Love Story(36)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“Not husband,” Summer said under her breath. “Father of her child.”

“Whatever,” Brian said. “What happened to him?”

I opened my mouth and nothing came out. My mom was dead. Why did their questions about my dad hurt even more?

“Where is he?” Brian persisted.

I swallowed. “Vancouver, last I heard.”

“When was that?” Summer asked.

“Six years ago.” Six years, three months, two weeks, and three days.

“And her lover in the story

what happened to him?” Manohar asked. He seemed genuinely curious about this drama in real life.

“He still works at my grandmother’s horse farm,” I said. Summer looked the question and I confirmed, “Hunter’s dad.”

“No way!” Brian exclaimed. All three of them gaped at me.

I glanced toward the door to the back room, expecting my boss to appear with his hands on his hips. I glared at Brian. “Sir, can I take your order?”

“Does Hunter look like his dad?” Summer wanted to know.

“Yeah.” If they were not going to tell me what they wanted, I was going to serve them black coffee. I slipped a cup under the tap. “This is to go, right?”

“Do you look like your mom?” Brian asked.

“No,” I said. “Red hair skips a generation. I look like my grandmother.”

“But if your mom and Hunter’s dad hooked up,” Brian persisted, “does that make you and Hunter brother and sister?”

“No!” Summer and Manohar and I all shouted at him at the same time.

I glanced toward the back room again. “Look, you’re going to get me in trouble. When I wrote that story, I thought I was getting it off my chest so I could face Hunter head-on. Instead, I feel a million times worse, and I don’t want to talk about it, okay?”

“When do you have a break?” Manohar asked.

“Nine,” I said warily.

“I’ll come back,” Manohar said. Clearly he had his own interpretation of I don’t want to talk about it.

They took their to-go cups and wandered out of the coffee shop, leaving me to serve strangers and stew in my own juices. And like clockwork, at nine o’clock, Manohar reappeared alone. He gave me a small wave and sat at Hunter’s table by the window.

I sat down across from him and slid him a latte with a butt drawn in the foam.

He didn’t even look at it. He focused his dark gaze on me. “Summer didn’t put me up to this.”

“Did Hunter?”

“Hunter!” he exclaimed. “Hunter’s been nuts all weekend. Nuts for Hunter, that is. Quiet and antisocial. I thought he had the flu. Now I realize he must have read your story on Friday.” He leaned forward. “I had no idea your story had a grain of truth to it, Erin. I wouldn’t have said those things in class if I’d known.”

I blinked at him, not believing at first what I was hearing: an apology, sort of, from Manohar. After all the anxiety he’d caused me over the past six weeks, I wasn’t ready to kiss and make up, but I did manage to shrug and say slowly, “Don’t worry about it.”

“I am worried about it. I tried to apologize to Hunter after class, and he told me to f**k off!” He collapsed against the back of his chair in exasperation. “I decided to work your end of the equation. Ironically, you seem to be the more reasonable party.”

I sighed and put my chin in my hand. “Can we get back to the part where you were sorry?”

He waved his hands in the air. “I don’t want to take it too far, mind you. Knowing that your story is based in reality doesn’t elevate it in my mind.”

“Thanks.”

He held up his hands to silence me. “Our instinct is that if we’re taking a story from reality, automatically it will be realistic. But that’s not true. For instance, my father plays bluegrass banjo. He loves country music. He’s a stockbroker but he thinks he missed his calling. And in just about every story I write, I think about putting in an Indian father who plays bluegrass banjo. It’s something familiar to me. I could write the hell out of it. The banjo would make a great symbol. Of something. But people would say my writing wasn’t realistic.”

I opened my mouth to tell him that this was the most interesting thing I’d ever learned about him, and the most believable. For the first time he seemed like a real person with an embarrassing family in his background, not just a dapper Indian boy with a bad attitude. I would much rather have read a story about his banjo-pickin’ daddy than the dystopian pablum he usually turned in for class.

But he went on, “Besides, every time you write anything remotely like reality, it involves Hunter somehow. Hunter is calm and cavalier about everything but you and your writing. So if you don’t mind, to keep the peace, stick to your romantic fantasies from now on. But leave Hunter out of it.”

WHEN I WALKED HOME FROM THE coffee shop a little after eleven that night, I found Summer sitting on her bed, reading. I had expected her to be up in Manohar’s room. I knew she was headed there now because she still wore makeup. She was waiting for me.

She patted her bed. I set my book bag down carefully, to preserve it, and sat beside her, then kept sitting down and down until I lay flat in her pillows and stared at the cracked ceiling.

“You love him so much,” I heard her say.

“No, I don’t.”

“I just can’t understand how things have gone so wrong between you two for so long.”

I didn’t want to talk about this, but looking at the ceiling made it easier. My stomach twisted into knots and I sucked in a breath against the pain, then blurted this out: “After my mom died I couldn’t look at him because his dad had been there with her when she died. Anytime I looked at Hunter, the whole thing replayed in my head. I couldn’t look at his dad, either. That didn’t last long because my grandmother told his dad to get me back on a horse right away so I wouldn’t be scared. But by that time, school had started and Hunter was the new kid and people were calling him my stable boy and I hadn’t done anything to stop it.”

“Oh,” she said, as if that were the end of it and she was sorry she had asked.

I kept going, now that I had started. “Then he got hurt. You know, the scar? And it was like my mother was dying all over again. I wanted to see him. I walked down to his house to ask his dad to take me to the hospital with him to see Hunter. But I just stood in the driveway for a while and couldn’t knock on the door.

“When Hunter came back to school, he seemed to resent that, too, and we went through the rest of high school that way. People would tease him about being my employee and they would tease me about going after the stable boy, and girls would tell me he was perfect for me. They didn’t understand how much he hated me or why. Then we were seniors and competing against each other for a scholarship to the same college.”

“Oh,” she said again. This time she reached over and stroked my hair on the pillow. That made my eyes fill with tears.