Girl Trouble

Lori? In a secondhand clothing store? Lori, who used to spend more on one dress than Cade’s father earned in a week?

She must be volunteering there.

Of course. That was it.

That was nice of her, he thought, and found himself turning down the street. He was only going to take a closer look at the chrysanthemums; he’d like to start a garden once he was settled at French Bay.

He looked through the window of the store. Another woman was seated behind the counter, reading; Lori, still wearing her blue jacket, was going through a rack of girls’ clothing.

He was watching a film that somehow had gone wrong, Cade thought crazily; its script had got muddled up with that of an entirely different film. A surreal film. Then, as if she felt the strength of his gaze, Lori glanced over her shoulder and saw him. The look of horror on her face should have been funny and was not. She ducked her head, turned her back and couldn’t more clearly have told him to vanish from her sight. From her life. Forever.

Leave me alone...please.

Cade pushed open the door and marched over to her. “What’s up, Lori?” he demanded with something less than diplomacy. “Ten years ago you wouldn’t have been found within five blocks of a place like this.”

She straightened to her full height, her blue eyes blazing. “How many times do I have to tell you I don’t need you in my life? That doesn’t seem like a very complicated message and I don’t understand why you’re not getting it.”

“I just want you to tell me what’s wrong!”

“The only thing wrong is that you won’t leave me alone.”

The woman at the counter said in a carrying voice, “Need a hand, Lori?”

“No thanks, Marta—he’s leaving. Right now.”

Cade grated, “The only reason I’m leaving is because I’ll be late for work if I don’t.”

As an exit line it lacked a certain punch; but it was the best he could come up with. Cade strode out of the store and down the street, the chrysanthemums forgotten.

Had Ray lost all his money? After all, the recession was still on and bankruptcies were common. Why else would Lori be buying her children used clothing?

The reasons were nothing to do with him. Any more than she was. He crossed the main street, his jaw set.

Even though they’d been busy yelling at each other, he’d seen how tired she looked. Part of him wanted to sweep her up in his arms, carry her to his apartment and look after her, this woman who’d scorned and humiliated him. Look after her and make love to her, he thought with a twist of his mouth. Make love to her day and night, and to hell with her children and her husband. And if that wasn’t an unrealistic and totally mad scheme, he didn’t know what was.

All day Cade worked like a man demented; and he didn’t speak to Miguel about his sister.

On Saturday morning Cade decided to drive across town to check out stereo equipment; he wanted speakers installed throughout the downstairs and part of the upstairs of the house at French Bay. After a series of the mild, sunny days so characteristic of September in Nova Scotia, rain was now pelting the windy streets, glistening on the tossing leaves of the maples and collecting in puddles because the drains couldn’t carry it away fast enough. No day for umbrellas, Cade thought, and with a dizzying thud of his heart saw that the woman running toward the bus shelter was Lori, her head down against the rain.

I’m doing my level best to avoid you. To forget about you. So why the devil do I keep meeting up with you?

Because Halifax is a small city?

Because I’m meant to?

She was wearing her blue jacket and carrying a kit bag. She must be on her way to aerobics.

He glanced in his rearview mirror and pulled over to the curb, being careful not to splash her. Rolling the window down, he shouted, “Get in—I’ll drive you!”

As Lori recognized him, shock fixed her features into a mask; rain was streaming down her cheeks as if she were weeping, and her jacket was plastered to her body. She turned her head to see if the bus was coming in a movement as jerky as a puppet’s on a string. Only then did she grab the door handle and plunk herself down on the seat beside him.

Take it cool, Cade told himself, and said easily, “Just push that black button, it’ll raise the window again. Do you get much of this kind of weather in Halifax?”

Lori fussed rather unnecessarily with her seat belt. “Not often,” she said in a smothered voice.

She pushed back her hood. Her hair was a loose tumble of wheat-gold curls and her cheeks were pink from running. Every nerve Cade possessed tightened to an unbearable pitch. She was so close, yet so unutterably out of reach. Forcing himself to concentrate, he pulled back into the flow of traffic. “Are you going to the gym?”

She nodded, and again he was reminded of a marionette: this, in a woman normally so graceful. “If it’s not out of your way,” she said.

It was, and he couldn’t have cared less. “You don’t have the girls with you,” he said at random.

“I was able to get a sitter.” She shot him a quick glance. “Do you live near here?”

“On Whitman Street.”

“Oh,” she said faintly. “Where are you working?”

“At the garage on the corner near the Commons.”

They’d pulled up at a set of lights. Without even knowing he was thinking it, Cade heard himself blurt, “Lori, if you ever need help for any reason, all you have to do is ask me.”

The words replayed themselves in his head. He ran his fingers through his damp, untidy curls. “And what that was all about I don’t have a clue. But—” he gave her a sudden, wide smile devoid of calculation “—I mean it. Every word. It can be for old times’ sake, if you like.”

She was staring at him, her jaw gaping, her eyes dazed. Hastily he added, “What’s wrong?”

In a rush she whispered, “I’d forgotten your smile. There’s something about it...it makes me feel...oh God, I don’t even know what I’m talking about.”

His heart was now racketing around his chest like a ping-pong ball gone berserk, and again the words came from a place far from conscious thought. “You can say whatever you like to me, Lori. I mean that, too.”

She looked down at her hands, clasped in her lap. “No, I can’t,” she muttered, and to his horror he saw that the moisture gathered on her lashes wasn’t rain now, but tears.

“Lori—” Someone in the next lane blasted a horn at him, and hurriedly Cade paid attention to his driving; the wipers swished over the windshield and the tires hissed on the wet pavement.

In a voice so low he had to strain to hear it, Lori said, “Forget this conversation, Cade, forget it ever happened. I’m tired, that’s all. And I’ve always hated the wind.”

“That’s right,” he said slowly, “you told me once how you got lost on a windy day when you were only little.” The day she’d told him, he’d been polishing one of her father’s cars and she’d come to get her little red sports car to go to a horse show. “You were wearing jodhpurs and a yellow shirt, and the wind grabbed your scarf—do you remember? I ran after it, and luckily it caught in the lilacs.”

“They’d been in bloom for over a week—it was a good year, they were like purple foam all along the driveway.” She bit her lip. “Do we ever forget anything?”

Another man might have missed the anguish underlying her question. Cade did not. “Not much,” he said. “In my experience. But I would have thought your memories were happy ones.”

“Would you?” she said sardonically. “Then you’d be wrong.”

It wasn’t an opportune moment for Cade to remember the night when he’d walked home alone through the woods; how the three men had loomed out of the darkness, taunting him as they’d backed him against a tree, laughing raucously as he’d gone down, helpless, beneath a hail of blows and kicks. He said in a clipped voice, “We’re nearly there. I hope your class goes well.”

Flinching at his change of tone, Lori visibly retreated from him. “Thank you for the ride,” she said with formal exactitude.

Then he was pulling up in front of the gym and she was climbing out of the car. He kept silent, his hands gripping the steering wheel as if it were a thoroughbred as volatile as the big bay mare she used to ride. Lori slammed the door and ran up the steps. Cade drove away.