Worlds Apart by Daniel Kelley Page A

embarrassed by my gawking – that I hadn’t a chance with her, that’s Elyse , hadn’t he told me about her? And could I please just walk the forty feet with him to where the sisters were waiting for us?”
    A half smile appeared, but Sonya still didn’t look up. “But you met her anyway. You hit a ball into her court.”
    “I did. I hit it so hard that neither Phillip nor the sisters would believe it was an accident. I was so afraid that your Mama’s game was going to end, that she’d leave the courts and I’d never see her again. I had to talk to her, I wanted to make her laugh like that myself, if I could.”
    “Did you make her laugh that day?” Sonya asked.
    “No. Well, yes, but she laughed at me. She called me Tarzan, or ape man, and she made a joke about was I aiming for the moon?”
    “ Which was out that day. ”
    “Yes. It was visible, and I looked up when she said that, and then I looked right at her and said that I was aiming for the moon, but that my bad shot had brought me to the sun instead.”
    “And did she laugh at that?”
    “No! But her tennis partner did, and Phillip and the sisters, who by then were standing by the fence that separated the courts. But Elyse, your Mama, she just looked directly at me and said, ‘That’s sweet. Complete bunk, but sweet.’ And I probably would have stood in that exact spot the entire day, but her partner tossed my ball at me and it actually bounced off my forehead, and then everyone was laughing, including me. And as I ran to chase it, she asked Phillip if he was planning on bringing ‘his mad poet’ to lunch at the clubhouse.”
    “And Phillip said yes.”
    “He said no! But he was kidding, and Elyse knew it, and she promised him she would help train both my tongue and my aim if we sat at her table. And I think even Phillip was amazed, for he told me later that she’d never spoken to him before, and here she knew his name, his family, and she was even courteous enough to ask the sisters to join us as well.”
    Sonya looked up at her father. “You must have loved her so much.”
    Kurt took a deep breath. “I did. I do. From that day forth, there was no one else for me. I only wanted her.”
    “Did you plan to go to the same university? Or was it a coincidence?”
    Kurt smiled. “It was an incredible coincidence. When we met, it was early summer. I’d already made my plans, she’d made hers. We had different majors – you know mine was languages – but I probably would have transferred if I’d found we were headed to different cities. Once we began seeing each other, that is.”
    “When did you sit at the wishing well?” Sonya asked. She wasn’t looking her father in the eye anymore, but was staring at his chest, his arms, his chair.
    “That was our third year. We took a short trip. We even pretended to be a married couple at the inn where we stayed.”
    Sonya’s half-smile returned. “I remember that.”
    “It was a tiny village, and it was near the end of term and both of us had just wanted to get away from the pressure of studying for exams. Mastering English and French as well as German was tedious work, and I was exhausted, both Mama and I were.”
    Sonya closed her eyes. “I remember exams, too. Not the best time of life,” she said.
    “No. We’d brought all of our study materials, but we never once cracked them open. We took walks, we read novels, we sat by the fireplace and held hands. And we found the wishing well, too.”
    “Down the small street with the bakery.”
    “Yes, tucked away in a little courtyard that we found after buying some bread and treats. It was out of a fairytale, an old wooden bucket cinched up with a rope, a seat large enough for two built into the stones. Mama was so excited, she wanted to plan our whole future right there, coin after coin dropped into the well.”
    Sonya’s eyes opened and she looked at her father. “You wished for me.”
    Kurt nodded. “We did. It was there that we wished for