Love Story (17 page)

“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.

“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 feet 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

B
undled 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.

“Boo-boo,” I said impatiently. “High and Mighty. By Rocky Mountain High out of Might Is Right.”

“Oh!” As he realized he was not in trouble, his shoulders relaxed. He pointed with his grooming brush toward the other end of the back stable. “Rock Star has taken a shine to her. We moved her next to him because she calms him down. Want me to saddle her up for you?”

“No thanks,” I said, hurrying toward my horse. The new guy had not gotten the memo that nobody saddled horses for the old lady’s granddaughter. Tommy had seen to that. He’d taught me that if I wanted something done right, I had to do it myself.

Relief flooded me as Boo-boo poked her head out of her stall to see who was coming, ears pricked up. When she saw me, her ears moved forward. If I’d been twelve, I would have sworn to anyone who would listen that Boo-boo recognized me and loved me. However, I was eighteen. I knew better. I was holding the apple out in front of me.

The time in the stall was always the hardest for me. My body tensed, waiting for the horse to rear, and my brain kept replaying the accident I hadn’t seen.

Boo-boo was a thoroughbred, looming and nervous like all of them. But she was relatively sweet tempered. Tommy had picked her for me when my grandmother insisted that he put me back on a horse a week after my mother died. Boo-boo’s soft, surprisingly nimble lips plucked the apple out of my palm. As she chomped, I stroked the side of her head firmly, as Tommy had taught me. Cooing “Boo-boo-boo-boo-boo” to her, I squeezed the terror out of my brain. The way to stay safe was never to let a horse know I was afraid. I wiped the apple juice on my jeans and put up my hand to make sure I was wearing my helmet before I ventured farther into the dark stall to find the tack.

Riding was dangerous, with the constant threat of being thrown and trampled, but ironically, once I was up in the saddle and away from Boo-boo’s legs, I felt safe. I directed her out of the stable—she was in great spirits today, kicking up her heels and shaking her head as if bragging to the other horses that she was going for a run and they were not, ha ha, so there—and I trotted her across the paddock to the back pasture. Then I loosened the reins and let her go. She loved to run.

Normally I loved it, too, the green grass flashing past, the bright fall trees, the cold wind in my face, the always foreign feel of a huge animal galloping underneath me. Today I was sore. Every step of the horse jarred my hip and sent a ripple through my back. Even my fist gripping the reins was sore after grazing Hunter’s hard jawbone. After a few minutes of riding I grew used to the pain and settled in for a long ride. Usually Boo-boo and I dashed out for a gallop after school, and then I had friends or homework or reading to occupy me. Today I decided we would explore every corner of the farm. I had nothing else to do besides study history and calculus, and I might never be back.

Something inside me died that long afternoon while Hunter was at the races. I finally lost all hope in my dad. He was not coming for me. He did not harbor a secret wish to become reacquainted with me. He was not dying to complete our family but was prevented from doing so by foreign spies. He had left me to bury my mother and my grandmother to raise me, and he had moved on with his life. If he had anything to do with it, I would never hear from him again.

But more likely, he would die before me, and I would receive the news just when I was about to get married or give birth or embark on my national tour for my best-selling novel. I had looked forward to my dad’s return as the climax of my story. Now I knew he would ruin my happiest day for me, an unexpected plot twist.

Boo-boo chomped through the reins as I pulled her up short out of a canter. We had reached a far pasture, many rolling hills away from the house and the barn. Standing on a limestone boulder under the golden canopy of an oak was the horse that had killed my mother.

She’d been two at the time and there had been talk of trying her in the Derby the following spring. After the accident, my grandmother never raced her, though she potentially lost millions of dollars with that inaction. She just put the filly out to pasture. If the decision had been mine, I would have shot her myself. But as Tommy had explained, horses bore no malice. They were skittish herd animals escaping danger.

They were not, however, mountain goats. Boo-boo danced impatiently as I gazed toward the black horse on the gray rock under the yellow tree. How had she gotten up there? The back of the boulder sloped more gently, I remembered. That was the explanation. But my heart did not slow down.

In Hunter’s most recent story, the girl he looked down on rode a black filly. I wondered again what his story had meant.

I
WOKE TO THE SOUND OF
dishes clanking in the kitchen and the scent of bacon. Untangling myself from Hunter’s bedclothes and sliding my history book off my face, I squinted at the dark window. Dawn had not broken. In the dimmest light glowing from under the bedroom door, I could just make out the planets stuck to the sun above Hunter’s dresser.

“Tommy!” I exclaimed at the overflowing kitchen table. “You didn’t have to cook all this. I hardly eat anything in the morning. I’ll just have some coffee.”

“Coffee,” he repeated in exactly the Long Island accent Hunter used when he said
coffee
. Turning with a skillet of eggs, Tommy jabbed the spatula toward an empty chair at the table. “Eat. Hunter told me you’re living on peanut-butter crackers. Eat or you’re walking to Churchill Downs.” He flopped eggs onto my plate. “Or are you hiding here all day?” He sat down at his own place and handed me a platter of biscuits.

Hiding sounded like an excellent idea, but it wasn’t what I’d had in mind. “I need money,” I said.

He stopped eating and eyed me from across the table. The look he was giving me … I had never seen this look from him before. I wondered if, for the first time, I was seeing that father from Hunter’s story. I had thought Tommy was a happy-go-lucky old soul who would give me the shirt off his back, but perhaps I’d gotten that impression only because I’d never asked him for anything.

Quickly I clarified, “I want to work for you today. Could you use an extra stable hand? Pay me what you used to pay Hunter.”

He raised his eyebrows, chewed and swallowed before he responded. “It’s your grandmother’s money, you know.”

“At least I will have earned it.”

In his grunt I heard acquiescence but also impatience at humoring the poor little rich girl. I might have told him never mind, he didn’t have to satisfy my whim. But I did want to spend the day at Churchill Downs. And I did not want to spend it in the owner’s box with Hunter and my grandmother.

In the darkness I helped Tommy load a brown stallion and a dun filly into the trailer. We drove back up the empty interstate and through the neighborhood of nineteenth-century houses in the style of my grandmother’s. At the orange stain of sunrise across the gray sky, we pulled slowly through the gate at Churchill Downs, all white-painted wood with twin spires towering over the grandstands.

Then we started work. I fed horses, watered horses, groomed horses. I didn’t exercise them because this close to their races, the trainer wanted specific experienced people riding them, sensing problems. I did, however, lead horses to and fro, and when a stallion reared up and kicked in protest at going back into the Blackwell Farms trailer, I was the one who leaped forward to grab the reins and talk him down. I acted automatically. It was only fifteen minutes later, when the truck leading the trailer pulled away and Tommy squeezed my shoulder, that my heart pounded at the danger I’d been in. An hour after that I realized I hadn’t been wearing a helmet.

Groups of agents and buyers and my grandmother’s assistants wandered into our farm’s section of the stables and out again, talking business over bourbon in clear plastic cups, lighting cigars after they’d walked away from the hay. I used to be part of these groups. I would hang at the periphery with other tipsy teenage heirs to horse farms, often Whitfield Farrell. I expected to see my grandmother in one of these groups. Repeatedly I peeked under a horse’s belly to look for her without looking like I was looking. I never saw her. Around noon I did, however, see Hunter.

He grinned with a middle-aged agent and my grandmother’s elderly lawyer, both powerful men, handy to know if you were pretending to take over a venerable business that had been in someone else’s family for five generations. They stood in the warm sunlight that had finally burned through the clouds. He took a sip of bourbon and watched me over the rim of his cup.

And then he was laughing at something the lawyer had said. He’d joined the boys’ club with a great personality, good looks, and no effort at all. I wasn’t sure anymore that he’d been watching me over his cup. He was in the sunlight, after all, and I was in the darkness. He couldn’t see me.

Staying on my feet and taking care of horses all day would have hurt enough, but my bruised hip started to throb, and my shoulders ached from holding the spooked horse steady. I noticed other stable hands sipping sodas and smoking cigarettes beside the vast parking lot, but I never asked for a break, and Tommy never suggested I take one. I suspected he was giving the princess exactly what he thought she wanted.

Just before the last race of the day, after we’d sent our best horse to the paddock to be shown off, Tommy jerked his head toward the track, telling me to follow him. In the sunshine I shed my Blackwell Farms jacket and tied it around my waist. We found a space at the white fence where we could see the track—nowhere near the finish line, which was in front of the grandstands, but with a great view of the fourth turn. He bought us both a hot dog at a cart. I bit into mine immediately, giving him my thanks with my mouth full. I hadn’t eaten since he’d fed me that morning.

As I ate, I watched him down huge bites. The whole hot dog took him four. Hunter did not eat like this. Hunter could eat a hot dog with a knife and fork and make you think everybody ate it like that on Long Island.

“What is it?” Tommy asked me. A dab of mustard clung to the corner of his mouth.

I handed him my napkin as a hint. “Were you in love with my mother?”

The half smile stayed in place on his lips. He and Hunter were both good at smiling through anything. But I saw his reaction in his eyes. He winced a little, crow’s-feet deepening and then relaxing in a split second.

“I didn’t have time,” he said, wiping his mouth.

“So it was lust,” I said.

He squinted at me. “Nnnnnn … Maybe. She was beautiful. She was also very funny. Like you. And your daddy didn’t treat her right. Like he doesn’t treat you right.”

It was my turn to wince. I hadn’t forgiven Hunter for dragging me down here on that pretense.

“That was a lot of it,” Tommy said. “She needed me. She said she needed me. The drive to rescue the damsel from the dragon is real strong, and real hard for a man to resist. That story never ends well, and I knew that going into it.”

I looked out over the track. We faced the back of the starting gate. Grooms were leading horses into it one by one. Our farm’s horse did not want to go. Nose inside, he braced his back feet outside the gate so they couldn’t close him in. Two of our grooms put their shoulders against his ass and pushed. I asked Tommy, “Why didn’t my grandmother fire you?”

Tommy watched the show at the gate, too, or seemed to. “Why didn’t she ship that filly off for dog food?”

“Because the filly meant no harm.” I recited what Tommy had explained to me when I was older and ready to listen.

The grooms managed to shove our horse inside the gate and snap the doors in place behind him before he could kick their heads off. They walked away mopping their brows with their sleeves as other grooms approached the gate with the next horse in the line-up.

“Honestly,” Tommy said, “I think she kept me on because of Hunter. She knew this was a good place for him. She’s always liked Hunter.”

“She sees herself in him,” I said. “They’re both manipulative and crazy like a fox.”

“There’s that,” he said flatly, staring out over the track, as if my grandmother and Hunter did not bother him at all. Or as if they bothered him very much. Both emotions looked the same on Tommy.