Knowing You (11 page)

Paul released a breath. “Doesn't look like it.”

“Almost a shame. It's been a while.”

“Yeah, it has,” Paul agreed, taking a seat again and reaching for his coffee.

Nick sat down, too, grabbed his cup, and took another long drink to steady himself again. “You remember the last one?”

“Not likely to forget it,” Paul said, smiling now in memory. “Three years ago. At the Fourth of July picnic. You cheated at the softball game.”

“I was safe,” Nick said automatically.

“Out by a mile and you know it.”

“Hey, the day hasn't come when you could beat me on a playing field.”

“I did that day,” Paul countered.

They sat there in the kitchen, each of them comfortable enough to lapse into a thoughtful silence that ticked past with a gentle, steady beat.

And after a few minutes, Nick picked up his coffee, took a long, deep drink, and set the cup back down
again. Looking at his brother, he said simply, “Change really sucks.”

Paul thought about all of the other changes that had happened in the last few days and wondered what his brother would have to say about any of them if he knew. But Nick wasn't going to know. The guy was low enough already. Hearing about his twin and Stevie would topple him over the emotional razor's edge he was busy balancing on. Besides, it was over. Yet another change. So Paul kept his mouth shut. No point in opening up that can of worms now. So instead, he just agreed. “Damn right it does.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

“I'
M TELLING YOU
, S
TEVIE
, those kids from the karate class are about to knock my fence down.”

“It can't be that bad, Mrs. Frances.”

The older woman blew at a lock of dyed red hair as it dangled like a fishhook over her forehead. Then she picked up her cookie, took a savage bite, and chewed. Waving her arms, she chopped and slashed an invisible enemy as a demonstration. “Those little thugs come out of that class with way too much energy to spare and they're chopping at my picket fence and screaming like they're about to attack.”

Stevie set the coffeepot down onto its burner, then turned back to face one of her best customers. “They're not thugs; they're just kids.”

“Thuglets,” the woman said. Using what was left of her cookie as a pointer, she jabbed it toward Stevie. “You mark my words. Those little brats need their bottoms warmed, or pretty soon they'll be knocking over liquor stores.”

Stevie's lips twitched. “Don't look now, but you're starting to sound like Virginia.”

The other woman's eyes bugged open, then narrowed. “Well now, you're just being mean.”

Laughing, Stevie shifted a look at Virginia, one-third of Chandler's Terrible Three. The older women had snagged a table in the only splotch of sunlight in the shop. They huddled together, like the old crones in that play of Shakespeare's—which one was that? Didn't matter. All they needed was a bubbling cauldron. They had the nasty dispositions already.

Virginia—always on the lookout for “gangsters”—wore two red circles of what she still called
rouge
on what used to be her cheeks. Just like her mentor, Abigail. But her skin had faded and sunk so much, she was pretty much just drawing with crayon on her bones. Abigail, the leader of the little coven, was at least fifteen years older than Virginia's seventy-five, but what she lacked in age she made up in mean. Abigail's rouge was even darker. And Rachel, the last member of the Three, was only in her sixties, but her spirit was as wizened as the other two's faces put together.

Scary bunch. They were always the first to leap on whatever piece of gossip came their way, and they had a network of cronies who could distribute that news fast enough to make Federal Express look like a wagon train.

Stevie looked away from the women and back to Mrs. Frances. “Did you talk to Tony about the kids?”

“Yes, for all the good that'll do,” the woman complained. “When he was a kid, the sheriff used to hit my fence with his baseball bat like he was Babe Ruth in Yankee Stadium.”

The phone rang, an ear-splitting shriek, designed to be heard above the everyday noise in the shop. Laughing at the woman's disgusted expression, Stevie took a step back, grabbed the receiver, and said, “Leaf and Bean, how can I—”

“Stevie!”

The voice sounded a million miles away, but she'd have known it anywhere. “Carla!” Stevie waved a frantic hand toward her counter girl, Sarah, to take over for her as she rounded a corner, taking the phone with her into her cubicle of an office.

Sitting down in the chair behind her tiny cluttered desk, Stevie leaned back, propped her feet on the edge, and ignored the papers sliding off to land on the floor.

“How are you? How's Chandler?”

“Good and the same,” Stevie said, her fingers curled tight around the receiver. “How're things there?” she asked, and hoped to hell Carla's first trek back into the search-and-rescue business was going well. After all, she'd delayed her honeymoon to be able to go and help people through a disaster.

“They're great,” her best friend said. “Tough. Disappointing and frustrating sometimes, but great.”

“Good. That's good.” Just two years ago, Carla'd given up what she did best because of a tragedy she held herself responsible for. Good to know that she'd finally managed to put it behind her.

“Hey, have you seen my husband?” Carla was saying. “And how weird is it that I have a husband?”

Stevie grinned. “No, he hasn't been around. I hear, though, that he's got some Mafia guys helping him set up his new office.”

Carla laughed and the sound bubbled over the distance and filled up a lonely spot in Stevie's heart. “Good to know Virginia's still in fine form.”

While Carla talked, Stevie's gaze shifted around the small office, sliding across a framed photo of her dad and a poster of the Caribbean she'd tacked to the far wall as a reminder of her last vacation. And right now that white beach and clear, green water looked like paradise. The fact that she was imagining Paul surfacing from the waves, water sluicing down his tanned, sculpted chest as he reached up to push his wet hair off his face, had nothing to do with it.

“Anything new?”

“Huh?” Stevie snapped out of it and told herself to concentrate. “What?… Uh, nothing. Nothing's new.” Just old friends finding new ways to connect. And connect. And connect some more.

“No new guy?”

“No.” Old guy, Stevie thought with a silent groan.

Oh God. She sat up, propped her elbows on her desktop, and stared down at the papers scattered across the surface as if looking for the secrets to the universe in a shipping order for sugar.

“Have you seen Nick lately?”

This just kept getting better. “Yeah, he's fine, too.”

Nick. Stevie and Nick. Nick and Stevie. Even Carla thought of the two of them as a pair. Though they hadn't been together in more than two years, the Candellanos still thought of them as linked. And if they found out about her and Paul?

She pressed her fingertips against her temple, hoping to ease the throbbing ache that had just leaped into
life. Pounding in time with her heartbeat, pain pulsed inside her, bright and hot.

But Carla was talking again and she forced herself to pay attention.

“Mama okay? I tried to call her”—Carla's voice faded, crackled, then came back again—“wasn't there.”

“I'm losing you, Carla,” Stevie said, raising her voice to be heard over what sounded like locusts chewing at the phone wires.

“Storm coming—” The crackling got louder. “Gotta go—you soon.”

“Bye!” Stevie shouted, and when the dial tone buzzed in her ear, she lowered the receiver and stared at it as if she could see her best friend's face. Best friend. That meant a lot. Heck, it had meant everything to the twelve-year-old girl Stevie had been when she'd first moved to Chandler.

Finding Carla, having a friend like her, had been, for Stevie, like finding a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. Living out of suitcases, wandering the world in the wake of her mother, an elegant gypsy, Stevie had hungered for the kind of friendship Carla had offered her.

Someone to talk to on the phone. Someone to giggle with and cry with and get in trouble with. Someone who liked you no matter what.

Carla, being raised in a normal, loving family, had more self-confidence than anyone Stevie had ever known. And over the years, that bravado had rubbed off on Stevie and taken the edge off the shy little girl who had never really felt wanted.

Hanging up the phone, Stevie leaned back in her chair and let her memory take her back to those early years with Joanna. She had taken Stevie with her when she left Chandler, not because of any great maternal instinct—the woman had all the nurturing skills of a praying mantis—but because people would have talked had she abandoned the infant she'd never really wanted in the first place.

For years, Stevie had followed in her mother's wake, always aware that she was just a steerage passenger who'd somehow slipped past the gate to first class. Her mother's boyfriends either spoiled her or ignored her, and her long succession of stepfathers signed the checks that sent her to boarding schools. Until she turned twelve.

That was the year Stevie finally found the courage to tell her mother that she wanted to live with her father. Mike Ryan. The man who welcomed her every summer for three glorious weeks. The man who took her fishing and allowed her to wear cutoff jeans and get dirty. The man who tucked her into bed at night and kissed her forehead. The one person in the world who loved her.

Joanna had agreed, more than willing to get rid of a child who was living proof that Joanna was getting older. But it hadn't mattered. All that was important was that Stevie'd finally found a home. A place to belong. She smiled as she remembered how good it had been to go to school every day with the same kids. To make friends. To walk down the street and have people call her by name.

And soon after moving to Chandler, she'd also found
Carla. Her first, and last, best friend. The huge Candellano family was overpowering and overwhelming. They opened their arms to her and pulled her inside, and between her own father and Carla's family, Stevie's soul had soaked up all the love she'd missed out on in her first twelve years.

Stevie stood up, letting her fingers trail across the phone receiver. Family. That's what it was all about.

Now that her own father was gone, Stevie was alone again except for the Candellanos. She couldn't lose them. Couldn't lose that last connection.

“Hey, Stevie!” Sarah opened the office door and stuck her head inside. Her bright red hair looked frazzled and she was out of breath. “You coming back out here or what? A whole soccer team just dropped in and I'm drowning.”

“Right.” Stevie started for the door, deliberately putting her thoughts of the Candellanos, Carla and most especially Paul, out of her head.

At least for now.

*   *   *

Sunday night dinner at Mama Candellano's was required. No matter where you were, how you felt, what else was going on in the world, Mama expected her family sitting around her table, eating. If there was a nuclear blast, Mama would wait for the toxic clouds to disappear, then start ladling sauce onto fresh pasta. But tonight was special. Carla was home from her first search-and-rescue mission in more than two years, and she and her new husband were honeymoon-bound.

Paul opened the back door of the old Victorian, stepped into the kitchen of his childhood, and inhaled
deeply. Years rolled back and he was a kid again, racing in to beat the others to the dinner table. Man, there was just nothing else in the world like the smell of his mother's kitchen. Whatever else you could say about Mama—and there was plenty, he thought wryly—the woman was a magician in the kitchen.

“Wipe your feet.” The “magician” didn't even turn from the stove to see which of her children had entered.

The familiar command brought a smile to Paul's face. Some things in his life, at least, remained unchanged. His mother. This house.

The Candellanos had come to California a few generations back. They'd settled in and around Monterey, following the jobs to be found with the fishing fleets, the vineyards, and the canning factories. Italian immigrants settled in Northern California and brought their traditions with them. Then Paul's father had met Angela, seventeen, beautiful, and fresh off the boat from Italy. She'd come to California to visit relatives and hardly spoke English. But she'd taken one look at Anthony Candellano and had never gone back to her village in Sicily. They'd married and moved to the tiny town of Chandler, to give their children a home outside the city—where they would all look for work outside the factories and the fishing boats.

Paul smiled at his mother's back. She and his father had given their children everything. A home, unconditional love, understanding, and the occasional slap to the head when necessary. And he wouldn't trade a single memory of life in this house for any amount of money.

“I already wiped my feet,” he said. “I know the drill.”

Mama turned from the stove to look at him, delight sparkling in her dark brown eyes. “Paul! You're early.”

Angela Candellano's smile deepened the creases in her face and lit sparks of pleasure in her dark brown eyes. Her black hair, liberally streaked with gray, was drawn to the top of her head in a style she'd been wearing since he was a kid. She was a little wider than she used to be, but she hadn't slowed down any.

“Hello, gorgeous,” Paul said, and crossed the room to her, sweeping her up into a tight, fierce hug. She laughed in his ear and slapped at his shoulders.

“Let me go,” she said, giving him a quick kiss on the cheek.

“Only if you feed me,” he teased, and gave her one last squeeze before releasing her. Still a beauty, he thought. And since his father's death she'd taken over as head of the family, running her house and her life and her children's lives as she saw fit.