The Tourist Trap

Chapter Three

"That's right Shelby! Just sit up straight in the saddle and squeeze!" I called out as Shelby and her horse, Patrick cantered around the paddock. Patrick was a beautiful horse and the Shahanians kept him well. His nut-brown hide shone in the early morning sun and he held up his head and tail as he moved. Shelby smiled as she took the turns, brown braids flying. At age nine, she was a natural. This was only her first day of her second summer of riding lessons, and I could already tell that by the end of August she would be ready to compete in her age group.

Early last summer, my father had been surprised when Shelby and her mother had shown up at our front door in the middle of dinner, asking about riding lessons. Most people knew that our house and our stables, while on the same property, were two different entities. One was for family, the other was for business. Our ranch style house sat on top a small hill, the west facing windows looked over the stables, the paddock, and the fields down below. Our driveway ran between the paddock and the grazing field, then cut left rounded a clump of trees as it climbed the slope. It finally cut back right and ended in the dirt lot just outside our porch door. Vendors, trainers, vets, and riding students almost never drove past the stable and came to our front door, especially not after business hours.

Dad had been ready to toss the Shahanians out, but when I heard them mention my name, I had immediately joined them at the door. It turned out that they had asked around and someone had recommended I teach little Shelby. I never found out where they got my name, but I had been begging dad to let me take some of my own riding students for two years. And there was someone specifically asking for me. How could he turn that down?

Well, he couldn't. It turned out that Mrs. Shahanian's offer of $100 an hour, coupled with my big, begging doe eyes, nudged dad into agreeing. Last year, I ended up having three other riding students aside from Shelby. And this year I had landed even more.

I glanced at my watch as Shelby and Patrick came around their last turn. Her hour was almost up. Easiest hundred buck I would ever make. Unfortunately, 50% went directly to the ranch, when was the same for the other instructor, Penny Haberman. Another 40% my parents made me put into my untouchable savings account, which I couldn't go near until I graduated college (a little agreement I made with my parents when I first started teaching). That meant I just made a whopping ten bucks to use as spending money or put towards the competition entrance fee. It was going to take me a lot of lessons to earn that money before the competition on the third weekend of August, especially if I wanted to have any kind of life this summer. I mean, it would be nice to be able to buy myself the occasional ice cream cone.

"Okay, Shelby! Bring him in!" I called out.

"Kay!"

Down at the bottom of the drive, Mrs. Shahanian's black Mercedes SUV signaled and turned in. I smiled and tried not to shake my head. All the summer locals drove high end cars, but not all of them were as nice as Mrs. Shahanian's.

Shelby and her family were not year round Lake Logan natives. They were what we actual towns people call "summer locals" or, more commonly and less charitably, "invaders." Dotted all around the periphery of or lovely hamlet -many of them on or near the remote shore of the lake- were huge Victorian mansions, all of which were deserted 9-10 months out of the year. They were vacation homes for the wealthy- those who considered themselves too old-school or too humble to hit the Hampton's with the rest of New York City's elite. Instead, they wondered their way north every June or July in their Lexus convertibles, their Jaguars, their BMWs, and took over the town of Lake Logan. They bought up our fresh corn, lamented about our lack of espresso bard, and looked down their noses at us whenever they got the chance. The Lake Logan Country Club became a swing site for balls and charity events and the omnipresent "Summer Fling," an event to which all their teens sons and daughters flocked in their designer gowns and tuxes. Inevitably there would be a drunken caravan of limos and sports cars through the center of town, these over privileged kids waving their champagne bottles out the windows laughing and showing off. They were all such prize losers.