Miracle (The Pagano Family Book 6) (17 page)

I think I made you feel bad at dinner, and I’m sorry. If you’re mad at me, I understand. I hope we’re okay. I love you so much. I’m worried about what Angie wanted to talk about. I don’t know what his problem is, but he’s been a huge ass lately. If he said something to hurt you or make you

She stopped and read what she’d typed. Dammit, she was doing it again. Tapping the ‘back’ key with more force than necessary, she erased most of what she’d put down and left only
I think I made you feel bad at dinner, and I’m sorry. If you’re mad at me, I understand. I hope we’re okay. I love you so much.
She added a few emojis and hit send.

That was all she needed to say. The Angie stuff? Maybe that wasn’t her business.

~oOo~

When Joey came for dinner, they usually spent some time with her mother afterward. They would sit and watch television, or Tina would read and they would both listen, or they’d all listen to some of her mother’s music.

Her mother and Joey couldn’t communicate in a very substantive way, but he was glad to sit with her and be kind. He always kissed her cheek and said she looked pretty, and he made it sound sincere.

Her mother was a vain woman—not the obnoxious, entitled kind of vanity but rather a devotion to always looking her best—and she had been beautiful. But the ravages of the stroke had destroyed her looks. One side of her face sagged badly, and that eye was greyish-white. Her gorgeous dark hair was now grey and short. Her skin was greyish and pasty. Her hands were curling up despite regular therapeutic manipulation. Her mouth didn’t close, and she drooled. Her eyelids didn’t close.

But when Joey told her, in his slow, effortful way, that she looked pretty, even Tina believed him.

Her mother liked Joey a lot. When Tina came in that night alone, she was disappointed not to see him.

Tina kissed her cheek. “Sorry, Mamma. Joey couldn’t stay. He was sorry not to be able to see you. You want to read tonight?”

Her eye moved back and forth.
No.

“Television?”

No.

“Music?”

No.

“Do you want to be alone?”

No.

Her brain felt fragmented already, full of worry at the way Joey had left, and Tina got impatient. It was so hard to have a conversation with someone who could only answer yes or no. Every single statement had to be formed precisely.

Shortly after the stroke, when her mother was still in the hospital, one of the nurses had recommended a book to Tina:
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
. It was written by Jean-Dominique Bauby, a French journalist, who was like her mother: locked-in after a stroke. He could move only his left eye, just like Tina’s mother. And he’d written an entire memoir with the help of an assistant who went through the alphabet for every single letter, writing down the letter he’d blinked for yes at.

An entire memoir, written letter by letter, blink by blink.

When her mother had been strong enough, Tina had tried to develop a similar transcription method to help her simply communicate. But she couldn’t blink, and moving her eye so much caused her pain. After a while, she’d refused to try.

That momentary burst of inspiration and hope dashed, what was left was yes/no questions and this room, made as bright and cheerful as possible. But it was four walls. A box her mother never left. Just a bigger, airier coffin.

Without warning, Tina began to cry. Her mother’s eye moved frantically, her way of conveying worry or confusion, and Tina got control of herself as quickly as possible.

“Sorry, Mamma, sorry. I’m okay.” But she wasn’t. Maybe she was fucking up one of the best things in her life. She sniffed. “I just…can I talk to you about something?”

Yes
.
Of course
.

“Joey’s mad. He won’t say why. He just left. I think it might be something I did. But Angie was a jerk tonight, and maybe he was a jerk to Joey, and Daddy thinks that I’m too protective of him and that I’m…I don’t know…emasculating him?”

She thought of the words her father had used:
Like you’re carrying his balls around in your pocket.
“Yeah, Daddy thinks I’m emasculating him because I’m trying to make things easy on him. His speech pathologist says I’m enabling him. I guess I am. I should know what I’m doing. This is my job. But it’s different with Joey. I just want him to be happy. He has enough going on. I should be someone he can rest with. Right? Shouldn’t I be? I don’t know what to do, Mamma. I love him. I see how hard he works. I don’t want him to have to work with me. I don’t want anything in my life to make things harder for him. Including my family.”

Her mother’s eye was keenly alert but didn’t move. Tina wished she could hear the thoughts going on inside that immobile head. She wondered at the things her mother knew that she would never be able to share. Angie’s secrets. Tina’s. Probably Matt’s and their father’s too. And her own. She was like their own Receiver, from another book Tina had read, this one in middle school. A keeper of their darkness.

There was only one way to lighten dark thoughts: bring them out. “I guess I just need to talk to him.”

Her mother’s eye went emphatically up and down.
Yes. Definitely.

“If he’ll talk to me.”

Up and down.

Tina grinned. “Okay, Mamma. I get it. Don’t be a nag.”

~oOo~

She sat with her mother for another ten minutes or so, until her father shooed her from the room so her parents could, as he put it, ‘have some alone time.’ That was how they’d always phrased it when they'd meant that the kids should stay clear of the master bedroom. Her parents had been an enthusiastically physical couple all the way up to the stroke. Tina and her brothers had a mountain of slightly traumatic in-jokes about their parents’ history of audible lovemaking.

She wondered what ‘alone time’ was for them now. Probably simply time alone. But still, Tina thought it a sweet thing, that there might still be some kind of romance in their marriage.

When she got upstairs to her own room, she took her phone out and texted Joey once more:

I love you. Good night.

Seconds after she sent it, she got a reply:
I love you. Sorry I bailed.

Those few words settled her heart.
It’s okay. Sorry I ruined dinner.

It’s okay.

With that, she knew her father had been right. It had been her, not Angie.

Will you come back?

Now?

Yeah—or I could come over. I want to fix the night.

The ellipses indicating that he was writing lingered for a long time.

Not tonight. I’ll just see you on the beach Saturday.

The Pagano & Sons Memorial Day weekend beach party. Always a huge town event and the pseudo-official kickoff to the summer season. This year, it was twice as big as usual, because it was a memorial for Carlo Sr. as well. He’d started the tradition years ago.

That party was two days away. It had been weeks since they’d gone a day without at least an hour together.

We’re okay, right?

Another lingering set of ellipses.

We’re okay. I love you, T. I just need to think some things out.

That didn’t sound okay at all. When left on his own, Joey turned inward and fed on himself. But she decided not to push past this boundary that he’d set. He needed time, and she needed to stop managing him—managing
them
.

She’d give him time.

Okay. Good night.
She ended with a heart.

Good night.
He sent back the same heart.

~ 13 ~

The Pagano beach party on the Saturday of Memorial weekend was just a family party—or, at least, it had started out that way about forty years ago. First, in the years before Carmen had bought the beach house where John and Katrynn now lived, the family had set up on the public part of the beach, and Pop had simply offered the other beachgoers food and drink out of a general sense of community.

But over the years, it had become a thing. Once the family had a stretch of private beach, they set up there, but nobody noticed a boundary between private and public, not on that day. It had been Luca’s idea, if Joey remembered correctly—it had been before his time working for the family business—to put up a Pagano & Sons banner and serve beer and soda out of P&S cups.

Since they didn’t charge, they didn’t need a license. Thus, their family party had become a town party and one of the biggest events of the summer.

All because Pop had enjoyed a good barbecue.

This year, a month after his death, the family had discussed cancelling the event, but that discussion hadn’t lasted long. Pop had loved this weekend more than Christmas—and he’d been crazy about Christmas. Everyone agreed right away that it was the exactly right thing to do to keep the party going and to honor him in that way.

The funeral had been about his death. The beach party would be about his life.

The weeks since his death had been full of planning; they were ramping up the usual party to make it a truly memorial event. In addition to doing up the Saturday party even bigger than usual, Theo and John had put together a 10K charity run in Pop’s name for Memorial Day, to benefit the American Heart Association. They had plans to make it an annual thing.

Joey thought that all the work the family was putting into a party that had for years all but planned itself was helping them all through the hard weeks of early grieving.

For his own part, Joey was struggling. It felt to him like the little bit of a life he’d been starting to rebuild was crumbling already, and it felt like Pop’s death had started it all.

He remembered thinking, at Christmas, that he could give Pop what he wanted as long as he lived and then crawl back to his cellar after his death. But in the months since, Joey had actually found a life he wanted to live—he’d found strength in his body and his spirit, he’d found joy in his work, and miracle of miracles, he’d found love.

Even able-bodied, young and strong and with a beautiful girl on his arm whenever he’d wanted, he hadn’t felt anything close to what he felt for Tina. And she loved him, despite his limitations.

And then Pop had died, and something inside Joey had lost its tether.

He didn’t understand it. He and Pop had been at odds most of his life. He’d fought against his old man’s pull forever, and they’d expected his death for months, so why was he at such loose ends now?

He’d walked through the days between the death and the burial in a fog, and then, on the very night of the funeral, he’d taken a risk to grab onto the life he wanted, and he’d ended up even more impaired than before. It was as if Pop’s death had killed Joey’s hope.

He couldn’t figure out what was loose in his head. All of his therapies were mountains of failure and frustration now, and they kept shifting his meds, and he was just done. Done with everything.

No.

No, he wasn’t. As long as he had Tina, then there was a reason to put up with all that bullshit and keep fighting.

Or he’d thought so. But at her house for dinner, he’d begun to wonder what their relationship really was. Sitting at that table enduring her endless attempts to protect him from Big Bad Angie, and being unable to stop her because his anger had locked down his tongue—the last time he’d been so humiliated by a woman…he didn’t like to think about it.

But it was different. Tina loved him. She’d been trying to protect him.

Yeah, it was different. It was worse.

And Angie. Fuck that son of a bitch. Staring at him all through dinner, his smug sneer practically shouting his derision, and then later telling him that he’d garrote him with his tubing before he’d allow his only sister to get trapped with a ‘tongue-tied crip.’ And thinking he could get away with shit like that.

Joey was a goddamn Pagano. Nick would take Angie’s skin off in strips for even making a threat like that against his blood.

And that was the real problem—Joey couldn’t fight his own battles. Even his girlfriend who barely came up to his chin thought he needed her to protect him. He’d stood there speechless and rigid while Angie had sneered and threatened and then sauntered out of the house, and there hadn’t been anything he could have done.

The very worst part of it: Angie had waited until they were alone to make his threat. Because Tina
had
been holding him off. Protecting Joey.

Now he didn’t know what it was he actually had with her. He couldn’t survive in a relationship like that, hiding behind a woman, letting her shield him, ease his way.

He didn’t know how to change the dynamic between them. What if everything he’d thought they had was based on that? What if she only loved him because she wanted to take care of him? Was that even love?

He couldn’t live like that. But he didn’t know if he could live without her.

~oOo~

On the beach, Joey generally kept his tank on his back. Walking over the sand could become strenuous without much warning, and it was too much of a risk to put the tank down and possibly not be able to get back to it. Unless he was staying close to John and Katrynn’s house, he wore it, even if he didn’t need to take hits from it.

So far, he hadn’t needed it. The day was warm, with a cloudless blue sky and a light breeze. Perfect. Even without the beach party, Memorial Day weekend was the big start of the summer season, and a coastal town like Quiet Cove had a fair number of summer residents—some who stayed all season, others who came every weekend, and some who simply popped in for a getaway. All comers on this weekend were fresh and lively. The water was full of swimmers and surfers.

That morning, while they were beginning to set up, a lot of his family had gone out with their boards and gotten wet. Carlo, Luca, Carmen, and John all surfed, despite the fact that they were all in their forties. Carlo was pushing fifty. Trey, Ben, and Teresa all surfed, too. And Rosa’s husband, Eli, had taken it up. While the chill still lay over the sand, the water had been dotted with Pagano family in wetsuits, running dawn patrol.

Joey hung back with their spouses and the little kids; his surfing days had ended with a bullet. None of his siblings had married people who surfed, and Rosa had given it up a long time ago. Joey wondered if her kids—Teddy, who was four, and Rita, six months—would end up on a board. Maybe; their father had taken to it like the natural athlete he was.

After he and Theo got the banner up and stabilized with guywires, Joey stopped and watched the bobbing black dots of his family. Damn, he missed that. There was a moment, just as you got to your feet and the wave took over, that did something to the body not all that far from orgasm. And catching a really great wave, the kind that hefted the board up on its fingertips, and riding that bitch all the way in? There was nothing in the world that came close to the same feeling.

He was a strong swimmer again, but he’d never be able to swim in the ocean, never surf, never be able to risk getting cleaned up and pulled down. All he could do was stand on the sand and watch.

“Hey, Joe! Need you a sec.” Theo’s voice pulled him out of that bleak fugue, and he turned. Tina’s brother Matt was walking along with Joey’s brother-in-law. No sign of Tina, though.

“Matt,” Joey said and came forward with his hand out. This brother, Joey could stand.

Matt grabbed his hand firmly and shook. “Hey, Joey. I got the truck. My dad sent over provisions.”

They hadn’t asked for help from the Cortis or anybody else. This had always been strictly a Pagano Family deal. In fact, they spent big money at Corti’s every year to stock this event. But they’d already picked up that order.

“What provisions?”

Matt grinned. “Sweets, mostly. You already about cleaned us out of meat and cheese and sides. There’s wine, too. And these gallons of pre-mixed cocktails that a rep left us. Can’t recommend them to anybody I like, but the masses might be fine with ‘em, especially later. And ice. I’ll be back later with more of that, too.”

“That’s…great. Didn’t…have to.”

“No sweat, Joe. We wanted to help out. This party is a big deal for the market, and with you and Tina together, it’s like we’re family anyway. Plus, this one is special.”

Joey nodded. Pop and Mr. Corti had been pretty good friends. Business leaders in the Cove.

He looked over at Theo; he needed some help with talking. Theo nodded and took over. “We’ve got the food set up in stations over here. I’ll gather the troops and get their help.”

As they walked away, Joey saw Tina coming up from the street. She wore a pink bikini with a big scarf thing tied around her waist like a skirt. Sabina and Rosa wore those things, too. Her hair was up in a high ponytail. She looked so different from her usual emo self that Joey’s breath caught, and he coughed to start it up again.

She came right to him. “Hey.”

He pulled her into his arms. As soon as she was there, closed up tight within his embrace, he felt better. About everything. He felt stronger, and happier, and calmer. He felt worthwhile.

Inside, he knew that as long as he only felt good when he was touching her, they weren’t truly solid, no matter how they felt about each other. He needed to be strong on his own. He needed to find some kind of trust in himself.

But right now, this was what he’d needed: a minute to feel good, to be in the arms of the woman he loved. “Love you,” he murmured into her neck.

She set him back an inch or two. “I love you. So much. Can we find some time today to talk? I’m screwing us up, and I want to stop. I want us to be right.”

He brushed her bangs from her face so he could search her big brown eyes. “Okay.”

~oOo~

The beach was packed with people well before noon. Carlo and Luca manned the grill, and Manny lingered nearby, in charge of buns and condiments. Theo and Eli served as bartenders. John hovered around his very pregnant wife, sitting in Adirondack chairs with Bev and Nick at the fire pit. Carmen and Trey had the bigger kids busy playing volleyball near the water, taking all kid comers. Rosa and Sabina were in charge of the little kids.

Nick never really relaxed, as far as Joey knew, but he seemed particularly alert on this day. Joey wondered if he’d knocked up Bev again. Ren, their youngest, and their only son, was not quite a year old, but that didn’t seem to matter to those two. That woman was fertile.

As was usual when Nick was out with his family in public, there were a lot of armed men milling around. Casual beachgoers wouldn’t notice them as out of the ordinary; Nick insisted that his guards blend in, so they were in shorts and loose short-sleeved shirts. But the family knew their faces, and Joey knew their watchful posture for what it was: an army guarding its general.

Angie was there, but he paid no mind to Joey and little to his sister. Joey tried to keep that shithead out of his line of sight.

Laughter and music, squealing and splashing—all the happy sounds of a summer Saturday on the beach—swirled together in the air. A harmony Joey knew by heart and had loved all his life. Today, though, he felt melancholy.

Tina had stayed close all morning, but she’d wandered off while Joey was helping set up the volleyball net, and now she was ensconced with Rosa and Sabina, holding little Rita. She gravitated toward Rosa’s dark-haired baby girl whenever the chance arose. Joey liked to watch her and imagine what it might be like to make a family of his own, to see Tina holding their child.