No Place Like Home (26 page)

By midafternoon, the band and the cash bar had considerably loosened the crowd. A predictable wave of thunderheads rolled in, darkening the room but in no way dampening the spirits of the revelers. Including my own. Michael showed no signs yet of being overly tired, and finally glared at me when I asked him for the tenth time, “Are you okay?”

“Babe,” he said, drawing me down beside him, his hand feeling strong around my wrist. He kissed my cheek and said, “Don’t take this wrong, but there aren’t that many weddings in my future and I’m enjoying myself. Don’t hurry me off to my bed.”

I smiled. “All right. Sorry.” What was the absolute worst that could happen, after all? It surprised me that I could think in such a joking way about it, but there was something peaceful about that, too.

I danced all day, with cousins I hadn’t seen in twenty years and had forgotten. With uncles who smelled of Old Spice and Brut, with Spanish grandpas who’d learned the two-step in New Mexico at age four and had indulged at least once a week ever since. We did the chicken dance, laughing happily. We ate. The wine flowed, the cake was cut, toasts were made.

But the delirium of the day for me came from Shane, standing up there so handsome and suave, singing as beautifully as Michael, who’d taught him, and playing even better than his father, who had also taught him.

Michael just kept shaking his head as Shane did one more thing and one more, singing in Spanish he’d learned in only a few weeks, crooning out love songs in very bad Italian. He told me later that he’d been spending every night after work with the band, who’d lost a singer three weeks before the wedding and had never had a good bass player. My father had arranged it.

Of course. Because my father would have realized—or someone would have heard it and realized and told him—that the voice, trained by Michael, was the voice of
my
father, a voice so clean and deep and true that people often turned around when he spoke in a crowd, and stopped dead when he sang in church.

And I could tell my father knew it by the way he watched my son with his dark eyes filled with pride. At least, I thought, peering over the shoulder of my rotund cousin Leo, I’d given something back to my dad for all the trouble I’d caused. I wondered, suddenly, if he realized that Shane was a Sabatino, not a Jake. A boy to carry on the name.

“You must be so proud of him,” Leo said.

“More than a little,” I admitted.

“All’s well that ends well, eh?”

I smiled up at him. “Sure.”

No one, of course, commented on the fact that the sisters all sat at the head table with Jane, except me. Wars in such a huge family are a delicate thing, and to keep the peace, an unspoken set of rules were followed. If my father danced, I stayed off the floor, for the most part. And when it became clear that I was a popular partner, he started declining dances. When he got in line for food, I waited until I was far behind him, and we never went to the bar or the cake table at the same time.

Even so, the timing gets off a little once in a while. Overheated and flushed in my satin gown, I went to the bathroom to wash my face, noticing as I peered in the mirror that my eyes had that telltale shine of slight tipsiness. “Time to slow down,” I said aloud to my reflection.

“It was time for me an hour ago,” another woman said, a young Hispanic professional sort with long dark eyes. “Not so many weddings a year you can’t indulge them, though, eh?”

I was grinning when I came out, and ducked behind a guy in shirtsleeves—which put me face to face with my father on his way to the men’s room.

We both halted, stunned to silence, our eyes catching and holding for a space that felt much longer than it was. For one lightning stretch of an instant, I thought I saw a softening, thought he might be about to open his mouth and speak to me.

Instead of waiting, then being disappointed, I ducked my head and dashed around him, nearly tripping on my skirt in my haste.

Close call.

A little while later, when the band was on a break, I saw him capture Shane and lead him over to a table in the corner. I leaned close to Malachi. “Now, there’s the table you want to sit at,” I said as an old man lifted a bottle to my father. There were introductions being made, the lift of the chin in acknowledgment. My father drank, passed the bottle to Shane, who carefully didn’t look my way as he lifted it and drank.

Michael raised an eyebrow at my soft sound of protest. He shook his head and I knew he was right—that bottle was acceptance—but it was still hard to see my kid drinking right in front of me.

“What are they passing around?” Malachi asked.

“Homemade wine. Muscatel. The man in the blue shirt makes it every year. He’s famous for it.”

“Go snare us a bottle. I like to sample the local cuisine.”

I made a dismissive sound. “Not for women.”

He chuckled. “Really?”

“Pretty much.”

“Amazing.” He gazed over the party with a measuring expression. “I’ve never been to anything like this in my life.”

“You’re kidding!”

A one-sided shrug. “How many of these people are you related to?”

I took a breath, narrowed my eyes. There were about three hundred people in the room. “Probably at least half of them. Maybe a hundred, hundred and fifty? The rest are on Steve’s side.”

“That’s amazing.”

“Find it a little overwhelming, do you?”

“It would be hard to live around so many people who knew you, I think.”

“It is, sometimes. But sometimes, it’s really good, too.”

“I guess you’d always know somebody had your back. Or you’d have a place to land.”

I thought of the web, the net—sticky safety. “Something like that.”

He looked at me. “As long as you follow the rules, right?”

I nodded a little sadly, thinking of my recognition during the wedding that I would be the one they’d point to as an example of what not to do. “They’ll still make a place for you,” I said. And because he looked so good, because I had nothing to lose, I leaned over and kissed him.

His grin was a thousand watts. “Is that your place?”

“You betcha.”

“Think they noticed?”

“I don’t care today.”

His gaze was steady. “Yes, you do.”

I looked involuntarily at my father and Shane, settling in for the telling of tall tales at the old men’s table. The bottle made another round and I grinned. “He thought he got a headache from tequila.”

While the band was on break, a selection of pre-recorded tunes was playing, and I stood up abruptly. “Dance with me, will you?”

For a moment, he hesitated, his expression impossible to read. “Maybe that’s not what you really want.”

“If you don’t stand up and dance with me, you’ll make me look really bad.”

He unfolded, bigger than a grizzly, and let me lead him on to the floor with a sprinkling of other couples. When the band was on, it was hard to talk, but this was more intimate and not quite as energetic.

I held him loosely so that I could look up at him. “When you leave, they’ll forgive me,” I said with a smile. “The grandmas will start looking for a divorced man, or a widower, maybe somebody with kids. The aunties will ask their friends at work, and talk about me. I’ll be hitched in a year.”

“And I’ll just be a fading memory.”

“No, you’re going to send me postcards from exotic places, so I have some link to the wild world outside.”

He sobered. “I can do that.” He rubbed my spine with the tips of his fingers. “Maybe before you get all the way settled in, you could meet me in the Alps.”

“Maybe.” But we both knew I never would. For a long minute, we let that knowledge rise up between us, both comforting and sad. I smiled to lighten it. “I can promise I’ll think about you sometimes on summer nights when it rains.”

“That would be good.”

Because he would leave, I could say things more freely than I would have ordinarily. “You know, if you and Michael and your parents had lived here, things would have been very different for you.”

He gave a derisive little snort. “Yeah, Michael would have fit right in.”

“He’d have been fine. Everyone would have known he was gay and hoped they were wrong and said prayers and lit candles for him, but they would have watched out for him. If he’d grown up in my neighborhood, he would have had to fight, but I know he did some of that anyway.”

Malachi nodded.

“The big difference would have been with your parents,” I said.

The careful distance. “Why?”

We turned and Malachi edged his body closer. “The relationship was volatile and passionate,” I said. “But they did love each other.”

“I guess.”

“Everyone would have known it. When they got into their fights and one or the other showed up at their local bar, there would have been somebody on alert. Nobody would have gone home with your mother. And if there was a stranger around, he’d have been politely escorted away.”

Malachi rolled his eyes.

“Or they’d have picked a fight with him,” I said with a grin.

“That I can believe.”

“And when your dad started getting too drunk and talking trash? Somebody would have just either drank him under the table or stuck with him till morning.”

“I don’t buy it, Jewel. No community does that, not consistently.” But even as he spoke, a flicker crossed his eyes.

“What did you remember?”

He scowled at me. “Why do you do that all the time?” It came out
all a-time.

“Do what?”

“Come up with something like you can read my mind.”

I grinned up at him. “Because I can.”

“Yeah?” He lifted his chin, a challenge. Given to another man, it would have been a squaring off, but what it revealed to me was the underside of his jaw, a place I knew from experience smelled of a special soap he always used, a plain brownish bar laced with herbs. “What am I thinking right now, then?”

I inclined my head. He wanted me to think he was looking down my dress, but he couldn’t hold it long enough. He stumbled a little, kicking my toe. “Sorry,” he growled.

What was he thinking right now? He was surprisingly easy to read for a man who’d spent his whole life covering his emotions. “You’re wishing that you
had
been raised in a place like this, that you had a nana and few million cousins to catch you when you fell and a dad you could pretend to ignore.” I half smiled at the darkening of his irises. “Oh, I forgot. You do have the dad part.”

The cheekbones went dark, intensifying the angle. It occurred to me vaguely that he must have some Indian blood somewhere, and it surprised me that I’d never noticed it before. It was plain in Michael’s face, too, if you ignored his coloring. The slash of cheekbone, the down turning of the mouth.

“Tell you what, sugar. I’ll write my daddy a letter and tell him all is forgiven if you can get yours to dance with you.”

“Hit a nerve, huh?”

“I dare you,” he said.

I only smiled, feeling heat rise between us with his anger. It lashed out, whipping across my torso, down the front of my thighs. On my back, his fingers curled.

“Double dare you.”

“And I decline,” I said easily. “You’ll do what you need to do. Just like I will.”

The song ended. We stopped, but neither of us let go right away. “You really piss me off sometimes, Jewel, you know that?”

I laughed. “And why is that, Malachi?”

“You just think you know everything.”

“You mean I don’t?”

“No.” His jaw set for a moment and his mouth was tight. “What I was going to say is, why don’t you come with me? You don’t belong here any more than I do.”

Come with me.
It pierced me in a dozen places, a hundred ways. Run away again, this time with a man who had made it an art form. “Climb the Alps?” I said. “See the pyramids?”

His fingers laced through mine. “Yeah. It would be so good, Jewel.”

A laugh went up from the head table and I looked over my shoulder. An ordinary group, really, who would lead ordinary lives. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. Jordan saw me looking and winked.

“Why don’t you stay, Malachi?” I looked at him steadily. “I’ll go to the Alps with you, to the pyramids, but I need to be here with my family now. I missed them too much to ever really leave them again.”

He looked around, panic on his face. “I can’t.” He let my hand go and spun away on his heel, going outside where the wind was beginning to whip up. If his brother hadn’t been on his deathbed, I knew he would have climbed on his motorcycle and been gone.

It made me smile. I floated back to Michael and kissed his head. “I could have used him a lot sooner,” I said.

He reached up and put a hand on my wrist. “I never saw before how much alike you are.”

“I don’t really see that.”

“I know.” He turned my hand over, his palm as dry as an elm leaf. “When does the fair start?”

“Friday.”

“We’re going that day, right?”

“Sure, if you want to.”

“I do.” His thumb moved on my hand, and I could feel him slipping away into that distant place. “How does it work out, in terms of the way it was when we met?” He dragged himself back into the moment. “Was it the first night of the fair then?”

I smiled, brushed a lock of hair from his shoulder. “It was indeed, sir. Twenty-three years ago. Amazing, isn’t it?”

“I’m real glad you went that night.”

And suddenly everything in my world shifted, like somebody pulled a string in my imagination and all the pieces fit together. I looked down into the aquamarine color of his eyes, and knew that
this
man had been the reason I’d gone to the fair, and run away. It was Michael who’d freed me, not Billy.

I loved him so much. “You are so amazingly beautiful,” I said, and kissed his lips lightly.

An outcry at the front of the room went up, and I saw the band members reassembling. “Time for the money dance,” I said, eyeing Shane as he picked up his bass. He laughed at something one of the other guys said, showing his big white teeth. The tight gangster queue was coming undone, leaving a few strands to fall across his handsome face. So bad, so beautiful, so talented, my Shane. I would miss him when he headed out into the world, but somehow I felt he was going to be just fine.