“Pull over.” Carla heard herself using the DEFCON-1 tone that brooked no refusal, even though she knew it was a bad idea; how many times lately had she heard Rache using that exact same tone on Blake? Using it until the little guy broke down in tears?
Switching off the she-who-must-be-obeyed voice and speaking more softly, Carla said, “That woman was nice to the kids.”
They had pulled into Damon’s next to the horse-trailer when they stopped for ice cream. The horse-lady (nearly as big as a horse herself) was leaning against the trailer, eating an ice cream cone of her own and feeding something to a very handsome beastie. To Carla the treat looked like a Kashi granola bar.
Johnny had one kid by each hand and tried to walk them past, but Blake was having none of that. “Can I pet your horse?” he asked.
“Cost you a quarter,” the big lady in the brown riding skirt had said, and then grinned at Blakie’s crestfallen expression. “Nah, I’m only kiddin. Here, hold this.” She thrust her drippy ice cream cone at Blake, who was too surprised to do anything but take it. Then she lifted him up to where he could pet the horse’s nose. DeeDee regarded the wide-eyed child calmly, sniffed at the horse-lady’s dripping cone, decided it wasn’t what she wanted, and allowed her nose to be stroked.
“Whoa, soft!” Blake said. Carla had never heard him speak with such simple awe. Why haven’t we ever taken these kids to a petting zoo? she wondered, and immediately put it down on her mental to-do list.
“Me, me, me!” Rachel bugled, dancing around impatiently.
The big lady set Blake down. “Lick that ice cream while I lift your sister,” she told him, “but don’t get cooties on it, okay?”
Carla thought of telling Blake that eating after people, especially strange people, was not okay. Then she saw Johnny’s bemused grin and thought what the hell. You sent your kids to schools that were basically germ factories. You drove them for hundreds of miles on the turnpike, where any drunk maniac or texting teenager could cross the median strip and wipe them out. Then you forbade them a lick on a partially used ice cream? That was taking the car seat and bike-helmet mentality a little too far, maybe.
The horse-lady lifted Rachel so Rachel could pet the horse’s nose. “Wowie! Nice!” Rachel said. “What’s her name?”
“DeeDee.”
“Great name! I love you, DeeDee!”
“I love you, too, DeeDee,” the horse-lady said, and put a big old smackeroo on DeeDee’s nose. That made them all laugh.
“Mom, can we have a horse?”
“Yes!” Carla said warmly. “When you’re twenty-six!”
This made Rachel put on her mad-face (puckered brow, puffed cheeks, lips down to a stitch), but when the horse-lady laughed, Rache gave up and laughed, too.
The big woman bent down to Blakie, her hands on knees covered by her riding skirt. “Can I have my ice cream cone back, young fella?”
Blake held it out. When she took it, he began to lick his fingers, which were covered with melting pistachio.
“Thank you,” Carla told the horse-lady. “That was very kind of you.” Then, to Blake, “Let’s get you inside and cleaned up. After that you can have ice cream.”
“I want what she’s having,” Blake said, and that made the horse-lady laugh some more.
Johnny insisted that they eat their cones in a booth, because he didn’t want them decorating the Expedition with pistachio ice cream. When they finished and went out, the horse-lady was gone.
Just one of those people you meet — occasionally nasty, more often nice, sometimes even terrific — along the road and never see again.
Only here she was, or at least here her truck was, parked in the breakdown lane with traffic cones neatly placed behind her trailer. And Carla was right, the horse-lady had been nice to the kids. So thinking, Johnny Lussier made the worst — and last — decision of his life.
He flipped his blinker and pulled onto the ramp as Carla had suggested, parking ahead of Doug Clayton’s Prius, which was still flashing its four-ways, and beside the muddy station wagon. He put the transmission in park but left the engine running.