Read Online A Tangle of Knots by Lisa Graff - Free Book Online Page B

road.
    Toby shook his head and began hauling his load of suitcases inside. The store was quiet, except for the soft strains of stilted oboe music. The old man was not at his post behind the counter.
    It was on his last run from the truck that Toby noticed her. He’d assumed that the person playing the oboe was the curly-haired girl, Marigold. But when he happened to glance at Marigold’s bedroom window, it wasn’t her head of hair he saw, but a close-cropped gray cut instead—and just enough of her face to recognize her.
    Suddenly Toby felt unsettled in a way he hadn’t all week. His skin prickled, his cheeks grew hot. He banged closed the back of his truck and lugged the last two suitcases— wha-pop! —inside the Emporium to the small office behind the kitchen. He had to leave. They both had to leave. This wretched place had been pushing Toby away for years, but now that there was someone else to think about, Toby found himself actually listening. The Lost Luggage Emporium was no place for a child, he knew that for a fact. Not with the old man and his single-minded whims.
    But how to explain that to Cady, without having to explain too much?
    Toby had mostly ironed out the last of his nerves when a slender shadow appeared across the top of the bag he was unzipping. He jerked up his head with a start, but it was only Cady.
    “Oh,” he said, stretching a smile across his face. “Hello there.”
    She blinked at him for a moment, as though adjusting her eyes to the light. “What are you doing?” she asked at last.
    Toby pulled up a stool for her next to him. “Just sorting through my haul from the airport,” he told her. “Which things to sell, which things to toss.” He plucked a well-read copy of Face Value out of the bag in front of him and pitched it into the Toss pile.
    “I made you some cake,” Cady said, holding out the small plate with the fork balanced just so. “These are for you, too.” A glass of yellow wildflowers. She set them on the small desk littered with papers.
    “Oh, Cady, you didn’t have to do that.”
    “Try the cake,” she insisted.
    Toby took a bite. Yellow cake with a creamy chocolate frosting. He pressed the moist crumbs to the roof of his mouth and closed his eyes, wishing that he might someday be the man who was the perfect fit for such a cake.
    “I’m still working on it,” Cady said, leaning forward on the edge of her stool, watching him chew.
    “Well, it’s wonderful.” He took another bite.
    Cady tilted her head to the side. “You don’t talk much, you know,” she said suddenly.
    Toby laughed, coughing on a few crumbs. He was growing to quite like this wide-eyed little girl. “I suppose I can be standoffish sometimes,” he admitted. “What would you like to know?”
    Cady shrugged. “I just want to know about you, ” she said. “To . . . to help me figure it out, about the cake.”
    Toby thought about that. “Let’s see,” he said slowly. “What can I tell you that might be interesting?” Toby scraped the edge of his fork along the plate, collecting some stray frosting. He didn’t want to lie, not more than he had already, but what could he tell her? He searched his brain until he found a memory, a good and true one, that she might enjoy. “When I was younger I used to travel,” he said at last.
    Cady sat up a little straighter, interested. “What sorts of places did you go to?”
    “Oh”—he slipped another bite of cake onto his tongue—“everywhere,” he said, chewing. “Europe, Asia, Australia. If I got an itch, I hopped on a plane and flew clear across the world to scratch it.” Cady laughed. “Once we even—I went to Africa to . . .”
    To get married. They’d flown to Africa to get married, and they’d stayed for the adventure. And what an adventure it had been! More than they had bargained for, that was for sure. As soon as their delightful baby daughter was born, they knew it was going to be the adventure of a lifetime. It