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The morning sun and the birds were outside the car window on the way to work, riding along, and thoughts of Blake were out there too, along with the cows and trees, as real as the grass.
Maybe the men who helped her the night before would return that evening, along with her fairy godmother? But, hang on, she didn't want to finish the job too quickly. If she did, her stepmother would simply come up with something else for her to do. She couldn't decide if she wanted them to come back or not.
As the barn approached, she leaned close to the window to see how much of a mess they had made the night before and, as it expanded in her view, starting from a small seed in the distance that grew larger, she finally got a good look at it and dropped her phone, gasping.
Her sisters turned back and looked at her, their mouths open in anger with their jaws pushed forward in disgust. It was the barn. It was painted. All of it!
They pulled into the parking lot and came around another side of the barn, confirming that the paint job was somehow completely finished.
“Did you stay up all night painting, Linda?”
“Gosh, how desperate are you?”
But Linda was too concerned with the barn to listen. She got out of the vehicle and began to circle the building on foot, looking for signs and evidence of what had happened. There was not a lot to be gathered, and she spent most of the time holding her hand over her mouth, completely shocked.
Her sisters disappeared into the office, and Linda pivoted three hundred and sixty degrees, looking for someone else there, not feeling alone. There must be someone, after all this work, waiting to take credit for it. But there was only wet grass. Even the fog was gone.
Inside the barn, the painting tools were washed and laying on the cement slab. They were disorganized, but they had been run under the water and cleaned. Linda picked up a paint roller. There were scratch marks on the handle.
What had happened? Only the horses knew.
“Carl, why can’t you talk!?” she asked. The look on his face made it seem as if it was because he didn’t want to as he turned back into his stall.
Outside the barn, Linda found that the dumpster had been ransacked; rummaged through like she had never seen before. The lids were wide open and the contents had been entirely overturned, but nothing was thrown outside of it.
Boxes inside were crushed and torn in half, not an inch of trash left undisturbed. Someone had done a very thorough job on it, but looking for what!?
The old lady couldn’t have done this, she was too frail. Neither could raccoons, they were too small. A bear or other animal would have left garbage spilled everywhere, but there wasn’t a piece that wasn’t still neatly inside the dumpster, though any food scraps were gone.
She concluded that the men who had helped her must have done it. They were the only ones there, after all. She could see the paint cans in the trash, but she had also seen how blind they were after dark. Yet they must have finished the entire barn in night somehow, and then dug through the trash? Barely able to see?
The old woman did have a flashlight, at least that’s what Linda thought it was, but that could hardly explain things. Even if it was powerful enough to light up the whole area, how had they reached the high places on the barn? It was painted all the way up to the peaks above the hayloft. The ladder couldn’t reach that high; someone would have had to climb!
None of this made sense. Would she get in trouble for this? How could she? She hadn’t done anything wrong. Oh, but she had...
The completed task would do nothing but infuriate her stepmother. It was not a chore intended to be finished, not on time anyway. But maybe she wouldn't find out. Linda's stepsisters might forget to tell their mother by the time evening came, or maybe they just didn't think anything of it and wouldn't mention it.
Neither was likely. They were there in the room when she had had the conversation with her stepmother about going to the rodeo, about earning a day off. But, so what if they did tell? Linda would tell a different story.
If her sisters said it was painted, she would say it needed a second coat.
If they said there was no more work to be done, she would say they hadn’t seen it up close.
If they said what had happened was impossible, Linda would agree, and say that they were exaggerating.
Linda could find a way to negotiate any scenario short of her stepmother coming down to the stables and inspecting the barn herself, and that wasn’t going to happen; her stepmother never drove. She insisted on being chauffeured around, usually by her daughters, and always sitting in the back seat.
The town was too small to have any taxis or ridesharing cars, and she knew the woman wouldn’t bother to come anyway, not until Linda herself said that there was no more work to be done on the barn, that’s when she would come so she could try to find more.
And so, Linda was safe. The barn, according to her, would only be finished at the exact right moment. According to her, it would still need a final touch up the morning she was to leave. She wouldn’t be sure she would finish even then! It would be close. She would push it right up to the end, apologizing to her stepmother, fooling her.
After working it out in her head, Linda became calm again and hopeful that everything would work out. All she had to do now was stay late after work each day, pretending to paint the barn and going horseback riding instead.
Worry floated away and it was replaced by excitement to attend the rodeo, which seemed to be inevitable now. Beginning her workday, she cleared the stable by turning the horses out into the field, contemplating the mystery and wonder of everything that had happened.
But nothing was ever so easy.
In less than an hour, Linda’s heart sank as a sleek, black SUV pulled into the parking lot, its tires crunching the gravel below it.
She had driven after all.
Linda’s shoulders drooped. The wraith of a woman exited the vehicle, empty under her skin, her eyes fixated on the barn. Her daughters had called her on the phone, fearful of Linda’s progress. Now, they stayed in the office, peering through the blinds to make sure trouble had been started, and feeling relieved that it had.
The woman stood outside her car, a cobalt statue, staring at the barn, working it out in her mind.
She approached the building and ignored Linda as she passed her, making a slow lap around, looking for anything incomplete that she could point out. But the barn was finished, to the dismay of both women, who both hid their emotion about it.
After some time in silence, the woman spoke.
“I see you’ve made progress.”
Linda shrugged her shoulders almost apologetically, finding no way to lighten the situation. “It’s finished,” she said without enthusiasm.
“Quite eager to attend this rodeo, are we?” the woman asked with a raised eyebrow.
Linda, taking her time to think of a response that wouldn’t clue her stepmother in any more to her love of Blake and bull riding, took a long time to come up with an effective response, but couldn’t find one.
“It just wasn’t that much work,” she said, shrugging again.
“Nonsense. You’ve worked very hard to make it this far.” The devious woman looked around and thought for a moment. “Had help even?” she asked with a slight squint in her eyes.
Linda remained silent.
“Well,” her stepmother said, taking a breath and losing the slight hint of frustration in her voice, “If this task was so easy for you, we must be sure to find something more challenging for you to do.” She smiled as if she was joking, yet she had said exactly what she was thinking. “Come,” she said.
Linda followed her stepmother as she entered the barn. It was quiet inside without the horses and thick yellow sunbeams stood immovable in the room with hay dust stirring inside of them like fish in a tank.
The woman moved into the stable, crossing in and out of the beams, pacing slowly up the aisle, incredibly keen and perceptive to the condition of everything around her.
She went from stall to stall but did not scamper back and forth in an unbecoming way; she slowly strode up the center between the stables, her heels clacking and crunching beneath her, allowing her head and her eyes to do the running for her.
When she came to the end, she saw the wash rack, the painting tools, the lockers and saddle rack and ladder to the hayloft. Linda, as she watched her, was observing too, and growing more and more confident with the condition of the stable as they had made their way from one end of the barn to the other.
The woman lifted a riding crop off a nail that was hanging on the wall and examined it in her hand, running her thumbnail up the braided leather.
Everything was perfectly in order. Everything was clean. Linda was safe! What could the woman say about stables that were so clean?
“These stables,” she said as she pinched the leather tongue on the end of the crop, “are too clean.”
Linda fought against her eyeballs from rolling back into her skull.
“That’s a good thing, right?”
“No, it’s not a good thing,” she said as she approached Linda, towering over her. “Why are there so many empty stables?”
“I turned the horses out for the day.”
“That’s not what I mean.” The woman gestured with the crop, pointing swiftly to certain stalls. “Why is there no bedding in these stables? No food?”
“Because there aren’t any horses in them.”
Linda was only answering the question, but it came too close to sounding sarcastic and her stepmother waited for a better answer, the riding crop clenched across both fists. Remembering that she didn’t want to upset the woman any more than necessary, she gave it to her.
“I mean, we don’t have any renters for those.”
“And how do you expect this place to make a profit if we aren’t boarding horses in the stalls? This is a stable, is it not? Think, Linda. What is the explanation for this? Is it your intention to run this place into the ground?”
Linda refrained from mentioning the loans her stepmother had taken out against The Stagecoach, or the crippling interest costs that actually were running the place into the ground.
“I just take care of the horses. Aren’t Caroline and Emily supposed to find the renters?”
“Don’t worry about what they do,” the woman said angrily, whipping the crop to her side. “Aren’t you the one who has something to gain from paying this place off?”
This was actually true, and one of the more reasonable things she had heard her stepmother say.
“I think your next task should be to find the Stagecoach more customers. It’s for your own good.”
Lind agreed that it would be for her own good to generate more income for the stables, but there was always a catch.
“Find them before you go to the rodeo.”
And there it was.
“The horses we do have already keep me busy. If we bring in more, we may have to hire additional help,” Linda said.
“But don’t you see how that would defeat the purpose of bringing in more money to the business?”
“If it was enough money, it wouldn’t defeat the purpose.”
Linda’s stepmother took slow paces towards her, coming closer, and stopped right in front of her.
“Why don’t we see how much money you can bring in first?”
Linda nodded.
The woman then paced her way to the exit, paused, and pointed the riding crop harshly at Linda. “Before the rodeo,” she reminded her, hung the crop neatly on the wall, and disappeared.
So this was it. A new challenge shoved down her throat with a time limit that may have been impossible. She didn’t think there was anything her mystical fairy godmother could do this time to help her, this involving money and her being a bag lady.
She wouldn’t have minded the challenge of bringing more business to the stables, but doing it in a week and a half?
Returning to her regular work, she spent the time brainstorming and cleaning stalls. She supposed she could put a classified ad out at no charge on the internet and felt frustrated that her sisters were supposed to be taking care of things like that all along, though she was sure they hadn't.
Most of the horses, if not all of them, came from longtime renters that had known Linda's father and were loyal to the business.
And even if the Stagecoach did have some kind of outreach or advertising program, where would the horses come from? Other stables? People's backyards? Usually, people only boarded horses when they couldn't care for them themselves on their own property.
Boarded horses were horses kept as pets to learn riding on like Mary.
They were old horses, rodeo contenders and workhorses that, through loyal service, had earned a retirement package at the glamorous Stagecoach Stables.
And there was a mule that nobody wanted but nobody could get rid of, so his small check arrived every month and he ate oats and bit Halloween buckets in the little stall on the end of the barn.
Where would she find more of these horses?
Linda worked through the day, taking the time to admire again the paint as it dried on the barn and, in the end, it made her quite happy, looking bright and new.
She looked at it over her shoulder, hoping that passing cars could see it, feeling proud.
The Stagecoach Stables were, at one time, a place of joy, and the coat of red paint revived memories of that time.
As the workday ended, the real work was just beginning. How on Earth to bring more customers into the stable?
Could her fairy godmother come up with something after all? Something weird and confusing? Linda would have been fine with that. She looked around for her, but she was not in sight.
No help would come from her sisters either, who sat in the office doing nothing, watching the clock and thinking about leaving.
Maybe this one she would have to pull off without any help at all.
And just then, help arrived.