time to let the cat completely out of the bag. “Well, I heard you talking to him. You said you couldn’t do it now, and you knew the riders would suffer. Well, we
would
if the bank took over this place. We just couldn’t let it happen, Max!” Stevie waited. “You told him you didn’t have enough money and you needed more time.”

Max studied Stevie carefully. “When was this?” he asked.

Stevie thought for a second. “It was right after the class when we were playing Break and Out,” she told him. “You remember—the one where Veronica was cantering and you’d told us all to walk?” Stevie smiled a little,
remembering how silly Veronica had looked and how they’d all laughed at her. “Then after class I came to your office to ask you something and I heard you on the phone. You sounded just desperate! You said you didn’t have enough money or enough time, and I, I mean we, figured it would be bad for all of us if you were in trouble, so we …”

She stopped talking. The girls could see that Max wasn’t listening. He was thinking. He began to nod.

“I remember the conversation,” he said. “And now I don’t know whether to laugh or yell.”

“Laugh,” Stevie said. “Please!”

Max’s shoulders started shaking and the girls knew that meant he was beginning to laugh.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll laugh. You thought I was talking to Mr. diAngelo?” He snorted with laughter.

“Yes, I did,” Stevie said indignantly. Although she liked it better when Max laughed than when he yelled, she didn’t much like it when he was laughing at her. “You told him that you couldn’t pay it now and that it was going to affect us, but we’d get used to it.”

“Now let me guess—then you went out and began dragging in students from off the streets to keep me in business?” he asked.

The Saddle Club girls nodded in unison.

“Like those little Scouts, and that waitress, and all the fourth graders in Willow Creek?” he asked.

“The Scouts were just luck,” Stevie said. “We ran into them in the supermarket.”

“Whose luck?” Max asked. “You should try
teaching
them!”

Carole had a sudden and vivid memory of the girls wandering all over the supermarket, wreaking havoc. She tried to imagine what it must be like instructing a group like that. She burst into laughter. Lisa and Stevie joined her.

“Well, they’re learning,” Max said. “But they’re exhausting. And so are all the other students you brought in here for me.”

“But you’re not going to have to sell out to Mr. diAngelo now, are you?” Stevie asked.

“No, and I never was,” Max said.

“
What
?” Stevie yelped. She glanced at Carole and Lisa, who were shaking their heads at her. “Uh-oh …” she mumbled.

“What you overheard wasn’t a conversation with him,” Max continued. “I was talking to a man who was trying to sell me a horse. I want to buy a couple of new horses. I’d like some trained show horses for the better riders to use, but I’ve got so many boarders at this time that I don’t have space. I told the man that. He was trying to push me into expanding, but I can’t do it now. It’s the busiest time of the year—especially since I’ve had so many new students. So I lost the chance to buy the horse he wanted me to buy. He was a terrible nag and kept calling me. I didn’t like him at all. I’m glad our deal fell through.”

“You mean you weren’t talking about losing the stable?” Stevie asked, her face beginning to flush.

“No, I wasn’t. This place has been in my family for three generations and it’s not about to change hands. I guess I’m glad you care so much about it—”