Prayer (4 page)

~ 1 ~

John headed down the concourse toward the baggage claim. As he was texting Luca to see if he’d arrived yet to pick him up, another text came through. He smiled and opened the photo.

Giada, in a car, making a cute little duckface, with the message,
Già mi manchi! XOXO!

John didn’t know as much Italian as he probably should have. Prior to this trip, it had been a long, long time since he’d been in Italy, not since his mother had died twenty years before, and he’d lost most of the useful bits of the language. He could cuss a good game, and drop some good insults, but otherwise, he could barely get by in the big cities, where most residents knew more English than he knew Italian. For his first weeks of this visit with his Italian family, he had relied heavily on their passable command of English.

But then he’d met Giada, and his four-week vacation had become six-plus weeks. She’d helped him out with the language.

And some other stuff, too.

She was gorgeous and funny and enthusiastic about everything, and she played guitar, as he did. She played professionally, though, which he did not, and she’d brought him up on stage with her band a couple of times.

They’d gone skiing together several times, and they’d spent a few days in Milan. And they’d fucked like rabbits for weeks. It hadn’t been serious—how could it have been serious?—but it had sure been fun.

All in all, he felt much better than he had when he’d crawled onto a plane on New Year’s Day, carrying on the worst hangover of his life and a whole cargo of self-hatred and self-pity.

He texted back,
Anche tu mi manchi. xo.

I miss you, too. He was nearly one-hundred-percent sure he’d said that right.

And it was true. He liked her a lot. He especially liked her casual, ‘let’s just have a fling’ attitude. He was no longer interested in ‘flinging’ in his real life, but on a vacation, while he was rebounding from a variety of disappointments, a fling had been perfect, and the permission to just have fun without wondering where anything was headed had been cathartic.

Luca was leaning against a post near the baggage claim, and he pushed off and came forward as John approached. John let his guitar and backpack drop off his shoulders, and the brothers hugged hard.

“You look good, man. A shit ton better than when I dropped you off.”

“Thanks. It was a good trip.”

Luca gave him a brotherly punch to the gut. “Got fat.”

No, he hadn’t, but he’d put on a few pounds. It was impossible to spend more than a couple of days in Italy and not gain weight. Most of it he’d skied and walked and fucked off, however. A few days back in his regular routine would take care of the rest.

“Fuck you,” he laughed in reply. “You got bald.”

Luca, past forty, had the same ripped fighter’s physique he’d had since high school. But his hairline had started backing off a bit near his temples.

Luca flipped him off; then, as the carousel started to move and roll out the baggage from John’s flight, he asked, “You rested? Carm and Theo are having that thing tonight, and we’re all expected. You need to catch some Zs first?”

“I popped a pill and had a beer and slept the whole flight. What thing?” John’s skis rolled up, and he pulled them off the conveyor.

“You know—Theo’s writer buddy is in town. Atticus Whoever the Fuck. He’s been around all week, but tomorrow is his book release party at the bookshop.” Luca grabbed John’s suitcase. “Anyway, they’re having a thing for him tonight, too. Cocktails and New York Book Types. I thought you knew about all this. Didn’t Bev wrangle you into doing your Bob Dylan impression tomorrow at the shop?”

“Oh shit. I completely forgot. Fuck.”

As they headed toward the exit, Luca said, “I thought that was why you came back on a Friday.”

No, he’d come back because Giada was heading off on a tour of the UK with her band, and he didn’t feel like being her groupie. Besides, he’d already extended the trip far enough. It was time to get back to his life. They’d said their goodbyes at the train station.

“No. I was just ready to come home.”

He wasn’t so sure he was ready to see Katrynn, though. He’d spent the past month and a half aggressively trying not to dwell on the ways he and his life sucked, so he had tried hard not to think about how he’d started off the new year by fucking and chucking her—a woman he considered a friend. A woman he was attracted to. He had put no thought at all into how to make amends for that.

And now, first thing, he was going to have to face her.

Bev, their cousin Nick’s wife, owned Cover to Cover Books. Katrynn was the manager. Theo, their sister Carmen’s husband, a writer himself, was friends with this writer Luca was talking about. John was surrounded by people invested in this event.

Bev had asked months ago if John would play guitar as background during the release and reading of Atticus What’s His Name’s new book. He liked to play for an audience, so he had agreed. That was before he’d been such an asshole, though. Now, he’d much rather have dodged Bev, the bookshop, and Katrynn for a while, until he had his shit together.

Luca opened the hatch on his truck. “That Atticus dude is an asshole, but Carmen’ll have a stroke if you bail on tonight.”

John sighed and slid his skis in. “I’m not gonna bail. I’ll shower and change and get over there.”

“Always the good one,” Luca chuckled.

He ignored that little dig. It was more or less true, anyway. John had always been the ‘good son,’ the one who did what people expected of him. Whether he wanted to or not. When he allowed himself to think too hard on that, he saw that a lot of his discontent had to do with it: meeting other people’s expectations and not getting around to meeting any of his own.

Yeah, not ready to open that mental viper pit again just yet.

Something else that Luca had said had caught his attention. When they got into the truck, John asked, “How is the guy an asshole?”

“You’ll see. But I speak the truth. Carm and Theo brought him over to the house the other night, and I had to go out to the back yard after a while before I punched the cocksucker.”

For Luca, that was unlikely to be an exaggeration.

‘The house’ was the house on Caravel Road, where all six siblings had grown up, and where the oldest of them, Carlo Jr., now lived with his family. It was where the family congregated more times than not.

“Surprises me that Theo’d be friends with a guy like that.”

Luca shrugged. “He was Theo’s student, I guess. I don’t know, maybe he wasn’t always an asshole. I get the impression that Theo’s surprised, too.”

So a party where the guest of honor was an asshole—no, two parties, tonight and tomorrow—and facing the victim of his own assholery. Quite the welcome home.

Suddenly tired and feeling less great than he had been, John leaned back in the seat. “Sounds like a great time.”

Luca laughed. “You never know. Been a while since we had a brawl. Could be fun.”

~oOo~

Theo’s friend’s name was Atticus Calhoun, and John understood what Luca had meant within about five minutes of meeting the guy. He just gave off a certain vibe, and most men knew at least one like him: the kind of guy who spent a lot of time in front of a mirror, who really considered his ‘look,’ who scanned the home page of a couple of news sites every day and considered himself up on the world. Who’d picked up a random fact or two about a whole bunch of shit and considered himself an expert on everything.

His hair was long and blow-died, and he had on more jewelry than most women John knew wore: silver and turquoise cuffs on both wrists, a bunch of silver rings, a thick silver chain with some kind of stone pendant, and silver hoops in his ears. Silver belt buckle, too.

He was tan. John would have laid down a decent stack of Benjamins on a bet that the tan had been applied in a salon.

Calhoun was going for a cowboy-sophisticate look, John supposed, in his jeans and boots, with a tweedy jacket over a black shirt

Normally, John wouldn’t have paid so much attention to what some guy he’d only just met looked like, but Calhoun kept drawing attention to himself. He fidgeted and gestured and shook his hair like a fucking shampoo model, and he managed to insinuate himself into almost every conversation. He made it impossible not to notice every damn thing about him. He was the kind of guy you either found charming or hated on the spot.

John did not find him charming.

Theo was a fairly unassuming guy, on the quiet side but with a sharp sense of humor. He was patient and determined, which was good for Carmen, who could be prickly as fuck. John liked his brother-in-law a lot. What he was doing being friends with this clown, though, John couldn’t begin to say. Theo had probably had thousands of students over the years. Why take this one under his wing?

A pair of hands landed on John’s shoulders from behind, and he glanced down and saw his sister’s wedding ring on a finger. He hadn’t seen her yet since he’d been back; Theo had been doing most of the hosting tonight.

Turning in her light hold, he hooked his free arm around her waist and gave her a squeeze. “Hey, Caramel. Nice party.”

There had been a time when the idea of his sister hosting a cocktail party for anyone other than immediate family would have caused gales of disbelieving laughter among her siblings. She wasn’t the world’s most social person. But then she’d married Theo, a professor and a writer of some fame, and they’d had their little girl, Teresa, and since then, Carmen was a little different. Not all that much, but noticeably. More relaxed. And, for her husband and child, more social when they needed it. She managed play dates and volunteered at Teresa’s school, and she threw occasional parties for bookish types for Theo.

John didn’t think she actually
enjoyed
doing any of that, but she loved her family, and Carmen was, like he himself was, good at doing what she had to do, whether she wanted to or not.

Which was why John hadn’t even considered bailing on this party, despite the certainty of facing Katrynn. Their family supported each other, period.

And maybe he wouldn’t face Katrynn tonight, after all, even though she was here. They’d made eye contact exactly twice. She was quite obviously hurt and angry, and she was doing everything she possibly could to avoid him. John hadn’t decided yet whether that was a good thing or not.

“Yeah. You look like you’re having a great time.” Carmen cocked a sarcastic eyebrow at him, then nodded at his near-empty glass. “You need a refill?”

He pulled it back as if she’d reached for it. “I can fix it myself. You need help with anything?”

“Don’t think so.” Carmen turned and surveyed the room. When Theo had retired from teaching a few years before, they’d moved back to Rhode Island and bought this house down shore from the Cove. It was a newer build, a beachfront property, the kind affluent summer people bought to live in a few months of the year. Carmen liked it for that very reason: they were the only people on their little lane who lived there year-round.

Like all beach houses, it made use of the view, and Carmen had pulled all the draperies back so that most of three walls were glass, looking out onto the February night and the beach and ocean beyond. From the outside, the party probably looked pretty fantastic.

Just then, Calhoun laughed at something somebody had said, a big, booming laugh, and John saw Carmen twitch like she’d been poked. She didn’t like him, either.

“What’s Theo see in that guy?”

Carmen shrugged. “He was a student of his about ten years ago, and he’s from Cheyenne, too. And he really is a great writer. His first book didn’t make a big impact, but it got some great reviews, and Theo put him in touch with his publisher. The one they’re releasing tomorrow is already getting talked about as a Man Booker contender before it’s even sold a copy. I’ve read his stuff—it’s amazing. I thought I’d like the guy who could write like that.”