Love Story

She stepped closer and peered at them. “If it were Little House on the Prairie, you would wrap them in paper and put them on a high shelf.”

“Or I’d dig a pit for them in the ground and fill the pit with hay to keep them fresh and cold.”

“Or you’d pack them in a barrel with salt.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said, “they’re boots, not herring.”

“You should have taken that thousand dollars,” she said. “You earned it.”

I waited until she left for her quiet night with Manohar. Then I raked all my clothes off her closet rod and plopped them on my bed. I pulled my underwear out of the bottom drawer of my dresser and even stacked my textbooks on the pillow.

Every item I owned fit on the bed. I divided the items into two piles: items that my grandmother had bought and items that I had bought with money I’d earned since I moved to New York. I looked very, very carefully at my grandmother’s pile and considered throwing it away. I could toss some of it, but there was one thing I simply couldn’t part with. My laptop. I might as well throw my writing career away. And if I couldn’t throw out absolutely everything she’d given me, the exercise was pointless.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized there was no way to get around Hunter’s argument. Only a rich girl would consider throwing out a prized possession just because it was a gift from someone she was angry with. It was a gesture of the very privileged.

I stood looking at all my stuff. Enough of this. I was wasting time. I had homework to do, and a job to go to at six in the morning. I cleared all my textbooks off the pillow except calculus.

Footfalls sounded in the stairwell. I looked up as if I could see through the wall. These could be Hunter’s quick steps. This was the wrong time of night. But it was the weekend, and Summer had said she thought he was leaving.

Sure enough, as the heavy front door of the building closed and I peeked out the bay window, it was Hunter’s tall frame I saw mingling in the evening crowd on the sidewalk with his overcoat slung over his shoulder, ready for his trek back in the wee hours when the air would be frigid and black.

The following Thursday, the creative-writing class discussed yet another of his stories. Add the back room of a cocktail waitress’s bar to the list of possible somewheres. The only way to find out where Hunter was going at night was for him to stop teasing and just tell me.

The story I composed over the next week was designed to make him do just that.

9

But on the day it was due, I couldn’t let it go.

Students whose stories were discussed on Monday had to turn in the stories the previous Friday by noon. It was eleven fifty-five on Friday. I sat across from the front desk in the five-story lobby of the library in a mod chair of red fur that would have looked funky and adorable except that it was matted with wear and mysterious stains. I gripped “Anything Is Possible” in both hands, bending it in the middle, sullying it with my sweat, ruining the pristine condition I preferred for my stories because I thought they looked professional and made readers less likely to tear them in two during class discussion.

On the large digital clock behind the front desk, eleven fifty-five blinked to eleven fifty-six. I needed to turn this story in, but I could not. I had written it for a specific purpose, to shake Hunter out of his pattern of seeking me out, shutting me down, and writing a sexy story about somebody else. If this story didn’t motivate him to tell me how he really felt, nothing would.

The problem was that in prodding Hunter to lower his defenses, I’d lowered my own too far. The other stories I’d written for class had been fictionalizations of my life. This one wasn’t fiction at all.

At eleven fifty-seven I was second-guessing myself. Why had I written this story anyway? What had possessed me to do this to myself? I could quickly write another story as a replacement. It would suck, but at least I could protect my soul from the prying eyes of the class.

I couldn’t risk it. Gabe might have some system of knowing when a story had been turned in late. At the very least, some of my classmates might come into the library and ask for the reserve folder in the next few minutes so they could read the stories before starting their weekend. I would be busted, my grade would suffer, my dreams of the internship would be gone. It wasn’t worth the risk.

At eleven fifty-nine I wiped both wet hands on the matted red chair, crossed the lobby, and asked the kid behind the counter to add my story to the reserve folder for my class.

Before I could change my mind, I ran away, back across the lobby, past the group of chairs, and up the stairs.

My money from the summer was running out faster than I’d expected, and I’d signed up for extra shifts at the coffee shop the whole weekend. I had an early American literature survey (bleh!) paper to finish in the two-hour window before my belly-dancing class, and no time to lose. I settled at a table on a second-story balcony with a glass wall below the rail so I could see the lobby floor. This was one of my favorite places to study. The white noise of five stories of library was the perfect background music since I was sans music player and earbuds.

Nothing changed about the white noise, I was pretty sure. The scanners at the checkout desk below me blooped softly, the elevator slid up and down, and behind me girls were having too loud a conversation for a library. But something changed. Something made me look up from my laptop toward the front desk on the first floor.

Hunter was checking out the stories.

He took the folder and handed over his student ID in exchange, then headed for the group of chairs where I’d just been sitting. Nothing unusual about that. It was a convenient place to read if you’d popped into the library only to read the stories for class. He didn’t choose my fuzzy red chair. He sat in the larger carved chair upholstered in golden velvet, a stylized throne.

But he didn’t seem like a king, for once. The huge chair made him smaller in comparison. He looked young, curled up with the stories, one leg folded under him. I hadn’t seen him sit that way since middle school, happening upon him reading under a tree in my grandmother’s pasture. He would not sit that way if he knew people were looking at him. Strange what a gaze did to Hunter.

I watched him. I knew he was reading my story rather than one of the others because my paper was a higher-quality bright white, one of the few luxuries I sprung for anymore. He stared at one page for a long time, leafed back to the page before it, read the whole passage again. He winced. I tried to figure out which of the many wince-inducing sections he was reading, judging from how many sheets he seemed to have left. I couldn’t tell.

Reaching the end, he held the story up and stared at it for a few minutes. He stretched and popped his neck, then settled back down to read the other two stories. But the bright white story came out again. He read it through, slipped it back into the folder, turned in the folder at the desk, and left the library. He’d scratched a lot of comments in his notebook about the other two stories, but after reading mine, the first time and the second, he hadn’t scrawled word one.

Maybe he was saving his comments to tell me in person. All weekend I half-expected him to confront me as I worked at the coffee shop, or read on a blanket with Summer in the park, or wrote in my room and listened for him in the stairwell. He did not confront me. I did not see him. My story hadn’t affected him the way I’d hoped. He’d gotten the last laugh after all.

That’s what I thought until class on Monday.

Anything Is Possible

by Erin Blackwell

She knocked on the closet door, then opened it slowly. Her daughter probably had her earbuds in as usual and wouldn’t hear the knock anyway, but she tried to warn her daughter as best she could. Her daughter had an exaggerated startle response; doctors had said witnessing domestic abuse might have caused this.

Her daughter looked up easily from her pillow nest in the closet and smiled. “Hey.”

“Hey.” She sank down into the fluffy softness in front of her daughter. “What are you reading?”

Her daughter showed her the cover: Pride and Prejudice.

“Haven’t you read that before?”

“Like four times. But it gets better every time.”

She didn’t doubt her daughter. She wasn’t much of a reader herself, but she’d seen quite a few movie and TV versions, and the more recent ones were definitely better. “Well, I’m turning in,” she lied. “Don’t stay up too late reading, okay?”

“I won’t,” her daughter promised. Her daughter had bent her head to the book again before she had even closed the closet door. She suspected her daughter was lying, too.

Free of this responsibility, she hurried down the grand staircase, careful not to look as if she were hurrying. She waltzed right past the office where her mother still slaved over the books for the business, anxious to find a way to make it leaner smarter better richer and exceedingly more boring. If her mother burst out of the office at this moment, she could say she was headed to the kitchen for a snack. But her mother, like her daughter, stayed put behind a closed door.

As she sneaked oh so quietly out the side door, careful of the squeak that sounded when it was opened too far, she began to feel foolish. She was thirty-two years old, way too old to be sneaking around behind her mother’s back, and her daughter’s.

But thirty-two was way too young to have a twelve-year-old. At eighteen she had run away to Hollywood to escape the iron fist of her mother and prove her worth by making it on her own as an actress. At twenty she’d had a baby. Now she’d run away back home to escape the iron fist of the father of her child.

She would not stay here, she told herself as she leaped from the porch stair, over the corner of the crunchy gravel path, to the dewy grass where she wouldn’t be heard. Moving through the wet night toward the barn was like drawing closer to her destination in life after a long and fruitless detour. Her new man made her feel like anything was possible. They would take his son and her daughter, strike out on their own, and make a new life for themselves. They had not discussed this but she knew it would work out.

“Just like your career as a Hollywood actress worked out,” said a voice in her head. But if she had listened to the voice in her head, she never would have pursued her dreams. Granted, her dreams had not worked out, either, but better to pursue them than to have stayed here when she was eighteen, and to have hung her dreams in a black barn alongside stalks of tobacco to cure and age and dry.

Her mother’s huge house was surrounded by large grassy hills, like a ship rocking in thirty-foot seas. At the bottom of one hill she could see nothing but stars above her in the black sky. Climbing this hill, gradually she saw more and more of the long, low horse barn. No features of the ancient building were visible in the night. It was only a black block obliterating the starlight, one open doorway filled with brilliant light, and the smell of cigarette smoke.

He was waiting for her.

She was shocked by the intense wave of desire that swept through her. She had felt this way a hundred times in high school, a thousand times during that shining year in Hollywood when she’d still thought the world was hers. So seldom had she felt this way since—perhaps a few times with the father of her child. Every time he struck her, and apologized the next day, calling up that desire became harder. She picked up speed through the dewy grass until she ran toward that feeling.

The man had seen her coming and had ground his cigarette under his riding boot. Now he laughed and caught her in his arms and swung her in a circle outside the barn. He had not grown up here like she had. He had grown up somewhere far away but similar, and she felt as if she had known him longer than a month.

“You haven’t changed your mind.” He set his forehead against hers and chuckled these words to her. He was a tall, strong man with a lightness about him, always laughing as he spoke. He did not judge her for wanting him.

“I haven’t changed my mind.” She took his rough hand and led him through the labyrinth she knew so well: past the barn office, down the dark main corridor with horse stalls on either side, to the bunk room in back.

She’d had men here before, when she was a teenager with no business here. She hadn’t regretted her actions then. Now, looking back, perhaps those wild transgressions and her mother’s reaction when she found out had been the hottest fire lit under her feet and had sent her two thousand miles away. She dreaded her mother’s reaction still. But with any luck her mother would not find out until her relationship with this man, exactly her age, was stable and happy.

“You are a beautiful woman.” He smiled down at her, running his rough fingers through her curls. “Here I thought I’d found a job in paradise, and then from out of nowhere comes an angel.”

“Not from out of nowhere,” she teased him. “Out of the two thirty Greyhound from Glendale.”

She bit her bottom lip, wishing she hadn’t made this silly joke. As a teen she would have made dozens of jokes like this in quick succession, daring a boy to keep up with her. The father of her child had taken these jokes to mean she thought she was smarter than he was, and twice this had been the reason he punched her. Exactly twice. She kept score.

But her new man grinned and lightly touched his fingertip to her nose. Gently he eased her backward onto the sagging mattress covered with a clean quilt faded to pastels. With surprising force he took her mouth with his. She tasted cigarette and mint and comfort.

Later they dressed. “Put it on,” he joked from the mattress, and she donned her clothes while pretending to move in reverse. She stepped outside the barn with him while he smoked a cigarette. She didn’t smoke, and any other time the smell and the habit would have annoyed her, but they seemed a part of this man, an imperfect but honest part.

He offered her a cigarette and she should have taken it, and one more. Then they would have remained outside with room to run when the father of her child stormed through the front door of her mother’s grand house and out the side door.

But she declined, and in the few more minutes she thought she could spare before her mother finally turned in for the night and perhaps looked in on her to make sure she hadn’t escaped again, she asked this kind man to show her the horses. She had seen them all when she’d first arrived home. She had run her hands over them to meet them and had exercised a few of them, but she wanted to see them through his eyes.