It didn’t take long to realize these were exactly what the title described: love poems. Love full of hunger, and sadness, and fire. The words made her temperature rise and her teeth clench.
Emeline slammed the book closed.
She couldn’t keep this. A book of love poems from the person who stole her memories? It was too much.
I’ ll throw it away,she thought, eyeing the trash can next to the pump.
“Excellent choice,” said a deep voice from nearby.
Emeline turned to see a bearded man wearing a black turban pumping gas into his car behind her. He nodded to the book in her hand. “My wife loves Neruda. It’s how I wooed her.”
Emeline glanced up into gentle brown eyes, which were crinkling in a smile. He had a sweet, grandfatherly demeanor, this man.
“Is she here with you?” Emeline asked, trying to steer the subject away from Hawthorne’s book. She glanced to the passenger side of his car, but the seat was empty.
His face fell. “Ah, no.”
“I’m sorry,” she said quickly, realizing her mistake. By the white of his beard and the deep wrinkles of his forehead, he was probably close to Pa’s age.
He tsked gently. “Don’t apologize. I love remembering her.”
So that’s how Emeline passed the next few minutes pumpinggas: listening to him tell her about the love of his life, whom he’d lost five years ago to cancer.
As they went to pay, he opened the glass door for her. “Thank you,” he said. “For listening.”
She hugged him.
As she walked back to her car a few minutes later, her phone buzzed with a text from her manager.
Want to meet your tour mates tonight?
Her heart skipped. She texted back:Meet The Perennials?Tonight?
The thought made her break out in a sweat.
They’re grabbing drinks at the Rev. I’ ll tell them to reserve a seat for you.
A thousand butterflies fluttered through her. In the terror and madness of the past week, there had been no time to be excited for her tour or think about what it would be like to meet the band she’d idolized for years.
If she met The Perennials tonight, they wouldn’t be strangers in the green room tomorrow. She wondered what they’d be like. After three weeks on the road together, would they all be friends?
I need friends.
A wisp of memory flickered through her: Hot summer day. Dust sticking to her skin. Legs swinging from the barn beams. And a girl, stretched out beside her, listening to her sing.
Sable.
The memory brought a rush of confusion. She tried to think backwards. Tried to gather other, older memories of Sable from before she ever left Edgewood.
But all that came was a fog. A gap. Anothing.
It scared her. She pushed the feeling quickly down, then pocketed her phone. Just before she got into her car, the sight of that same trash can made her pause.
Emeline looked from the trash can toTwenty Love Poems and a Song of Despairstill gripped in her hand. She could throw it out right now.
But as she moved to do it, all she could think about was the man at the pump and his poetry-loving wife. He spoke of her like she was a radiant sun. One that had set but, like the dusk, still lingered on the horizon where he kept his gaze fixed.
Emeline couldn’t help feeling that to throw Neruda’s poems in the garbage was to defile the woman’s memory, somehow. So she opened her car door, shoved the book in her bag, then pulled out onto the highway and kept driving.
