Miracle (The Pagano Family Book 6) (36 page)

BOOK: Miracle (The Pagano Family Book 6)

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The year after that had been the most tense Joey had ever known in the family. Carlo had been out of his mind. He’d been enraged that Trey had made such a choice, he’d been enraged that Nick had allowed it, he’d felt betrayed when his brothers and sisters wouldn’t agree to cutting Nick and Bev and their kids out—and he and Sabina, Joey thought, had come frighteningly close to divorce when she’d held the line and wouldn’t support him in cutting Trey out of their family if he went through with it.

That had been more than two years ago. Carlo had finally come around, more or less, realizing that his choice was to keep his son or to lose him, that he had no say in the choices Trey made. And yet, a part of Joey was always waiting to see if there would be another explosion between Carlo and Nick.

He wasn’t the only one on alert. Everybody had gone quiet and looked to Carlo as Nick and Trey had come into the yard.

Trey wasn’t made yet. To even be considered for making, a man had to do something critically important for the organization, at great risk to himself. Usually, that meant blood on his hands. A lot of it. Every Pagano knew that, whatever their side of the pews. If—when—Trey was made, Joey thought Carlo would blow again.

He wouldn’t be the only one. Nick had brought his blood family into the organization and kept him close, a lowly soldier riding with the don. Everybody saw the writing on the wall, because it was spray-painted in ten-foot-tall letters: Nick was grooming Trey for leadership, preparing the way for his own son someday to follow.

But Trey, like Ren, was only half Italian. When Nick made a man of less than full blood, he would flick his chin at tradition that extended into the history of the old country.

Joey could only imagine how the rest of the families, how
Cosa Nostra
itself, would react to that.

He stood as Nick went to Gessie and crouched to her level. He handed her a small, light blue box and accepted her grateful hug. His kids loved Uncle Nick and Aunt Bev and their cousins, and neither Joey nor Tina, despite their own history, had seen any reason to pretend that their family, their
whole
family, didn’t have dark threads in its weave.

He went to Trey and shook his hand. “All set?”

“Yeah, Uncle Joey. We’re all good. Sorry we’re late.”

Joey shrugged and nodded to the table, where the food was picked over but the beer was still cold. “Beer. Hungry?”

Nick answered as he approached. “Don’t go to trouble. We’re late, so we’ll take what’s left.” He held out his hand. “Gessica was lovely today.”

Joey shook with him. “Thanks.” He nodded again to the food and drink. “Help…yourself. I’ll…put meat on. No…trouble.”

Before he went into the house to grab some more meat, he watched Nick and Trey go over to the circle of men. When Carlo was the first to stand and shake hands with Nick, and then hug his son, Joey knew he could relax.

In the kitchen, Tina and Adele were cleaning up, standing together at the double sink.

“Need meat,” he said as he came into the room. Both women looked over their shoulder at him and smiled. Tina mouthed,
Me, too
.

Dirty minx. He grinned and winked.

When they’d bought this house, it had needed a lot of work. Structural work. But Tina had fallen instantly in love with the gingerbread details and the old wide-plank floors, with the peaked roof and with the huge, long back yard and its row along the fence of ancient rosebushes, so they’d bought it and spent a year fixing it up.

They’d done a good job, too. Even now, after years living here, and after the wear of three riotous children, Tina would sometimes just stop in the middle of whatever she was doing and exclaim,
God, I love our house!

It was now too small for their family, with only three bedrooms, one of which was more like a closet. They were planning an addition, because Joey couldn’t pry his wife out the door to move into something bigger. He wanted to expand the kitchen, too, but Tina liked her tiny space, in which, she said, she could reach everything with only a step.

It made entertaining difficult, however. Joey did all he could to stay clear of this room when they had a party.

Adele and Tina were both staring out the window over the sink, which overlooked the back yard. After he shooed Mimi and Poppy off the little table, where they’d been eyeing Gessie’s cake with bad intent, he went and stood behind his wife, setting his hands on her hips and looking over her head at the yard.

She leaned back on his chest. “Is everything okay out there?”

Joey scanned the scene of his back yard, framed by the window of his own house, in which he lived with his beautiful wife and their perfect children. Gessie, Claudia, and Olivia had given up playing house for sitting in a row on the grass and watching Elisa, Lia, and Teddy, the teenagers, talking in their self-conscious, performative manner. Marco sat between his Uncles Luca and John, listening to the men talk. Christie had chased off the Fearsome Foursome from her sandbox and was making sand stew for her Uncle Matt.

He slid his hands around Tina’s waist and bent to kiss the back of her neck. With his lips brushing her skin, he said, “Everything is… …perfect. Everywhere.”

THE END