Some Day Somebody (10 page)

She gave him a half-hearted shrug and nodded. “Not as often. He just wants me out of the house. Staying at his mom’s must be putting a serious cramp in his single life.”

J.C.’s eyes glittered with excitement. “You want me to whip his ass for you?”

Carrie laughed at her friend. “Don’t offer if you’re not willing to follow through.”

“Yeah, don’t let your mouth write checks your ass
ain’t
willing to cash,” Sam told him.

J.C. chuckled as he refilled his coffee cup. “He’s about my height, isn’t he?”

Carrie grinned at her friend. “Yeah, but I think you could take him. You’re probably one of those Crazy Cajuns who jumps into canals and marshes to wrestle alligators with a knife.”

J.C. gave her a disgruntled look. “I do not. You’d have to be an idiot to do something that stupid.” He pointed a finger at his chest and put on a thicker than normal Cajun accent. “
Mais
chere
, I went to college too, yeah.”

Carrie laughed and came back with her own home grown accent. “
Mais
, I’m sorry if you got
da
wrong
imprassion
. I wouldn’t do
dat
, no, me
bein
’ from
dat
petit, tiny town of Gardiner. You know, we can
parlez
de Cajun
purty
damn good over
dere
, too, yeah.”

J.C’s. chest rumbled with laughter. “And can I
jus
say
dat
you do it justice, my
fran
.”

“Merci beau coup, Monsieur Carter.”

“You’re welcome,” he said, before leaving the room with his mug full of wake-him-up.

Sam shifted and cleared his throat. “So, once you move to Gardiner how much farther will it
be
from work?”

“About ten miles, and twice a day—”

“Times five is a hundred miles a week, four hundred miles a month, and about five thousand miles a year...I know. That’s what I save by car-pooling.”

“And that’s in addition to the two thousand miles I drive every month. My paycheck’s already stretched too thin.”

“The divorce settlement should help you out, though.”

Carrie’s laugh reverberated through the room. “
If
Dave’s payments come like they’re supposed to, my car note and school loan will be taken care of.  Rent, food, fuel, and utilities will eat up the rest of my income. But, it’s wintertime, and plant work is kind of lean. I’m scratching to make ends meet now, and I’ll be scratching even more if I can ever move out.”

“Well, if he skips a note, throw his ass in jail.”

“Yeah, that’d go over big with my kids.”

“I’d do it.”

Carrie frowned and pushed away from the counter. “That’s because they’re not your kids. Besides, none of this is your concern, is it?”

“Carrie...”

She ignored what she assumed would be yet, another apology, and left him alone in the kitchen.  Would she ever learn her lesson when it came to men?

***

She pulled up next to her mailbox at the end of the driveway, groaning at the sight of Dave’s truck parked in the drive. After collecting the stack of bills out of the box, she parked under the carport. She hauled her things inside and kicked her shoes off at the door, sliding her feet into the pair of warm, fuzzy slippers she kept there.

Carrie shivered at the nip in the air, but rather than raise the thermostat, she shuffled into her bedroom for a sweater to throw over her shirt.
Still no visual on Dave.

She listened at the twins’ door and heard the steady beat of a pop tune from inside the room. She knocked once then poked her head inside.

Gretchen sat propped up against her headboard, reading a library book, while Lauren lay on her stomach atop her bedspread, doing math homework.

“Hey, Mom,” they said, as usual, in perfect unison.

Carrie smiled and walked into the room, searching for any hints of disturbance from her daughters. “Everything all right?” she asked, studying them carefully.

“Everything’s fine,” Gretchen told her. Carrie smiled at her daughter’s relaxed demeanor. She turned to the other twin, whose body language told a different story...pencil clenched tightly in her right hand, forehead resting on the open palm of her left hand, as she bit down on her lower lip.

“Lauren, are you all right?” Her daughter turned her huge brown eyes, so like her father’s, toward her, and lifted one shoulder in a half-hearted shrug.

“Are you upset about something?” Carrie stepped over to sit on her daughter’s bed.

Without saying a word, Lauren closed her eyes and dropped her forehead on Carrie’s shoulder. A sound from the doorway alerted Carrie to Dave’s presence.

“Of course she’s upset. You broke up the family.”

Carrie wrapped her daughter in a hug, but ignored his calculated words. “It’ll be fine, Lauren. How’d your appointment with the school counselor go this morning?”

Lauren sniffed and wiped her eyes. “It was okay. She said lots of kids feel like this when their parents get divorced. But Gretchen and Grant don’t.”

“No two people handle situations the same way, honey. You’ll see in time. Until then, I’m here if you want to talk.”

Lauren made a half-hearted attempt to smile.

Carrie rose from the bed and turned toward the doorway where Dave stood, arms crossed stubbornly over his chest. She pushed him away from the entrance and pulled her daughters’ bedroom door shut on her way to the kitchen.

“You heard any more about that rent house?” 

She stopped and threw back an annoyed look. “It’s
still
not available until January fifteenth.”

He sent her a scathing look. “Well, I thought you’d have had your family trying to pull some strings to get you in there sooner. I know they all hate me.”

She walked into the kitchen to start supper. “They don’t hate you, Dave.” Within two minutes, she had a package of thawed ground round frying, a pot of water heating for pasta, and two jars of spaghetti sauce sitting on the counter, ready to be opened and added to the meat.

“What are you cooking?” David asked.

She turned to him, one brow raised in amusement. “Are you trying to make polite conversation, or are you really that dense?”

He laughed.

That laugh
...the one that made the nerves and muscles at the base of her skull spasm with irritation. She clenched her jaw and arched her neck slightly.

“I can see you’re making spaghetti, so polite conversation it is,” he told her.

She glanced at the twins’ bedroom door, hesitant to cause a scene that would only upset Lauren more than she already was. She grabbed a large spoon and concentrated on breaking up the ground meat as it cooked. Tired of having Dave watch her every move, she banged the spoon loudly against the side of the pot and dropped it with a clatter onto the spoon rest. “Look, I said you could see the kids anytime you want, but if you come just to upset our daughter, I’ll put a stop to it.”

“I thought maybe you’d let me stay for supper.”

She kept her voice low and even. “Why would you think that?”

“Mom spent the day in Lafayette at the doctor’s,” he admitted.

“And what did you do today?”

“I went hunting this morning. I shot my limit,” he answered.

“Did you clean the birds yourself or leave them for your mom to clean after she’d been to the doctor and driving all day?”

He glared at her. “I cleaned them myself.”

“Did you clean up her kitchen when you were done?”

“Yes, I did, as a matter of fact,” he said, sounding annoyed.

Carrie spoke in a tight voice. “Then
you
should have cooked supper for your mom when you finished. You know how tired she is after her appointments, especially when she has a stress test scheduled, like she did today.”

Dave’s eyes narrowed angrily. He straightened and stalked over to the door before swinging around to point at her. “You’ve got until the end of next week to get your shit out of here. After that, I’m moving back in, whether you like it or not.”

She stirred the meat without looking up at him, thinking maybe a change of scenery would help. “The end of next week it is, then.”

He stalked out the front door, slamming it shut behind him.

Carrie grinned as she stirred the meat. “Don’t go away mad. Just go away.”

***

After supper, the phone rang as Carrie loaded the dishwasher.

“Hey,” Dave answered sheepishly. “You don’t have to move out until your place is ready.”

“Ruby chewed your ass out, didn’t she?”

“Shut the hell up.”

Carrie laughed. “Your mom loves me, jerk.”

He snorted. “Yeah, she does. All my family loves you, but your mom hates me.”

“She doesn’t hate you, although you’ve given her plenty of reasons to.”

“What about you?”

She closed the door of the dishwasher and set it to start. “She doesn’t hate me either.”

“Always the smart ass.”

Carrie wiped at the kitchen counter. “I don’t hate you either, Dave, but I need to get out of here before I do.” She thought of the early morning phone calls, thinking again how she’d feel safer if Dave was making them. An old quote she’d had to memorize in the sixth grade came to mind.
Greater is our terror of the unknown.
No kidding.

“Carrie...”

“
G’night
, Dave.” She didn’t wait for a reply before ending the call. “It’s too damn late for heart to hearts,” she muttered, before locking up the house and turning off the kitchen light.

***

Carrie opened her eyes but didn’t move another muscle. She stared at the bleary glow of red digital numbers coming from the nightstand; blinked them into focus, as four eleven turned to four twelve. Rain pelted the window, overflowed the gutters as thunder rumbled, low and threatening, from miles away.

She lay tense and frozen, certain of one thing. Something had awakened her.
A sound?
A stir in the air?
A sense of not being alone?