Rooted (The Pagano Family Book 3) (24 page)

Yeah, he did. Until today, he hadn’t had to face how far he’d slid down that slope. But he was working on two days without a drink now, and booze had been flowing around him since he and Carmen had arrived for Thanksgiving dinner. Even the wine was looking good, and he hated wine. When his hands had started shaking while they were hanging lights on this not-especially-cold day, he’d finally admitted it to himself. He was an alcoholic. But how did he say that to Carmen’s father, whom he’d met hours before? He didn’t. “I’m just cutting back.”

“That’s a yes, then. I’m asking what kind of drunk you are. Are you a party drunk? A drown-your-sorrows drunk? A mean drunk? What I’m getting at here is do I have to worry about my girl around you? Or the grandchild she’s carrying?”

“No!” He took a breath and confronted the question head on. “I’m not violent. Sober or not, I’m not violent. And I’m quitting. No more booze.”

“That’s good. Don’t be stupid about it. Get help. Carmen’s going to make you work for what you have with her. She’s like her mother, all mouth and fight.” He stopped and laughed. “I guess you already know that. She’ll drive you to drink”—at Theo’s responding chuckle, Carlo Sr. laughed harder—“I guess you know that, too. So get help.”

Theo nodded. “Yeah. I will. But you don’t have to worry about Carmen, or the baby. I love them. I’d never hurt them.”

“Good intentions pave the road to perdition, Theo. But I’ll trust you. You raised a fine boy in Eli. I wish those two would get married instead of shacking up, but I know that’s my Rosa as much as it is him. Eli’s a solid young man. He speaks well of you. With respect. Admiration. So I trust you with my girl. She’s a special one.”

“I know. She changed my life.”

~oOo~

When the decorating was finished, all but the Christmas tree and fresh greenery, which Sabina and Rosa planned to get the next day, some of the family started a board game in the dining room. Others were in the cellar, watching the eighty-inch television down there. Carlo Sr. and his wife, Adele, had taken their leave. Carmen, though, seemed to have disappeared.

Theo was feeling tired and overwhelmed at the end of this day. He’d enjoyed her family, and they’d welcomed him almost as if he were a long lost relative and not someone they were only just meeting. But it was loud everywhere he went. There were so many of them—Carlo Sr., Adele, Carlo Jr., Sabina, Trey, Luca, Manny, John, Joey, Rosa, Carmen, and Eli and him. He’d kept a running list in his head, trying to keep faces mated with names. And there was a horse-size dog wandering around—Ella, or something like that. This was not the kind of family he was used to, and his nerves, seeking bourbon, jangled harshly.

Unable to find Carmen, he was starting to feel an irrational panic that she’d left him trapped in a web of Paganos.

As he went through the kitchen on his third pass through the rooms of the main floor, he met Carlo, who was getting a beer out of the fridge. Theo caught himself staring at the bottle, watching condensation bead up in a delicious fog on the glass.

“I think she’s upstairs with Sabina. Helping Trey do his tree.”

Theo forced his eyes up to Carlo’s. “Hmm?”

“Carmen. You look lost. I think she’s in Trey’s room. Go on up.” He lifted his bottle. “And help yourself.”

“Thanks. I’ll just go up and see if I can find her.”

Carlo gave him a look, then nodded and headed back to the dining room.

Theo went up the stairs. He heard Carmen’s voice as he topped the landing and went to the open door in the middle of the hallway. There he saw her with Sabina and Trey. They were adding red and blue ornaments to a four-foot-high, white artificial tree. Red and blue miniature lights already glowed against the sparkling white branches, and a small baseball cap topped the tree. A Boston Red Sox tree. Theo smiled.

“Hey. Thought I lost you.”

Trey, dangling a little red glass sock from his finger, turned and grinned happily up at Theo. “Mr. Theo! Look I have my own tree. For the Boston Red Sox the best baseball team in the world!”

Sabina smiled up at him, too. “This year’s obsession. His father hopes this one lasts.”

“That’s a great tree, kiddo. I’m a Rockies fan, myself, but I like your spirit.”

“Daddy says that when you pick a baseball team you pick it for life.”

The Colorado Rockies hadn’t existed when Theo was a kid. But otherwise, he agreed. “I’d say that’s pretty true, yeah.”

Trey got somber. “Yeah. I’m sorry that you picked the wrong team. Now you can’t change to the Boston Red Sox even though they’re the best team in the world.”

The kid was already learning how to talk smack. Theo laughed. “Yep. Good spirit, kid.”

Carmen was sitting on the floor. When she started to rise, she faltered a little, and Theo jumped in and helped her up.

“God,” she grumbled. “I can’t be turning into a Weeble already.”

He kissed her cheek and moved his lips to her ear to whisper, “You’re beautiful. I can’t wait to see your belly get big and round and full of our baby.”

She turned and looked into his eyes. “Come with me.” Then she led him out of the room and down the hall, opening a door at the end and pulling him into a dark room. She closed the door and turned on the light.

They were in a boys’ shared room—blue, crème, and brown, two twin beds, two dressers, two desks, two bulletin boards. It clearly did not get regular use any longer.

“Whose room is this?”

“It was John and Joey’s, but they never stay here anymore. Joey has been in what was the guest room for a while, but he’s looking for his own place now. I think Carlo and Sabina are going to move Trey in here and make Trey’s room into a nursery.”

“That’s right—they have a baby coming. Soon, right?”

“Yeah. They need to get moving, but Sabina…” She stopped, evidently deciding what she’d been about to say wasn’t his business.

“Why are we—
oof
.” She’d pushed him against the wall next to the door. When she grabbed his belt, he had an answer to the question she hadn’t let him finish.

“You look stressed out and tired. I want you to stay with me, at my house.” She opened his fly.

He’d been hoping, but he hadn’t asked yet. “Yes.” He groaned as her hand sank behind his open zipper and took gentle hold of his balls.

“Good. First, though, I want to fuck in this house. Do you know I’ve never ever fucked in this house? I’ve had to hear Carlo fucking, and Luca, and John. I know Joey’s fucked here. Hell, we both know Eli and Rosa are fucking here.”

“We know, but we don’t have to talk about it, please.” Some things, a parent would rather not consider. Especially in this moment.

“But I have never once fucked under this roof.” She pulled him free of his jeans, grinning as she wrapped her hands around his hard length. Thank God whatever problem he was having with booze hadn’t caused a problem there. “So fuck me, cowboy.” She toed off her boots and dropped her jeans and panties, stepping out of the pile they made on the floor.

Feeling more clear and energized than he had in several hours, Theo pushed away from the wall. He led her to one of the desks and pulled out a chair, then sat and pulled her down to straddle him. When she sank down onto him, she sighed. He groaned and brought her close to claim her mouth.

And he gave her her first fuck in her childhood home.

~ 17 ~

The days after Thanksgiving were their usual flurry of family activity. John took Rosa and Sabina shopping on that Friday. Luca and Manny went to Providence to spend the day with Manny’s parents. The rest of the family finished decorating both houses on Caravel Road. They stacked the tree decorations to await deployment and stowed the rest of the now-empty storage boxes back in attic and cellar spaces. Then the men rearranged the living-room furniture, making way for the tree that John, Rosa, and Sabina would be bringing back with them. Theo and Eli were both in the thick of it all, until they went out together, sent off with Adele’s grocery list.

Adele spent the day in the huge kitchen of the main house—Carmen still couldn’t call it her brother’s house—baking cookies. Not allowed by anyone to lift or carry, Carmen helped Adele out for a while. But cooking and baking were not favorite pastimes, and Adele was bossy in the kitchen. When Theo and Eli came in with the groceries, Carmen gratefully used the opportunity to find a quiet place and get off her feet.

Carmen had been feeling odd since the morning. Not ill, nothing to do with the baby, she didn’t think, not bad at all. Just…odd. Like her blood fizzed in her veins.

She fished her tablet out of her bag and got comfortable in the blue velvet armchair that had been her mother’s. She’d finished
Infinite Jest
weeks earlier and had been cleansing her reader’s palate with some lighter fare. Now, she’d started
The Portable Dorothy Parker
.

“Are you hiding from your own family?” Carmen had been reading for awhile when she heard Theo’s voice. She looked up and saw him standing behind the sofa, smiling at her in a way that made her nethers tingle. He’d seemed tired and not entirely well since he’d arrived. Carmen was putting it up to jetlag, but she’d also noticed that he hadn’t been drinking.

She smiled at him. He’d returned to her life not much more than twenty-four hours ago, but it seemed as though the months they’d been apart had faded nearly immediately into insignificance. They had yet to talk about what they had, or what it meant, or what they’d do, but Carmen didn’t care. He was back with her, and he’d seemed to have forgiven her.

“It’s survival instinct. Sometimes you have to step out of the fray.”

“I hear that.” He came around the sofa and sat in front of her on the steamer trunk that had always served the purpose of a coffee table. “What are you reading?”

Her smile grew as she remembered a game they’d played during the summer. Looking down at the page on her screen, she picked a sentence at the beginning of a paragraph and read it aloud. “‘It did not occur to him to feel even a flicker of astonishment that Rose should have responded so eagerly to him, an immovably married man of forty-nine.’” The trick was to choose a sentence with enough meat that he couldn’t call her a cheat, but without any obvious giveaways.

He closed his eyes, and she waited. Then he grinned and, with his eyes still closed, said, “Dorothy Parker. ‘Mr. Durant.’” He opened his eyes and lifted his brows.

“It’s nuts how good you are at that.”

“I teach that story. And ‘immovably married’ is pure Parker. Almost a giveaway.” He put his hand on her knee and squeezed gently.

She closed her tablet and put her hand on his, wrapping her fingers around the leather cuff on his wrist. “I think I would have liked to have taken one of your classes when I was in college.”

Some emotion passed over his eyes, only briefly and gone before she could identify it. Then he said, “I came looking for you, and I’m glad to find you in a reading mood.”

“What?” She cocked her head.

“Hold on.” He got up, left the room, and came back in a few seconds, a thick sheaf of paper bound with a blue, heavy cardstock folder in his hands. He brought it to her and set it in her lap. “I’d like you to read this.”

She smoothed her hand over the plain blue cover. “Is this what I think it is? Did you finish?”

He sat back down on the trunk. “Yes. It’s not what I thought it would be. But it’s finished. I haven’t yet asked anyone to read it. Would you?”

“Of course. You printed hard copies?”

“I printed that copy. For you.”

Carmen opened the cover and read the title:
Lavender in Summer
. The words evoked a poignant, bittersweet memory of their last weekend together in France. She’d felt content and free, until reality—or maybe it had only been her skewed view of it—had taken over, and she’d blown everything up.

She turned the title page and found a dedication:

For C.

I’ll never forget

I’ll never regret

I’ll always cherish

My beautiful girl.

That odd fizzing in her blood became a foamy froth, and her head seemed to fill with air. She looked up into his waiting, beautiful blue eyes. He seemed blurry, and she blinked. A tear fell down her cheek in a cooling trail. “Theo?”

He put his hand over hers, pressing it onto the open page. “Maggie was the wrong love to write about. My story with her is over. When I knew that and let her go, I was able to write again. You’re my story now.”

“But I ended our story.”

“You tried to, yes. This book doesn’t have a fairy-tale ending. But you know what? I’m sitting here in front of you. You’re carrying our child. Our story’s not over. What comes next, though, is just for us.” He squeezed her hand, and she closed her eyes at the wave of warm reassurance—of love—she felt. “Will you read it, knowing it’s about us—and that it’s not a fairy tale?”

She was afraid, afraid to see inside his heart and truly know what she’d done. But that fear was buffered by a love richer and deeper than she’d ever known. “Yes. I’d be honored.”

He lifted her hand to his mouth and pressed a soft, lingering kiss to her knuckles. And then he got up and left the room. She set her tablet aside and turned the next page of Theo’s manuscript.

~oOo~

She read through the afternoon. People came in and then went back out, sometimes without saying a word. Carmen barely noticed unless they tried to engage her—at which point she made it clear that she didn’t want to be disturbed. When John came in and said they needed to bring the tree in, she went up to John and Joey’s old room. She finished Theo’s manuscript sitting on the chair on which he’d fucked her the night before.

Reading his memoir was like seeing their summer through his eyes. More, it was seeing herself through his eyes. He’d once, very early on, told her that it was a powerful thing to be understood. She’d thought then that she’d known what he meant.

She hadn’t. But she did now. He had seen deep inside her, finding even the dark corners she hid from herself. The glimpse into herself through his eyes sobered her. It hurt her heart. It made her swell with love. And it terrified her.

I’m here alone in Paris, and what I felt, what I feel, is true. In the span of a summer, I felt the full complement of possible feelings for her. The scarred heart in my chest stretched and stirred to life again, and I’m as glad to have the pain as I am to have the love.

She is rooted in my heart, and I am free and full.

And time again moves forward.

With those lines, the manuscript ended. He’d never named her or Rosa, referring to them only by the initials of their first names. He’d preserved her privacy even as he’d bared her mind, heart, and soul. It was indeed a powerful thing to be understood.

~oOo~

She found him in the cellar, watching television and talking with Eli and Joey. Eli saw her first and smiled. He seemed to be as happy to have her and his father together again as anyone—or almost anyone.

But Carmen felt exposed and unsettled, and she could feel the urge to back away, to recede into familiar solitude, taking her over. She hated it—this time, more than any other, she wanted to feel at ease, to trust and be comfortable in the knowledge that she was first in Theo’s regard.

She saw now that she had nothing to fear from his love of Maggie. Her new fear was of his love for her.

She was a fucking mess. But she was fighting it off.

“Hey, Carm.” Eli was sitting on the old plaid sofa with his father. He stood now, making way for her. “Wanna watch with us?”

“No, thanks. I came down to steal your dad.”

“I’m yours to be stolen.” Theo stood immediately, and she knew that he’d been expecting her to want to talk after she was finished with the manuscript. She wanted to just go back to her place, where they’d have almost infinite privacy, but dinner was almost ready, and she wasn’t in the mood to fend off the family pleas to stay. So she led Theo upstairs, back to John and Joey’s room.

They sat on the bed that had been John’s. Theo took her hand but didn’t speak. He was waiting for her.

“It’s beautiful. Truly beautiful.”

“Thank you.” When she didn’t, couldn’t, say more, he added, “Carmen, talk to me. You could have told me it was beautiful downstairs.”

Carmen took a moment and collected her courage with a deep breath. “You’re right. It’s a powerful thing to be understood.” Another moment, another breath. “It scares me. Badly.”

“Why?” There was no challenge, no ire in the word. Only gentle curiosity and patience.

“I don’t know. I feel…naked.”

“You’re beautiful naked.”

“Theo…” She huffed and tried to draw away, irritated that he would be puckish when she was trying so hard to master her fear. He held on, though.

He laughed softly and put his hand on her face. “No. I mean that the part of you that you try so hard to hide, that’s your real beauty. You let me see glimpses of that part this summer, little tendrils that reached out. When I say I’m entangled in you, that’s where. That tender part—it’s magnificent.”

“That little part—that’s enough? Because the rest of me is bitch.”

“No, it’s not. You’re not a bitch, Carm. You can be bitchy, definitely. But you’re not cruel, you’re not selfish, and you’re not uncaring. If anything, I think you care too much. More than you can contain. What you are is self-protected. It makes me want to protect you, to take some of the burden of it off your shoulders.”

“It makes me dizzy to feel like you know me better than I do. Really disoriented.”

“Do you trust me with the knowledge? That’s the real question.”

And so they’d come to a moment of truth—
the
moment of truth. But she knew the answer. She thought she’d known the answer even before she’d read his new memoir. She thought she’d known since he stood on her porch, peering into her house through the glass in her door.

“Yes.”

He pulled her close and laid her down on John’s twin bed. They made out like teenagers, Theo’s hand in her leggings, resting on the bare skin of her pregnant belly, until Carlo called them down for dinner.

That night, lying in her bed in the loft of her little beach cottage, Theo’s sleeping body spooned behind hers, Carmen finally comprehended that fizzy, airy feeling in her blood.

She was happy.

~oOo~

“Little bit of cold here.” The technician squeezed clear, freezing cold goop onto Carmen’s bare belly. Then she put the sonogram sensor in the goop and adjusted the monitor with her other hand. “Okay, let’s see what we got.”

Theo gripped Carmen’s hand and leaned over. Carmen watched him instead of the monitor. His expression was deeply rapt, as if he thought he could see more on that screen than the technician would point out.