Love Maps by Eliza Factor

Author:Eliza Factor [Factor, Eliza]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: book, ebook, Romance
Goodreads: 23282088
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2015-04-12T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Connecticut, October 1997

She held the canvas to one edge of the table and stretched it by hand. The table wobbled under the pressure. It was a cheap thing with dented aluminum legs and a plastic top, some fifties-era substance that was once shiny and optimistic but was now old, dull, cracked. She stopped stretching. The crease was still there. She’d live with it. She drew a picture of Philip. A crude picture, dull lead on untreated canvas, yet there were his eyes, flickering. It took a month for the bruises to go away. When his face returned it was a narrower, more asymmetrical face than the one it had been. Perhaps it would have been better if he had gone to the precinct and started blabbing to the first police officer he met. He had so disapproved of lying, and to be bound up in the same one as Maya?

On one of those trips to Texas, Tori had shown her a snapshot: Philip’s hair sun-bleached and shaggy, Franco leaning into him, a crinkly smile aimed at the camera. Sarah had pored over it, fascinated by this vision of Philip, his shirt not all the way buttoned, his eyes shining happily, both him and Franco gorgeous in that way of young men. Philip had been in grad school. He’d visited Conningsby as part of a larger trip. He was on his way to New Mexico to see an architectural commune inspired by the geodesic dome.

Franco, according to Tori, was one of Conningsby’s projects. A young man with no family, back from the war, in need of a job. Conningsby gave him a shack on his ranch and some mechanical work. The very first day that Philip was there, Franco offered him peyote, and Philip said yes. When Philip had told her that, Sarah hadn’t been able to believe it. Her Philip? But he hadn’t been hers yet. He had been twenty-six, in awe of Franco, who had defused bombs, who had dealt drugs, who treated Conningsby with a nonchalance that Philip couldn’t muster. They found the basketball court behind a one-story whitewashed school. Philip had played basketball, of course. Kids in Indiana play basketball, but he’d never played well, never liked it until Franco took the time to counsel him. The way he told it, Franco changed his fundamental understanding of the game. The two of them would practice for hours in the desert sun. One day, when the temperature stupefied them, they found a shaded trail by the court. It took them to some canyons where they scrambled up old footholds into a cave. There they sat and talked and talked, words pouring out of them, until it was dark and they had no light and stumbled and groped their way home.

Philip had not known why Franco bothered with him, he felt like an innocent beside him. Then one day they had wrestled by the lip of an old mine, and Franco had kissed him. A sweet kiss. That was the word Philip had used, more than twenty years after, still shaking his head in wonder.

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