Ranch Hands Read Free

qualifies as more than I care to remember.” The corners of his mouth twitched a little as he tried to suppress a chuckle. It didn’t work. He couldn’t hold it in. He started laughing. Carole couldn’t help herself. She started laughing, too.
    “I was just trying to do something nice,” she said. Then she scraped her failed dinner into the garbage. Her father did the same.
    “I know, honey. It was nice, too. At least the
idea
was nice. What I’m wondering, though, is what was distracting you so badly that you boiled the hamburgers?”
    “And fried the beans and chilled the potatoes,” she reminded him. He nodded. “Well,” she began. “I got a letter from Kate …”
    “Eli’s ranch?” Colonel Hanson asked.
    “You know about it?”
    “Frank Devine called me this afternoon,” he said. “He told me that Eli’s hoping to get some real work out of you girls. I told him I wasn’t sure you’d want to spend the whole time working with horses, feeding, grooming, riding, instructing—not when there was a chance to go to cooking school.…”
    “Dad!”
    Colonel Hanson knew when to stop teasing, too.“Actually, Carole, it’s perfect,” he said. “I got word yesterday from our commanding officer at the base that I’m going to have to go on an extended inspection tour. I knew I could take you along, but I also knew you would have been bored to tears. So, of course I told Frank it was okay by me if you went to Eli’s ranch—that is, if I could talk you into it.”
    “Just try me,” she said, unable to hide her grin of utter joy. She was going to the ranch!
    They spent the next hour eating every bit of the delicious and perfectly cooked pizza and talking about Carole’s summer on the ranch. They had a wonderful time, and in the end Carole concluded that the only bad thing about going to Eli’s ranch was that she really was going to miss her dad.
    L ISA PULLED HER chair into the table and put her napkin on her lap. She’d spent the last hour in her room trying to figure out how to talk her parents into letting her go to Eli’s ranch. It wasn’t going to be an easy job, but she was sure she could manage it. The strongest point would be that Eli was expecting the girls to work. It really was more of a summer job than a summer camp. Eli needed their help, and it was going to be a real work experience. “Imagine how that will look on my college applications!” she’d say. She figured her parents would love that.
    She had also decided that she should bring it up early in the meal—as soon as the last plate was served.
    Lisa’s mother nodded to Mr. Atwood, who began to serve. He finished his wife’s plate and passed it to her.
One down, two to go
, Lisa told herself. He put the food on her plate and handed it to her. “Thank you,” she said out loud.
Two down, one to go
, she said to herself.
    “Lisa, we’ve got some wonderful news for you,” her mother said.
    “We sure do!” said her father, putting his own plate down in front of himself.
Three down …
    “You tell,” said Mrs. Atwood.
    “No,
you
do it,” said Mr. Atwood.
    And so she did. Lisa’s mother told her that the three of them were going to Europe for a full month! They were going to leave in two weeks. They would go to England, France, and Italy. They would see everything! Her parents had been planning this trip to be a surprise for her for months.
    “We started planning it right after Christmas,” her father said.
    “We know you’re going to love it!”
    Lisa listened. She was too stunned even to speak. All her life, she’d dreamed of the day she might take a trip to Europe, but not now. Not
this
summer when she could go to the ranch with Carole and Stevie. Not when she could spend the summer riding Western ponies and being a real hand on a real ranch, helping Eliand teaching little kids. Not when something else so wonderful was going on.
    “Isn’t it exciting?” Her mother’s face positively glowed with excitement.