Nowhere to Hide(98)

He smiled and took the food out of the saddlebags. Lia was always looking for ways to improve the lives of those around her—even animals.

Spreading the green wool blanket next to the stream, shaded by the branches of the tree, Cav knelt and placed the plastic boxes on it. Lia hadn’t worn a hat today, so her hair was mussed, giving her a young college girl look. Her cheeks were pink, her gray eyes luminous with happiness as she knelt opposite him, handing him a bottle of water and keeping one for herself.

“Have you always been around horses?” he asked, opening up her plastic box holding a turkey and cheese sandwich.

Lia rested on her side, propped up on an elbow, and took the proffered sandwich from him. “Ever since I could remember, we had a horse. My dad also had a milk cow, Polka Dot. She was a black and white Holstein. I can remember him putting me on her back when I was very young, while he milked her. I think that’s what got me into horses, eventually. You can’t ride a cow,” and she smiled fondly in remembrance of those times with her dad.

“You weren’t scared of the cow?” Cav marveled, appreciating her long, slender legs. She had taken off her cowboy boots and socks, wriggling her toes.

“Never. Polka Dot loved me. I used to lie on her ridged back, my feet hanging over her tail and my arms stretched out toward her neck. She’d just let me lay like a blanket on her, thinking nothing of it. My dad always laughed and shook his head, saying Polka Dot must have been a horse in a previous lifetime to accept me on her back as a cow in this one. Cow’s do NOT want anything on their back. Besides, they have a high, hard spine and you can’t ride them at all.” She munched on the sandwich, studying him. “Where you grew up, did you have animals?”

“No, although my mother loved dogs and cats,” he recalled.

“Did you ever have any pets?”

“Well,” he said, “I had a cat, an old yellow tom that had half an ear missing. His face was all scarred up from so many catfights. He was a stray and I found him out in the alley in back of our apartment one morning.”

“How old were you?”

“Ten.” Cav picked up one of the sweet pickles from another box he’d set down between them. “I found him in a dumpster I wanted to climb into.”

She frowned. “You were dumpster diving?”

“Yeah,” Cav admitted, shrugging. “My mom’s birthday was coming up in a month and I wanted to buy her a gift. Sometimes, people threw things in dumpsters that you could pull out and go sell to a pawn shop.”

She felt the pain reflected in Cav’s eyes. “But you found that cat in there, instead?”

Chuckling, Cav said, “I don’t know who was more surprised. The lid was up on it, and I just hopped in. I almost landed on the cat and scared the living daylights out of him. But I was just as scared because he reared up on his hind legs, hissing, spitting and clawing at my legs with his front paws.”

“What did you do?” she tried to picture the confrontation between man and beast.

“I jumped out,” he said, grinning. “That was one pissed off tomcat. I’d seen an old chair in the dumpster and it had a lot of nicks, was really old looking and pretty much broken down. But I thought I might be able to get some money by selling it. Where we lived, there were a number of pawnshops. I thought if I could get the chair out of there and clean it up, maybe one of the pawn guys would buy it.”

“And you’d done this before?”

“Yes. It was a way for me to make a little money for things we needed. My father’s drug habit took all our money. There were nights when my mother had no food for the three of us, so she wouldn’t eat. She’d make me eat, instead. Said I was a growing boy and all.” He frowned. “She’d go to bed hungry at least once or twice a week and I hated it, so I was always trying to find ways to make money. My old man wanted me to start selling drugs, but I refused. I knew it wasn’t right. And hell, Lia, I didn’t want to turn out like the bastard I hated so much.”

Her heart broke listening to Cav’s story. He rarely spoke about his childhood and she was hungry to know more about him, even if it was painful for him to share.

“What about the cat?” she wondered softly.

“Oh, him. Well, he was after a rat in the bottom of the dumpster. He caught it and then jumped up and out of it, and took off down the alley. I didn’t have any food to give him, of course, so I climbed back into the dumpster, retrieved the old chair and cleaned it up. I learned from Charlie, a pawn shop owner, that it was a real antique.” He shook his head. “He gave me a hundred dollars for that piece of junk.”