Girl Trouble

Texas wasn’t far enough away for the likes of Ray Cartwright. But it sure beat Halifax. Cade felt quite extraordinarily happy.

Rachel grabbed her mother’s hand while Liddy glowered at Cade. Liddy didn’t like him, that much was clear. Cade knew very little about children, and in consequence tended to treat them as smaller size adults. He said calmly, “I know I’m not your dad, Liddy...all I’m doing is giving you a ride to the movies.”

Liddy buried her face in her mother’s jacket. “The movie will cheer you up,” Lori said, “so we’re going to accept Cade’s kind offer... although weren’t you just arriving, Cade?”

“Yep. But I’ve got all day.”

“No heavy dates?” she flashed, then blushed scarlet as if she’d meant to think the words, not say them.

“Not unless you call dinner with my mother in return for fixing her car a heavy date,” he said, and recklessly decided to call the emotion that crossed her face relief. “What about you?” he added.

“If we’re going, we’d better go,” she said crossly. “Blow your nose, Liddy.” Liddy complied and Lori dropped the tissues into the nearest wastebasket. Cade led the way out to his car. He unlocked it, opened the back doors for the girls and showed them how the seat belts worked. By this time Lori was sitting in the front. She blurted, “Isn’t this a Mercedes?”

How can you afford a Mercedes? That was what she meant. Smoothly he started the car and drove out of the parking lot. “I picked it up secondhand when I was here in June, and Sam, my business partner, worked on it in his spare time all summer.”

Lorraine would have tossed her head haughtily without a hint of apology. Lori, however, looked ashamed of her artless question; the differences between Lorraine and Lori were beginning to intrigue Cade a great deal. She said clumsily, “It was raining so hard the other day I didn’t even notice the car.”

“Plus you were surprised to see me.” To say the least.

She said in resignation, “We only live two blocks north of Whitman, that’s why we keep bumping into each other.”

“Celtic Street,” Rachel supplied. “In an apartment.”

So his two sightings of Lori, once at the secondhand store and once at the bus stop, hadn’t been coincidence at all, but merely the result of location. Nevertheless, questions were seething through Cade’s mind. Ray must have left her well provided for; and if he hadn’t, her father was a wealthy man. What was she doing living on Celtic, a street that was lined with apartment blocks? He’d checked a couple of them out before he’d found his own apartment, and hadn’t liked them at all. Cramped rooms, old carpeting and cheap appliances.