It was a bright, sunny day, warm for early spring, and they decided to act on Max’s advice—“Shake the wind out of our sails, whatever that means,” Stevie said—and go on a trail ride. While they were gathering their tack and grooming buckets from the tack room, a thin, frail-looking, gray-haired woman wandered in. “I wonder if you girls would know where I could find”—the woman consulted a scrap of paper—“a Mrs. Regnery? I’m supposed to have a lesson with her.” The girls exchanged glances. Max’s wife, Deborah, was a Mrs. Regnery, but she was just learning to ride herself. Max’s mother, called Mrs. Reg for short, was also a Mrs. Regnery. She rode well but rarely gave lessons. Lisa looked closely at the old woman and decided that Mrs. Reg must have offered to teach her so that the woman wouldn’t be embarrassed about learning from someone young. The woman didn’t look like a rider. She looked as if a puff of wind would knock her over. She wasn’t dressed right, either.
