Page 34 of Love Hollow at Last
It sounded kind of nice.
“I’m calling my mom,” she said.“If you’re not going to give any ground, I may as well leave.”
“Fine,” he muttered and took out his phone.
They heard the first drop of rain at the same time.Soon, it was all they heard.Their eyes met, and Aya was speechless for a moment.
If the rain continued, they wouldn’t be able to leave.
30
Noah
Aya was outside, having a conversation, pacing slowly and shaking her head.
Noah’s conversation with his parents was, he suspected, very similar to hers.
“Mom, why didn’t you tell me it was going to rain?For that matter, why didn’t Nobu?”
“I thought Grace would have told you,” she said.“As a matter of fact, if she had, you could have been back by now.Are you sure she didn’t mention it?”
Noah thought back to the morning’s conversations with Grace.The festival had been all they talked about, really.She’d insisted that they press on without worrying too much about the stories in the news, so Noah was trying to do that.In fact, a part of him was relieved.Every time he saw something about himself and a beautiful woman, he became a little less worried.Maybe the media would never discover his secret, especially if he never told another living soul.And even if they did figure it out, they wouldn’t have proof.Of course, they were fairly good at going forward without proof of anything.He had learned that the hard way when the publicity around his second album suffered.Apparently, according to the news outlets, Noah was a real diva on tour.But that wasn’t his perception at all.As it turned out, all you had to do was find multiple people willing to corroborate such a story, pay them well, and keep a hefty fund to defend against libel lawsuits.
“Well, Grace didn’t check it,” he said, though it was highly uncharacteristic of Grace to leave him unprepared.“When are you going to be able to come up and get me out?”
He heard his dad in the background probably playing with Hana.His parents had practically adopted that baby by now.Noah wondered again why his sister had bothered having kids if she just wanted to head off and do other things all summer.
“It doesn’t look great tomorrow,” said his mother.“In a couple of days, certainly.”
“A couple of days?”
“Don’t blame me,” she said sharply.“We went to a lot of trouble getting that place ready for you.It’s not as if you’re going to starve.”
“Yes, there’s food, which I guess is good since I’m stranded.Don’t you think that maybe Nobu could?—?”
But his mother had already ended the call.
“So much for filial piety,” he grumbled.“Not sure if you’re supposed to keep it up when there’s a sheep thief around.”
Aya was coming back in, a dark expression on her face, but she gave him a quizzical look.“Sheep thief?”
“Oh, just the old Confucian question.What is the best way to show filial piety if your parent is doing something terrible like stealing sheep?”
“Well, what’s the answer?”Aya asked, sitting down at one of the bar stools by the kitchen counter.
Noah shrugged.“My dad could tell you.I was never really interested in that lecture.And now we’re stuck here.I expected my parents to at least look at the weather.They never come out here without knowing the forecast at least a week in advance.”
“Maybe this is their way of passing the baton to the younger generation,” said Aya, and Noah grinned.
“How many batons has your mom passed to you?”
Aya seemed to think about it for a moment.She had told Noah that her mother cooked constantly, took care of everything around the house, and ran a small business singlehandedly, doing all of the admin and instruction for her dance studio.The only thing she was willing to outsource was gardening, as she liked having fresh vegetables around but had always relied on her parents for their help with weeding until they got too old.“Yeah, good point.”
31
Noah
Noah went outside again, that time to take a call from Grace.It was a shame, since he had just been getting close to a conversation with Aya.He wondered if the foibles of their aging parents might have been enough for him to get through to her.That stupid little ceremony!He had thought it was sweet when he was younger but had never thought it would disrupt his life quite so much.
