“Sit down, Cassie,” Max said. “You don’t need to leave unless you want to. You are welcome to stay here until you find more permanent housing.”
“I couldn’t leave my father.”
“It’s alright, girlie. It is time for you to spread your wings. You don’t need to keep worrying about me. I’ll collect my belongings. Monday morning, eh?” Hal said, scratching his chin. Max nodded.
It was a good sign, Cassie thought as she watched her father leave. At least he hadn’t yanked the job away from them.
As she followed her father to the door with his carpet bag, tears formed in her eyes. How could Max be so cruel? Her father gave her a kiss on the cheek.
“Mind yourself, girlie,” he said before heading up the road. She turned around to say something to Max, but he had disappeared.
Chapter 6
Max sat in his office fingering the hem of the pair of pants.Double hemmed, he thought. He had never noticed before. The distributor he purchased them from didn’t tell him the difference. And although he wasn’t being charged $1 a pair, he still wanted to be a good steward of his money.
He wasn’t rich by any means, but he had enough to live comfortably, and provide for a wife.Wife. He was sure he didn’t want one, but the word kept coming up. Dismissing the thought, he pulled out the invoices.
Most of the stock for his store came from New York, Boston and Philadelphia. He had established relationships with those manufacturers from his days as a fabric buyer. Ironically, his skills for relationship building were never appreciated by his father once he finally returned to New York.
So, where he worked with all the other garment makers in New York he avoided that one area of town his father he father served. It wouldn’t have made a difference anyway. There was no room in his life for his father.
When he purchased the store and the fire started in Creede he lost most of the inventory at that time due to the smoke. The only reason he rebuilt and stayed in the small town, was that the dry goods specialized in work wear and the mercantile had a very poor selection of men’s clothing. He liked the slower pace as the town started to grow.
As the town increased in residents, more folks were appreciative of having a fine cut jacket or a pair of pants for church or the theater.
He started with a few jackets and moved up to pants, cravats and even hats. There had been a small notion display when he purchased the store, but he found a need to expand it when his customers would come back looking for a button to replace one that had fallen off. Now he carried everything from needles to thread wax.
Creede was growing and he’d like to grow with it. He had often thought of expanding the shop, but he didn’t have the expertise for sewing or custom-made clothing. He actually thought about adding a shoe shine stand and shave chair, but those plans always seemed off in the distance.
Maybe expanding to include a tailor shop would be exactly what he needed. If Cassie and her father could help as he built operations, it could be beneficial to them all. He would have help, and they would have a stipend and somewhere to stay.
He thought of Cassie and her delight over the tarts the day before. She really was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. There was such an air of innocence around her.
He guessed her to be not a day over twenty years of age. That meant he was ten years older than she.
He wondered why she wasn’t married. She certainly was beautiful, and his father taught him that that was half a requirement in a wife.
He didn’t want to think about his father. His mother died under mysterious circumstances and his father shipped him off to boarding school. While he was away at school, he ended up falling and splitting his head open. It took him nearly a year to recover.
Did he truly recover? He started having problems concentrating. He couldn’t stand noise. The only thing that kept him calm was the repetitive motions of counting everything. He wrote things down so he wouldn’t forget them.
It was when the stress of buying and selling fabric became too much, he left. He felt like an outcast among the hustle of New York. It took him quite a while to feel settled again.
That settled feeling was disturbed the moment Cassie waltzed into his store. He felt different when he was around Cassie. It was a good different.
He was so worried when Cassie fainted in the stables. He didn’t mean to scare her. He smiled as he thought about the way Hal confronted him. Observing Hal’s interactions with Cassie, he could see that the man was rough, but cared deeply for his daughter.
When Max was finally able to explain that he came to offer them a room for the night, Hal picked up his bags and Max scooped Cassie in his arms to bring her back to his house.
She was tinier than he imagined. Her small figure fit perfectly in his arms. He held her close as he carried her to the guest bedroom.
He left Hal with the unconscious woman, as he went to get Maybelle and Dr. Thomas. The doctor gave her a quick examination and said she fainted most likely from exhaustion and shock. He suggested bed rest until Cassie woke up on her own.
Maybelle didn’t bat an eye when Max asked her to dress Cassie in her night clothes. Max showed Hal to another room down the hall before returning to Cassie’s room. Maybelle had already left, so he pulled a chair over and watched over Cassie until the early morning hours.
It was just as the sun was rising that he went to the bakery to pick up pastries. When he returned, he discovered Hal in his office. The man was studying the most recent shipment of trousers from New York.
They discussed quality and fabrics and Max was amazed that Hal knew so much about the garment industry. They chatted until Max remembered seeing Mr. Gladstone in the alley and needed to go find him.
