First, where's your washroom?" She dreaded the thought of his even more than the gas station's. "Then I want to ride a horse. I need to, badly. Where can I rent one? Not in the desert, but in the mountains."
"Might try Tehachapi, up the road."
After driving back to Mohave and changing into bluejeans and blouse in her room, Barbara drove her old Ford toward the next town west. Before getting there, she saw foothills to the Tehachapi mountains and road signs for Sugarloaf Mountain and Tehachapi Pass. She followed them, then signs for Sequoia National Forest to the north.
Along the way to the pass, she drove by a small ranch and saw some horses grazing behind a split-rail fence. She followed it slowly until she passed under a wooden arch sign that read "Genda Ranch -- Welcome."
Beside the entrance a larger sign read, "Chickens and Eggs For Sale, Horses and Mules to Ride." The "Welcome" sounded so friendly to Barbara, she pulled into the road leading up to a rather weather-beaten log cabin house. Nearby stood a barn, a yard with some chickens, and a small corral with a few horses and mules grazing.
A handsome, full-figured woman in her fifties with short brown hair, wearing a daisy-patterned blue and white cotton dress and apron, came out onto the covered porch and waved.
"Lost your way, need a drink of water, or want some eggs?" the woman asked cheerfully. "Maybe rent a horse?"
Barbara parked her car in front of the porch and got out, chuckling. "Two of the three, actually. Just hold the eggs."
"Pa, got a customer!" the woman called out.
A similarly handsome man a little older, looking like Farmer Brown in bibbed overalls and old boots, stepped tentatively out of a small barn. He walked slowly up to them asking, "Can we all have some cold lemonade, Ma?"
The man looked ill or something, but was pleasant enough.
Barbara liked him for not ordering his wife, but asking her.
While Barbara joined Buck and Edna Genda on their shaded front porch, sitting in wicker rocking chairs and drinking lemonade, she told why she had come there.
She noticed that Mister Genda sat quietly rocking, looking off into the distance. It was as if he might have heard her, but didn't understand. She didn't think he was with them mentally, on the porch. He was somewhere else. But she thought he caught the part when she told about maybe buying into an airport near there.