How Cassie Got Her Grind Back (21 page)

“Right,” he replied with a grimace on his ruggedly handsome face. “What has been seen cannot be unseen.”

Chuckling, she unchained the front door and headed down the hall. “We’ll
need
my bed, so burning it isn’t an option. I’m going to change the linens and…tidy up in there.”

“Okay, beautiful.”

The first thing she did was blow out the candles and then immediately regretted it. He’d lit several, and by the time she was done, she was waving her hands and wincing at the sweet scent mixed with the odor of smoke. She was just grateful she hadn’t actually seen Bill naked in her room. What a desecration of her private space—not that
he’d
seen it that way, obviously.

Soft music filtered down the hall. He’d found her stereo, and she heard his chuckle as she recognized the opening chords to Elvis Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling In Love With You.” “You and I are dancing to this when you get done in there, beautiful,” he called down the hall. “That one brings back some memories.”

Taking a deep breath as she yanked the sheets from the bed, she replied, “I was thinking about you and Samson, and your family, the other night, and I happened to have that CD. What’s a home without at least a little bit of Elvis in it?”

“I recall you were a big fan.”

She chuckled and softly said, “I’m a big fan of your parents.” She could still see them dancing in the kitchen. His parents were the only example she’d ever had of what a happily married couple looked like. Samson and Ivan had groaned in embarrassment and horror at their antics, but Cassie had wanted to be just like them.

“What? I couldn’t hear you,” he said from the doorway as he squinted and waved his arm in the air and turned on her ceiling fan to clear the drifting smoke.

“Whenever I hear Elvis, I always remember the way your parents were with each other. My mom and dad never did that while I lived at home, and after…well, I don’t imagine they wanted to be in the same room with each other, much less dance together. How is the cooking going?” she asked, hoping to change the subject.

“The vegetables are sautéing. I need to keep an eye on it, but it’ll be at least forty-five minutes while the gravy simmers. We have plenty of time.” He grabbed the corner on the fresh fitted sheet and helped her make the bed. In all their married years, Bill had never helped with such a chore.

She noticed him taking in the framed portraits of the kids hanging on the bedroom wall. “You’ve had a full and blessed life,” he finally said as they put the fresh pillowcases on the pillows. “Assholes aside, of course.”

With a nod, she said, “Yes. Joseph and Tamara are…amazing. I’m so proud of the people they’ve become. And Divine Drip has been a dream come true. My mom is going to be okay. If I ignore nonsense like Bill pulled tonight, and the garbage I put up with from my father, it’s a wonderful life.”

With a grin, he caught the corners of the quilt when she whipped them in the air above the bed. “What about your music? Are you still writing? And singing? I noticed the guitar case in the back of your closet earlier,” he said, pointing at the dusty case propped up against the back wall in the walk-in closet.

“I haven’t touched it, any of it, in years,” she said, thinking of the sheaf of handwritten music tucked inside the case.

“What happened, baby?” he asked as she opened one of the bedroom windows. The soft scent of fall rain hung in the air, and a touch of cool, fresh air kissed her fingertips.

“Oh…life, I suppose. I don’t want to bore you,” she said, evading, reluctant to share the slow demise of her original dream with him. “I made it work. And like you said earlier, I’m blessed.”

He came to her by the window. “Come on,” he said, tugging at her hand. “It’s time to check the gravy.”

* * * *

A little while later when supper was ready, Ivan held the spoon for Cassie as she took another bite of crawfish étouffée. The delight at the meal he’d prepared for her glimmered in her eyes and gave him a feeling of accomplishment that transcended merely feeding her. He loved the half-lidded look of pleasure in her eyes.

“Mmmm,” she moaned, her eyes twinkling as she chewed and swallowed. “You sure know how to cook, Ivan. If I owned a restaurant like Hermione, I’d be all over you like white on rice, trying to steal you away.”

He shrugged and took another bite himself. She’d have to ask him only once. “I’ve found a rather surprising amount of fulfillment as a chef. So you decided against pursuing your music degree?”

She’d always had visions of getting her degree at Berklee and then moving to Nashville or Los Angeles and pursuing a career as a songwriter and musician. And he knew she could sing as well.

He and Samson had supported her dream wholeheartedly because, even though it would’ve meant losing her, it would’ve enabled her to get away from the controlling men in her family. In the end, Cassie’s dream was the one thing allowing Samson to walk away on graduation day—that she would be free…finally.

Eyeing him as she wiped her lips on the napkin, she said, “You don’t really want me to rehash all that old history. I’d rather hear more about you and Samson.”

Determined, he shook his head. “I’ve spent the last hour talking about myself and what life has been like for us. I want to know about you. I need to,” he added as she pursed her lips and shrugged.

“It’s not very interesting,” she said as she took the last sip of her sangria and then got up from the sofa and took the plate and utensils they’d shared from him.

He followed her into the kitchen, where she rinsed the dishes and put them in the dishwasher. “Maybe it’s not interesting to you, but I don’t want you to gloss over the last thirty years. I want to understand how you arrived at a place where you feel satisfied with having not pursued what I know was your vision for life.”

She frowned, but any aggravation she felt at his pointed words she kept to herself, which said quite a bit. He waited patiently while she worked, noticing the firm set of her mouth. To give her time, he got out the bottle of wine and refilled their glasses.

“You know my father held the promise of helping me to go to college over my head. When I graduated, he told me the restaurant had taken some losses after what happened with my mom and I would need to work a semester or two to earn money for living expenses since he couldn’t help me as much.”

“I thought you’d been saving all your tips and your earnings from the restaurant for all four years of high school. You had quite a chunk saved.”

She shrugged. “My mother…”

“No,” he said, the syllable turning into a groan.

“There was nothing by the time we discovered her gambling addiction, after she was arrested. All of our savings went into paying her court fines and paying back the volunteer fire department. And before you ask, no, I’m not mad at her. I was angry at the time but realized, with age and experience, that an addiction can alter a person’s perception of reality. She’d inherited a piece of land, which she’d put on the market, and intended to replace every cent she took plus interest once it’d sold. She believed she could make it possible for both of us to get out from under my father’s thumb for good. But the realtors had no luck in selling the land, the thugs representing the man she owed a large sum of money to came calling, and she got desperate, embezzled the funds to pay them off, and got caught.”

And that was the point his father had gotten involved. He’d discovered the deficit in the volunteer fire department’s building account, and when he’d confronted Mrs. Villalobos, she’d confessed all and showed him the contract that had been signed on the land, which had fallen through when the potential buyers had pulled out of the area at the last minute, and then the fire department’s secretary had discovered the loss and reported it, implicating them both. Her for taking the money and him for covering it up. The court had seized the land she’d tried to sell and sold it for a fraction of what it was worth.

He squeezed her hand and tugged her back into the living room, having no difficulty imagining her quiet and affectionate mother’s remorse when everything imploded.

“Dad told me I could still go to Berklee, if I was determined to leave Divine and all the family who cared about me, but it would just be delayed for a bit. If I still wanted to go, I had no choice but to do as he asked. You know how he was with the family members who worked for him. None of that changed, but I kept my dream in front of me and tried to write on my own. Two years turned into three. I needed to help out financially at home, too, and soon very little money was going into my school account. Mom was released from the correctional facility, and with her at home, my father was difficult to live with.”

“But you say you wrote during that time?” he said, handing her the glass of wine as he took a seat beside her.

Her smile warmed his heart. “I did. It was a hard season in my life, and I poured all my feelings into my music. I never heard from either of you and figured you’d either married your careers or had fallen in love and were off building families. So yeah, I wrote a bunch. Kind of struggled with the music since there was only so much I could learn in high school and Dad said there was no money for private tutors. That was the age before the Internet and YouTube tutorials,” she added with a grin. “It was a good outlet for a while, but dreams deferred have a way of faltering. Dad’s haranguing only got worse after he filed for divorce. He didn’t want to see her face every day anymore, he said.”

Ivan tilted his head, and she met his gaze. “You know there was never anything between my dad and your mom, right?”

“Of course. I’m not a complete idiot. Your parents were the ideal, in love, worship-the-ground-each-other-walked-on example for how relationships should be. No, once he had the idea in his head that she’d cheated on top of losing all his money, he wouldn’t let it go. His bitterness began to infect me. I got…See? I really didn’t want to bore you with all this.”

“You’re not boring me, baby.”

Taking a deep breath, she blurted out, “I got depressed, and I gave up, basically. I took all the songs I’d written and my guitar and stored it all away.”

“Your piano?” Her entire family had chipped in and bought her a nice, used upright piano when she’d started high school, right around the time he and his brother had met her. She’d been all about her music back then.

Her smile was bittersweet. “Dad sold it within that first year after graduation. He said we needed the money more than we needed the noise in the house all the time.”

He wished he’d known.
Why did I never come back?

“Your parents had already stopped coming to Divine and doing any business in the area, going to Morehead instead, I guess, so I never saw them or ran into them at the restaurant. There were some days where I wished I’d run after the two of you on the football field, after we got our diplomas, begged Samson to take me with him, somehow.” She grimaced. “I sound as though I’m whining. Like I think everyone abandoned me.”

“No you don’t. There’s plenty I’d do different if I’d known.”
For starters, I would’ve begged you to come back to Dallas with me. I would’ve taken care of you
.

“Dad was miserable to work with, much less live with, and once, when I tried to quit, my aunts and uncles begged me not to, saying he needed me, that he didn’t mean to be so ugly. Life had dealt him an unfair hand.”

Ivan couldn’t hide his frown. “They told you he’d been dealt an unfair hand? A beautiful daughter and a sweet wife who might not have involved herself in addictive behavior if she’d had another outlet, if things had been better at home. I think your dad has some responsibility in what happened to her.”

“You mean a variation on the ‘he drove me to drink’ sort of thing? Maybe. All I know is she lived an unhappy life with him but never took it out on others the way he did. So I worked, and dreams of making music, writing songs, drifted further out of sight. Bill came home from college and took a job at the same bank his dad worked at, and my father noticed he was always eating at the restaurant. Dad started…pushing me at Bill—and pushing Bill at me.” She gave him a half-hearted smile as she curled up on the couch and looked away. “I was weak by this point, and well…we got married.”

Stifling his resentment at the thought, he caressed the top of her hand. “It’s the past. You can tell me.”

Tears were pooled in her eyes when she turned back to him, and she wiped them away and sniffled. “I hate crying in front of you. It makes my nose run and turn red.”

“I don’t mind baby, except I know it means you’re hurting.”

“It was a different time, and all the women in my family stayed home once they finished school,
if
they finished, and they either worked at home if their husbands could support them or worked in the family restaurant to help out. It wasn’t bad for all of them,” she said, putting her hand on top of his. “Uncle Rudy’s girls were encouraged to go to school, and he was sweet to us, but he was the youngest of his siblings. I was so pleased when he made the offer to buy them all out. The restaurant improved after that change.”

“I’ve heard he runs a tight, clean ship over there.”

“He does, and without all the yelling and fussing, too. Anyway, I never made a clear decision about not attending school. It just became more distant and unfathomable as time went by. By the time I’d had Joseph, I couldn’t imagine how to make it work. Bill wasn’t much for music and couldn’t relate to my dream.”