Authors: Bonnie Bryant
Ranch Hands (5 page)
With that thought, Stevie fell asleep.
Dear Stevie and Carole
,
Bonjour.
That’s what they say here a lot. It means hello or good day. They also say
merci
and then they say a million other things that I don’t have a chance of understanding. It’s really difficult. I know I’ve been studying French at school, but what you need in school and what you need in Paris are two very different things.
My parents are crazy about being here in Paris, but they are worse in the language than I am and sometimes it leads to trouble. For example, today Dad thought he was getting lamb for lunch, but ended up with a tongue sandwich. Ugh. He won’t make that mistake again.
We’ve been to the Eiffel Tower and the
Louvre
and we’ve traveled everywhere on the
Metro,
which is what they call the subway. In fact, we’ve done more traveling on the
Metro
than we planned since Mom got confused about which train we were supposed to take. None of us likes being lost!
Lisa tapped her pen on the paper, trying to think how she could tell her friends about her trip. Some of the things she was doing were interesting, and she wanted them to know that. Some of the things were difficult. She was having a lot of trouble with the language. She wasn’t used to being in a place where it was hard to say what she wanted or needed. She’d tried to talk to her parents about it, but it was as if they didn’t want to admit it was a problem. They seemed too afraid that, maybe, they weren’t having as good a time as they thought they’d paid for. As a result, her father had eaten every bit of his tongue sandwich, and hadn’t grimaced once. That struck Lisa as a little phony, but she also recognized that it was her parents, and not she, who were doing the paying. She felt she needed to share some of her fears, and some of her victories, with someone who would understand. That could only be Stevie and Carole—her two best friends who seemed to understand everything.
She missed them terribly, and that was definitely the hardest part of all about being in Europe. But she couldn’t tell them that. If she did, they might be worried about her, and if they were worried about her, it could ruin their summer. Lisa tapped her pen some more and then began writing again.
We also went to a museum in something that used to be a train station, the
Musée d’Orsay.
I really liked that place. They have a very pretty collection of paintings there by Impressionists. I wouldn’t mind going back there. I didn’t like the
Louvre
too much. It was crammed with people and Mom kept running up to guards to ask them where we could find the
“Mona Lisa.”
They all looked at her blankly. It turns out that the French call that painting
“La Joconde.”
See what I mean about confusing?
Actually, sometimes it’s fun not to know what to say. After we’d walked our feet off, Mom wanted to walk some more. I wanted to take a nap. They finally agreed to let me stay in the hotel room by myself for an hour. The place is overbooked, so I’m on a rollaway bed in my parents’ room, which is okay except for the fact that when I took the bed out of the closet, I could tell it had a broken wheel and that meant that it had this humungous bump in the center of it. No way I
could sleep on it. I know I could have taken a nap on Mom’s bed, but I decided to see if I could handle the problem myself.
I went down to the hotel desk and there was this cute bellboy who didn’t speak a word of English. I pulled out my phrase book, but there wasn’t anything even close to “The wheel on my rollaway bed is broken.”
I smiled nicely, took a deep breath, and did my best. I said
, “Le pneu sur mon lit est cassé.”
Roughly translated, it means “The tire on top of my bed is broken.” At first the guy just looked at me blankly. Then he burst into laughter. It sounds awful, but he wasn’t laughing at me, really. He was just laughing because what I’d said was so funny. And then the most wonderful thing happened. He actually understood me. He told me
attendez,
which I knew meant I was supposed to wait, and he brought me a new bed without a broken wheel.
Maybe this place isn’t so confusing after all. I just hope I don’t order a tongue sandwich by mistake the way Dad did!
I’ve been thinking about you a lot because I haven’t seen a horse since we got here. I wish I could talk to you or get letters from you. I can’t wait to read your diaries and learn everything that’s happening.
Send lots of love to Kate, Eli, and Jeannie. Tell all the campers everything you’ve ever taught me about riding and they’ll do fine.
Love
,
Lisa
* * *
Dear Diary (or really Lisa since that’s who’s going to read this eventually. I certainly don’t plan on looking at it again!)
I can’t believe the day we just had! Both Stevie and Kate are sleeping soundly, but I have a lot on my mind and I can’t sleep.
The day started off wrong, and it just never got any better. First of all, we were so tired that when the bell rang to wake us up, we just fell right back asleep again. Yesterday, all that traveling was more tiring than any of us had realized. So, when the breakfast bell rang, we did the same thing. Eventually, Jeannie came and woke us up. She was more or less nice about it, but we’re here to help, not to cause trouble. We were causing trouble then because there was going to be a ride and nobody could go until we were ready.
It didn’t get much better when we went for our ride. I guess Eli and Jeannie must have been talking about us to the campers who have been here a
couple of days already. They took one look at Stevie and me in our brand new Western riding clothes and they started calling us dudes. Most of them are from out West and they don’t have a very high opinion of English riding. They’ve got a lot to learn on that subject, but we didn’t do much of a job teaching them today.
First of all, I was having trouble with my horse. He’s a good horse (I don’t think there’s any such thing as a bad horse, just bad riders), but we aren’t used to one another yet. I forgot for one little second that in Western riding you use neck reining. The horse didn’t do what I wanted and three of the kids kept laughing about it. Little monsters. Remind me to tell you more about Lois, Larry, and Linc. Stevie dubbed them the L-ions. It’s just like her to come up with something like that. Anyway, these kids are really obnoxious, and I’m sure they’re going to be our biggest problem.
Check that. I’m not sure they’re going to be our biggest problem. I’m beginning to think that
we
are going to be our biggest problems. We don’t seem to have any idea of what’s going on. Every time the triangle rang, everybody else knew exactly what to do and Stevie, Kate, and I were left standing there, looking blankly at one another. The kids thought it was hysterical. Eli seemed a little perturbed
and Jeannie, who never quite recovered from having to dig us out of bed this morning, just looked peeved.
What’s weird is that the three of us arrived here thinking of ourselves as Eli and Jeannie’s saviors. We thought they had all these gigantic problems that we were going to solve and now it looks like the three of us—Stevie and me particularly—are just causing more problems.
And I haven’t even told you what happened when we tried to help in the garden this afternoon. Trust me, you don’t want to know. I’ll only say that it had to do with a worm that one of the L-ions dug up and everybody else thought it was a riot. It wasn’t.
So, although Dad always tells me not to complain, here I am complaining. I can’t help it. If we don’t start being useful to Eli and Jeannie pretty soon, I’m sure they’re going to want to put us on a plane and send us back home. I wouldn’t blame them one bit, either.
But I’m not going to let that happen. Neither will Stevie or Kate. We came here to be helpful and we’re going to be helpful. Whatever it is that Eli and Jeannie need us to do, we’ll do. If we don’t know what we’re supposed to do, we’ll ask, and we’ll learn, really fast. At least I hope so.
Eli told us what our morning chores are for
tomorrow. Stevie’s going to work in the vegetable patch (no worms!) and I’m supposed to collect eggs from the henhouse. Kate is going to help with the kitchen crew.
So, when do we get to ride again? Ooops, that sounded like a complaint. I didn’t mean it. I may even cross it out. No I won’t. This is a diary and diaries are supposed to be honest. Grrr.
Good night.
Carole
Carole put down her pen and closed the book. She hardly had time to turn out the light before she was asleep.
“H
OW DO YOU
know which weed is always going to be a weed and which is going to be an onion?” Stevie asked Eli.
“The onions are the light green straight shoots,” Eli said patiently. “Everything else is a weed.”
“Including her,” Linc hissed to Lois, obviously intending to be overheard by Stevie.
Stevie grimaced. She didn’t like not knowing what she was doing, especially when she’d been invited to High Meadow because of what she supposedly knew. Linc and his friends, Lois and Larry, clearly thought the Saddle Club girls were totally idiotic dudes, and Stevie had to admit that so far she and her friends hadn’t been able to do anything that might change their minds.
Stevie knew how to handle brats. After all, she was the sister of three of them. Her mind raced for a quick comeback, something to do with her various torture techniques, but she bit her tongue. She and her friends had come here to be peacemakers, not troublemakers. It wouldn’t help Eli and Jeannie at all if she got into a horrendous fight, tempting though it might be.
“I’ve just never weeded a garden before,” she said nicely to Linc. “See, I live in a suburb and the only farms around are horse farms. I know a lot about horses, but I don’t know much about farms. I’ll make a deal with you, though. I’ll teach you everything I know about horses if you’ll help me with the farming. Okay?”
“No thanks,” Linc said. “I don’t want to learn anything about that sissy kind of riding you do.”
“What do you know about English riding?” Stevie asked, as nicely as she could. She really wanted to throttle the little brat, but Eli was watching and she thought it would be a bad move in front of the boss on her second day on the job.
“I know I don’t want to do it.”
“Me, neither,” Lois piped in. “Give me a real horse with a real saddle who does real work and I’m happy. I don’t need to train a horse to dance to music or jump some phony fence, pretending to chase after a fox.”
There were a thousand things Stevie could have
said. The first five hundred were put-downs and the next five hundred had to do with Lois and Linc’s gross misunderstanding of what English riding was all about. But instinct told Stevie that none of them would have done any good and almost certainly would have done harm. Instead, she did the one thing Stevie almost never did: She didn’t say anything.
She just yanked weeds. Really hard.
Things seemed to be going a little better for Kate in the kitchen. She and Jeannie were doing the cleanup work after breakfast. Three of the campers were supposed to be helping them by wiping off the tables in the dining room. The last time Kate had looked into the dining room, though, they were actually sitting at one of the tables, playing. They were pretending the salt and pepper shakers were cattle and they were on a roundup. At least they were playing quietly.
Kate considered her options. The first option, of course, was to go remind the kids what they were supposed to do. This was a ranch, and everybody had chores to do. They were no different.
Then she saw the way one of the kids, Larry, was looking at her. One glance and she knew he was trouble. The look said he’d do whatever she asked him to do and he’d do it so badly that she’d have to redo it herself. Since she was well convinced she’d end up doing the work anyway, she decided not to make an issue of it. While they rounded up salt and pepper
shakers, she wiped tables. She did it quickly and well. It only took a few minutes. When she returned to the kitchen, Jeannie asked her how the kids were doing with the table wiping. Kate explained what had happened.