Page 98 of Hey, Daddy

“I need a car,” I said. “And so do you.”

He sighed. “I was really hoping to get my cruiser back.”

“You think that they’ll just allow that after everything?” I asked. “They’re still ‘investigating’ after a week. And we can’t keep renting a vehicle. And also, I have a secret shopper opportunity at the Ford dealership in Plano. They said they’d give me five percent off a vehicle of my choosing if I could give them a good reason to fire one of their employees.”

He chuckled. “Texas is an at-will state. They don’t need a reason.”

“Normally, no. But this is a family matter. One of the employees is a granddaughter of the owner, and unless there’s solid proof that she’s purposefully turning away certain people because she doesn’t like them, then they can’t get rid of her.”

“Ford, huh?” he asked. “What are you going to look at?”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Why do you look like you know something I don’t know?”

“Because I forgot to tell you last night,” he blurted it all out.

I gasped and reached for my phone.

Sure enough, the senator’s death by wife—and boy howdy, was it one hell of a death—was ALL over the internet.

It was on every media outlet.

Literally every single one.

“How could you not have shared this last night?” I asked.

“Because I wanted to enjoy my evening, and it would’ve put you back to thinking about it.” He winced, realizing how bad that sounded. “I don’t know. We just haven’t had anything that was just easy, and I knew how nervous you already were because of meeting my siblings, and I just wanted to be normal. So I put it out of my own mind, too.”

I understood.

But…

“Don’t keep things like that from me anymore, please,” I begged. “I’ve had enough of it from Shasha and my father over my lifetime. It’s suffocating.”

He ran the tip of one finger along my jawline before pulling away. “I imagine that I’ll be getting my cruiser back, so I won’t need a vehicle. But I’ll gladly go with you to buy a car.”

“How about you come with me, but maybe go in there to buy your own vehicle. But that will really be mine. I’m not dumb. I know a man will negotiate a better price at a car dealership, anyway. But I don’t want to spend an hour there going through the hoops of getting a car and not leave with one.”

“What about when your car finally gets released?” he asked.

“That’s not actually mine. It belongs to the family trust. Usually, Dima is the one to use it when he comes home from wherever he happens to be stationed. But I was looking into anew car, anyway, and so instead of replacing my car that was totaled a few months ago, I just used that one,” I explained.

“How was your car totaled?” he asked as he watched me move around the room to get dressed.

When I was fully clothed—much to his chagrin—I went into the bathroom and started doing my hair.

He sat on the closed toilet lid as I explained the accident.

“It was the weirdest thing.” I shook my head. “I was driving down a back road—one I used to take all the time because I hate 635 so much—and I see this like glare off of something. I squint my eyes and stare at it off to the side of the road, and all of a sudden, there’s a cow in front of me. Had the cow kept moving, it would’ve been fine. But he stopped when he heard the car approaching. And since he was black, and it was dark as pitch outside, I couldn’t do anything but swerve. Right into another cow. This one is much bigger than the one that I’d been trying to avoid.”

“Damn,” he said. “That sucks. I’m guessing the cow is dead?”

“That’s the thing!” I laughed then as I opened my mouth and applied my mascara. Once I was done, I explained, “So the cow lived. Not a scratch on him. He was a big ass bull, and he’d jumped the fence. Another, much smaller bull had jumped first I guess. They were both crossing the road to their heifer herd across the street.”

“I can only imagine that the damage was severe,” he mused as he watched me with avid fascination.

I was on my eyeliner now.

“I don’t know how it’s possible that you put on makeup yet don’t look like you did at all,” he said. “What, exactly, is the point of putting all of that on if you look just as beautiful as before you started?”

---