Love Story

by Jennifer Echols

  By the time we touched down in Louisville, I had worked myself into a frenzy of questions. “How did my dad know I would be here?” I asked, hurrying after Hunter in the terminal.

  He kept glancing up at the signs pointing us toward baggage claim. Neither of us was very good at airports, we’d found. When he and his dad had moved to Louisville, and when my mom and I had escaped to Louisville, we had all ridden the bus.

  “I don’t know,” Hunter said.

  “Maybe he thought my grandmother and I are getting along,” I mused, running after Hunter as he turned a corner, “and of course I would come home to see her for the Breeders’ Cup.”

  “Maybe,” Hunter said, stopping in front of the carousel that would spit out our suitcases.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “I doubt he’d think of the Breeders’ Cup. He doesn’t know anything about horses.”

  We stood in silence until the carousel ground to life. Hunter snagged his bag. He put one hand on my arm to stay me when I recognized mine, and he lifted it off the carousel for me. He started across the wide room toward passenger pickup with both suitcases in tow, but I took mine back from him, saying, “Maybe the Breeders’ Cup is coincidental. He assumed I would be living at my grandmother’s house, still in high school, because he’s forgotten how old I am.”

  “I don’t know,” Hunter said again.

  Suspicious this time, I looked him in the eye as we walked along. When he met my gaze, then fussed with his suitcase handle again, I knew he wasn’t telling me everything he knew. “What is it?” I insisted.

  “My dad,” he said, nodding toward the sliding glass doors and slipping his sunglasses on.

  Tommy had parked the Blackwell Farms king-cab pickup truck at the curb. As the airport doors slid open for us, I let the weight of my suitcase on wheels slow me like an anchor. Hunter reached the pickup first. Tommy bear-hugged him and they slapped each other on the back. They were both blond and had similar features, but Tommy’s face was weathered from the sun, and he wore a Blackwell Farms baseball cap and windbreaker that made him look strange embracing Hunter in his cashmere sweater and expensive sunglasses, obviously the heir to a horse fortune.

  Tommy held Hunter at arm’s length and beamed at him. Tommy had all Hunter’s friendliness without any of Hunter’s what’s-in-it-for-me calculation. It was hard to picture him as the distant father from the story Hunter had written for Gabe’s class, but certain elements of it rang true. Tommy was a drinker, I knew. He had been a smoker, but Hunter had badgered him into quitting. Tommy had complained about this at the stable every day for a year. Now he rolled a toothpick in the corner of his mouth, chuckling at something Hunter had said.

  Then Tommy turned to me with his arms stretched wide. “Erin! How’s the princess?”

  “Hey, Tommy,” I said, going in for a hug. My grandmother had always discouraged me from hugging the help. She embarrassed me. I embraced Tommy and let him pick me up and set me back down.

  “Hunter said you’d lost weight.” Tommy patted my tummy underneath my clothes. “Good thing you’re wearing that overcoat or you might blow away.”

  On cue, icy wind gusted across the terminal driveway. I hadn’t known much about Kentucky when I moved here from California, and I’d been surprised by the tenuous winter that started in November: an overcast sky that spit tiny particles of ice instead of snow.

  I wiped the wetness from my face. “Has my dad gotten here yet?”

  “Your dad?” Tommy repeated, rolling the toothpick to the other side of his mouth.

  “Or do you two have to stay away from each other? I shouldn’t have asked.” Tears stung my eyes. I could hardly see.

  That’s why I was slow to understand the questioning look Tommy was giving Hunter, and the stony expression Hunter returned.

  I think I might have gasped, “No!” and slapped both hands over my mouth. I wasn’t really aware of what I was doing besides staring at the sign beside the sliding glass doors, greeting visitors unfamiliar with the area with the various pronunciations of the city’s name: LOOAVULL. LUHVUL. LEWISVILLE. LOOAVILLE. LOOEYVILLE.

  “Son—” Tommy began.

  “I don’t want to hear it,” Hunter interrupted him. “Mrs. Blackwell wanted to see her and I didn’t know how else to get her on the airplane. Around here I could have slung her over my shoulder, but they frown on that in New York. Erin, come back.”

  As I walked down the terminal sidewalk, I held up one finger to let them know—or at least to let Tommy know—that I needed a minute. Hunter couldn’t care less what I needed. I stomped down the sidewalk, tears mixing with the icy wind in my face. I would let the cold wind dry me out and then I would turn back. Except more tears kept coming as I thought about my dad. He had not done anything. Not anything new. Hunter had only scratched the scab off that wound. Hunter, whom I kept trusting for some reason. Why would I think he was on my side? He was swindling my grandmother. He could screw me over, too.

  A shadow beside me made me turn my head. The Blackwell Farms truck crept backward along the curb, keeping pace with me. The window slid down and Tommy hollered, “Erin, get in the truck before Homeland Security crawls up my ass.”

  I stomped a couple of steps more, but I was running out of sidewalk. UPS made Louisville one of the world’s busiest airports, but the passenger side of the airport was small, to match the city, and the terminal ended just ahead. I had no desire to wander through the industrial wasteland to the Ford plant.

  I stepped over to the truck, jerked open the door, and tumbled into the backseat, shouting into the front, “Why did you tell me that, Hunter? What is the matter with you?”

  Hunter leaned between the front seats to face me, sunglasses still obscuring his blue eyes on a cloudy afternoon. “It was the only way I could think of to get you here. Even the threat of going to Gabe with the stable-boy story wouldn’t get you to come back to Kentucky to see your grandmother, and she really wanted to see you. She was hysterical when I told her you’d gotten hit by a car. I didn’t have a lot of choice.”

  He didn’t say he was sorry. He didn’t even look particularly sorry behind his sunglasses. He admitted his transgression with no apology.

  A lot like my dad.

  “You mean, you didn’t have a choice if you wanted to stay in college on my inheritance,” I corrected Hunter. “I hope nothing this important comes up again, because the stable boy is all you have to coerce me with now. Baiting me with my dad only works once per lifetime.”

  “Stable boy,” Tommy muttered, shaking his head.

  Luckily the farm wasn’t far, so I wouldn’t have to sit in the truck with Hunter for long. Of course, I’d spend the afternoon, all day Saturday, and Sunday morning stuck at my grandmother’s house. I had sworn to her that she would never see me again and here I was, only five months later. Broke, too, or I would have told Tommy to drop me off at a motel.

  Instead, he drove the truck off the interstate, turned onto the narrow blacktop winding through the hills to the farm, then pulled onto the grassy shoulder underneath a huge, fire red maple. “Get out, both of you,” he barked.

  Tommy did not bark often. The ice shower had stopped, so I couldn’t use the weather as an excuse. I slid across the seat and onto the ground, drained of emotion and shivering in my coat, looking down at the feet of Tommy and Hunter, standing in front of me. I had nothing to be ashamed of—Hunter was the one who should be ashamed—but I was afraid I looked like hell after crying and I didn’t want him to see me like this. I was an idiot, which made me want to cry again.

  “I’m not spending the whole weekend with you two sniping at each other,” Tommy said. “Erin, we’re going to solve this the way we settle things at the stable when your grandmother isn’t looking.” He nodded at Hunter. “Hit him.”

  “Don’t make her do that,” Hunter told Tommy. “She’ll break her hand.”

  “Ha! You think awfully well of your chiseled chin,” I said, but Tommy drowned me out, yelli
ng, “Let her hit you or I will hit you myself.”

  “This is excellent parenting.” Hunter emphasized his words with an okay sign of his thick fingers. His Rolex flashed in the sunlight before he put his hand down. “Here, Erin.” He closed his eyes and lifted his chin.

  I edged toward him, balling my fist, feeling better already. “Open your eyes,” I said. “I want you to see it coming.”

  “If I open my eyes, I’ll dodge you,” he said matter-of-factly, as if he was used to settling his differences this way with the other stable hands. He closed his eyes again.

  I struck while I had the opportunity. Didn’t pause to think about technique or the proper position for my fist, thumb in or thumb out, just hauled back and hit him.

  But in the split second before my hand connected with his face, I saw a flash of one of my family’s apartments in Los Angeles, an early one, because I glimpsed the ocean through the window across the room, and as the years went on we’d had less and less money and we’d moved farther and farther from the sea. I saw my dad hitting my mom.

  I redirected my fist, only grazing Hunter’s chin, and stumbled into the side of the truck. A strong arm hooked in mine and kept me from falling. Hunter drew me to him, chuckling. “Are you okay?”

  I shoved him away from me, slid back into the truck, and slammed the door. He wasn’t even sorry and I couldn’t even get revenge. There was no good in this. With a final sniffle I opened my history book, wishing I hadn’t come.

  I don’t know what argument Hunter used outside the truck, but predictably he hopped into the driver’s seat, and Tommy took the passenger side for the short drive up to the farm.

  A few minutes passed wherein the truck hummed, country music twanged on the radio, and I read the same paragraph in my history book four times.

  Then Tommy asked, “So, did you two hook up yet?”

  “Tommy!” I squealed. “What a question!”

  “What?” He half-turned toward me. “I’m just asking.”

  “If we hadn’t hooked up,” I said, “that question would be awkward and embarrassing. And if we had hooked up, it would be—”

  “—awkward and embarrassing,” Hunter said.

  Tommy watched Hunter driving for a moment. Tommy’s expression was inscrutable, and I could see in the rearview mirror that Hunter’s was, too. “So you have hooked up,” Tommy concluded.

  “Of course not,” I said. “Hunter met his girlfriend in the bathroom. He has a fortune-teller and a bar waitress on the side.”

  “Never say I didn’t raise class.” Tommy turned all the way around to face me. “And how do you know this?”

  “We live in the same dorm.”

  Tommy grinned. “Uh-huh. You’re from the same town, the same farm even, you live in the same dorm, you know all about each other’s business, but you haven’t hooked up.”

  When he put it that way, why hadn’t we? He made it sound as if the prerequisites for hooking up were familiarity, proximity … and he must sense the desire, at least on my end. He didn’t understand the complications, the humiliations, the hundred reasons why not that hummed underneath us like the never-ending sound of New York traffic, or the drone of the Kentucky interstate behind the autumn trees.

  “It’s none of your business, Dad.” Maybe it was because I could hardly hear Hunter over the motor and the radio, but I was surprised by how embarrassed he sounded, and wistful.

  We rounded the last bend. The trees parted to reveal my grandmother’s towering mansion. It perched on the highest hill in all of the rolling pastureland that formed the farm. Like many of the historic buildings in and around Louisville, it was built in the Italianate style of the 1870s. If a photo of a classic Southern mansion was stretched on a computer until the ceilings and windows were ridiculously high—that was this overstated style of architecture, so elegant and imposing it was threatening.

  “Here we are, princess.” Tommy opened his door, presumably to haul my suitcase out of the payload.

  “I’m not staying here,” I said quickly. “Hunter can stay in my room, where he belongs. I’m staying with you, Tommy.”

  Tommy and Hunter both looked over the seat at me in surprise. Tommy said, “That’s not proper. Your grandmother will have a cow.”

  “No way,” Hunter said.

  “You owe me that much.” I caught Hunter’s eye and drove home my meaning. I had no intention of telling my grandmother that he was taking her for a ride, but Hunter didn’t know that. At least I hoped he didn’t.

  Hunter’s blue eyes drilled into me just long enough to trigger my heart palpitations. Then he uttered an obscenity and left the truck, dragging his own suitcase through the giant front door of my grandmother’s house.

  “Your grandmother will march down to my house and get you herself,” Tommy said as he drove back down the lane.

  “She knows she can push me only so far,” I said. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, unfortunately.” He parked beside his little house, and I jumped out of the truck before he could change his mind.

  This house could have sat in a Louisville neighborhood with other bungalows like it, and it wouldn’t have drawn attention. But here on the farm it drew my attention. It was white timber above and local limestone below, with a slate roof, like all the outbuildings. It matched the gatehouse, and the historic kitchen with a vast brick oven, and the barn. I would not have chosen to live in a servant’s house that matched the barn. I knew from Hunter’s latest story for Gabe’s class that he felt the same way.

  I crossed the wooden porch and waited for Tommy to unlock the front door. Hunter had been in my grandmother’s house plenty of times. He’d even been in my room, during that childhood moment so long ago when we were friends. I had never been in his house. I followed Tommy through the narrow hallways, past a kitchen remodeled in the 1970s, to a tiny bedroom with a huge window that looked on the lane out front.

  “Here you go, son. I kept everything just like you left it,” Tommy joked, depositing my suitcase inside. “I’ll give you a few minutes to freshen up, but I need to get back to Churchill Downs. Then your grandmother wanted me to make sure you and Hunter got to the party at the Farrells’ tonight.”

  A party at the house Whitfield Farrell still shared with his parents? This trip was seeming more and more like everyone in my old life had pored over my new story for Gabe’s class—the one Hunter hadn’t read yet—and re-created it. “I’m not going,” I said quickly. I had no desire to live out that antifantasy.

  “Suit yourself,” Tommy said, “but you’ll have a hard time avoiding the party tomorrow night. It’s here.”

  He backed down the hallway. I heard the door close and watched the truck pass in front of the house, toward the mansion. In a few minutes the truck passed again, headed for the interstate. Tommy was in the passenger seat and Hunter was driving.

  Now that they were gone, I looked around. I was sitting on Hunter Allen’s bed. Eat your hearts out, girls in Gabe’s class! And I saw why Hunter had looked so horrified at the idea of me staying in his house. The walls were covered in glossy posters of fast cars and movie starlets wearing thongs. This shouldn’t have surprised me. He’d probably tacked them up when he was fourteen. It surprised me anyway to discover that Hunter was a teenage boy after all, and that he was—what was the word he’d used in his comment on my first story?—gauche.

  I crawled to the head of the bed, taking way more pleasure than I should have from the sensation of his rough bedspread rubbing my skin, and got a closer look at his walls. Taped between the posters were certificates for his academic awards. First place, seventh-grade math tournament. First place, tenth-grade science fair. Senior-class valedictorian. He’d won everything but the writing contests. Those were mine.

  I sat back against his headboard, as he must have sat up reading every night, and surveyed the whole wallpaper of white diploma-like rectangles superimposed on the larger images of trashy pop culture. That’s when I saw the cardboard sun, six f
eet across, behind his dresser where a mirror should have been, with the tiny planets floating in front of it, Earth the size of his thumbnail.

  14

  Bundled against the cold wind, I walked up the lane, past my grandmother’s mansion, and over the hill to the stables, built a hundred years before of solid wood and limestone and covered in ivy, picturesque to a tourist who didn’t know better.

  Most of the staff had gone to Churchill Downs. Only a skeleton crew was left to care for the horses that weren’t racing. I slipped easily into the office and changed into the riding clothes I’d left in the closet, and my helmet. Very important: always wear a helmet. I could feel that my clothes were looser than they’d been when I left, but luckily the office didn’t have a mirror. I transferred the apple I’d snagged from Tommy’s refrigerator from the pocket of my overcoat to the pocket of my riding coat.

  I walked through the rest of the front stable where we kept the money-making horses we liked visitors to see, the race winners and their parents and offspring, through the large gravel courtyard empty but for a few pies that kept their smell to themselves in the cold air, into the back stable and around the corner.

  Blinked at the white horse in the corner stable. Either I’d forgotten the layout of the barn in five months away, or Boo-boo was missing.

  Digging my fingernails into the apple in my pocket, I walked quickly through the cold barn, glancing at the horses that peeked out of their stalls, searching for a stable hand. When I found a new guy grooming a brown gelding, I tried to keep my voice calm but it came out a croak. “Where’s Boo-boo?”

  He looked around at me, startled. I watched the realizations march across his face: this was a stranger, this stranger had red hair like Mrs. Blackwell, this was the prodigal granddaughter everybody had been talking about, the one dragged back from college by Tommy Allen’s boy. Then a touch of fear that the stables had sold off the girl’s favorite horse and she would have a fit. This man looked like he’d been slapped by a spoiled brat before.