Love Story(62)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“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, yelling, “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.