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.
So much for detachment. As for exorcism, he was going to exorcise that word from his vocabulary. What on earth had persuaded him to blurt out that ridiculous offer of help?
His eyes flicked down to the little finger on his left hand, the one that had healed crooked. Lori was the reason he’d been beaten up. She might have forgotten that. But he hadn’t.
Nor ever would.
In a foul mood he drove to the music store, spent more money than he’d planned on the speakers, and took them out to French Bay. The wind had churned the sea into a froth of white and dirty gray; ragged clouds skudded across the sky, while the spruce trees that sheltered the house were madly waving their arms. The plumber hadn’t turned up on Friday as promised, and the electrician had left a note that he’d run into a problem with the wiring. Wondering why he’d saddled himself with a rundown old house and ten acres of granite and scrub spruce, Cade paced through the empty rooms, trying to work out where he wanted the speakers to go.
He was having dinner with Sam that night, and with his mother and Wilbur tomorrow night. Right now he was exceedingly glad to be busy both nights. All the less time to think about Lori Cartwright.
Because the nights were unquestionably the worst.
That evening Sam took Cade to his favorite steakhouse. “Eat up, boy,” he urged. “You look like you’ve been dragged through a knothole backward.”
Cade raised his beer in salute and described the various problems of French Bay. Sam listened, offered some suggestions and tucked into nachos and salsa. They ordered second beers and the steaks arrived, along with steaming baked potatoes and crisp Greek salads. “I’m hungry,” Cade said. “I didn’t eat lunch, now that I think about it.”
“You planning on moving out to the shore with a woman?” Sam asked, dumping a dollop of sour cream on his potato.
Cade’s knife slipped. “No.”
Sam said obliquely, “If a car’s a real lemon, you sell it and take your losses. You don’t keep pouring good money into it.”
Cade had spent the latter part of the day trying to settle into reading, watching television or studying the stock market, all without success. “Consign it to the scrap heap?” he said ironically. “You speaking from experience?”
Sam grimaced. “Nope. After Bonnie died I never had the heart to get out there and start looking. Dating? At my age? Didn’t seem proper, somehow.”
Cade had the grace to look ashamed; he’d known what a blow it had been to Sam to lose his wife of many years. “My mother’s got a new man friend,” he said. “It’s never too late, Sam.”
“Miguel’s sister’s a real pretty gal. Hair as black as yours, loves to dance.”
“And what,” said Cade carefully, “if the car that’s a lemon is the first car you ever owned, and you’re not sure you can sell it? Then what do you do?”
“If you’re a young fellow, you park it out back on blocks and get yourself a new one for driving down the street,” Sam said. “At your age you don’t want to be spending every weekend polishing the old one. Not like me.”
It was on the tip of Cade’s tongue to tell Sam the whole sorry story. But ever since he was a kid, he’d been in the habit of keeping his own counsel;
