“Does Dane have children?”
“Oh, yeah.” He took another swallow of tea. “Three beautiful daughters by three different mothers. Dane was also a ladies’ man, a charmer, sort of like Kid.”
“No one is like Kid.” She lifted an eyebrow. “So you grew up with his daughters?”
“Yeah. We lived down the road from High Five and then we relocated to their backyard. Summers were fun because all the girls were home.”
“What do you mean?”
“Caitlyn was raised on the ranch because her mother died in childbirth. Madison and Skylar lived with their mothers. There was a clause in the divorce papers that Dane got the girls during the summer and Christmas, that way their lives weren’t disrupted during the school year.” He felt a smile tug at his lips. “I’m surprised Kid survived those summers because the sisters knocked him for more loops than I can count. He was always teasing and picking on them. We usually baled hay in the summer and the girls were always there, even though Dane and Miss Dorie, their grandmother, didn’t want them to be. They wanted them to be proper ladies.” Cadde suppressed a laugh. “You’d have to meet them to understand that one. Caitlyn is bossy and responsible. She tried her damnedest to be the boy Dane had always wanted. Madison is like a lollipop—she’s so sweet you just want to lick her, which Kid has done on more than one occasion. And Skylar, well, she’s the wild sister, the one Dane worried about the most. They certainly kept Dane on his toes.”
Cadde leaned back as memories seemed to grip him. “After baling hay under a hot Texas sun, we’d pull off our hats, boots and shirts and jump into Crooked Creek to cool off. Sometimes the girls would join us. One time Kid dove in and snuck up behind Caitlyn and pinched her butt. She slapped him and he sank like a rock. We thought she’d killed him. We kept diving trying to find him, even Dane got in the water. Kid came up downstream, laughing. Caitlyn chased him all the way to the barn. He hid from her for two days.”
“Sounds as if you had a happy life on High Five.”
“Yeah.” He twisted his glass, knowing Dane and the sisters had given them a reason to keep going, to keep living. “I still miss Dane.”
“He passed away?”
“His drinking finally got him.”
There was silence for a moment.
“You haven’t said anything about your parents.”
Glancing up, he saw her gazing at him with dark, concerned eyes. While he’d been talking, she’d finished eating. “That’s not an easy subject.”
He could feel the gusher of words being capped, his throat closing. Then she laid her hand on his arm again and her gentle touch freed his emotions.
“Dad said they were high school sweethearts and married after graduation. They were happy…”
“They weren’t.”
“What?”
“I’d rather talk about Dane and the sisters. Those are good memories. My parents…”
She squeezed his arm. “What happened?”
He could do this. He could handle anything. From somewhere deep inside him he heard the word liar. Talking about his parents was something he didn’t do, except with his brothers. They understood. Jessie wanted him to talk, to share. Could he?
She rubbed his arm and it eased the grip on his throat, and the words came gushing out once again. “My…dad…is the reason I’m in the oil business. He preached education and how we should be bosses, not roughnecks. He taught us family values and about trust and faith, but in the end it was all a lie.”
“Why?”
“Seems my dad told my mom he was leaving her. It had just happened and all that kind of stuff. My mother wanted to know who the woman was, and he wouldn’t tell her. She started hitting him and he lost control of the car.” He swallowed. “On the biggest night of his young sons’ lives we were going to come home to find that our father had left us. I thought he’d meet us at the gym and he’d tell us how proud he was. Instead, we came home to find that our father had really left us…for good.”
Both her hands gripped his arm. “Cadde, I’m sorry.”
The waiter poured more tea and removed the plates. “Would you like dessert?” he asked.
“No, thanks,” Jessie replied.
“My mother didn’t deserve that,” Cadde murmured as if the waiter hadn’t interrupted them. “She was the nicest person.”
The words had come from a deep personal well inside him and Cadde thought he’d done enough sharing. “How about your mother?”
Jessie removed her hands and folded them in her lap. “I never knew her.”