Miracle (The Pagano Family Book 6) (4 page)

Seeming nearly distraught, he stared for a moment, then nodded and turned away toward the parking garage.

Before she went into the building, she was pretty sure she saw him hook the cannula over his ears.

~oOo~

When she got home that night, it was getting pretty late. Traffic out of Boston had been extra heavy, and she’d been slow to get her reports done before she’d left the office. Her brain had kept wandering off to dig at the open sore of the way she’d left Joey. Or the way he’d left her.

Her brother Angelo Jr.’s car was parked on the street in front of the house. Their brother Matteo’s car and their father’s car were both on the driveway, and Tina didn’t have to go in the next day—she only worked at the RTC three days a week. She parked on the street behind Angie, so Matt could get out when he left.

Neither of her older brothers lived at home anymore, but they both lived in Quiet Cove, and more nights than not, one or both of them showed up for dinner.

Although she was twenty-eight, Tina still lived at home and had no plans to live anywhere else. Her parents needed her.

She went in the side door and found her father and brothers in the kitchen. Their dad was fixing dinner, standing over a sauce pot with a dish towel draped on his shoulder. Matt was pulling dishes down from the cupboard. Angie, typically, sat at the island, drinking a beer. He’d always been the kid who ducked his chores, but in the years that he’d been in the Pagano Brothers organization, and especially since he’d been made, he acted as though helping his family was beneath him.

Usually, their father didn’t put up with that for long. But tonight he seemed to be distracted. He hadn’t even acknowledged that she was home yet.

“Hi, Daddy.”

He started a little, like she’d yanked him up from a deep thought. Then he smiled and stretched out an arm. She tucked herself under it, wrapping her arms as far as they would go around his ample middle, and he kissed the top of her head. “You’re late,
tesorina
. We were about to start without you.”

“Sorry. Traffic. I’d have called, but you don’t like it when I do that from the car.”

“No, I do not. Well, go say hi to your mamma, and wash up. We’ll wait.”

“Hurry up, shrimp,” Angie chided. “I gotta eat and split tonight.”

Angie was still the same self-absorbed asshole he’d been when he’d been hanging out with Joey, except he’d gained a hard shell of menace, too. Now he had the reputation to support that cocky attitude. No one was allowed to speak of it in this house, and they were all supposed to pretend it wasn’t true, but everyone knew that Angie was one of the Pagano Brothers’ most violent enforcers.

There really weren’t any Pagano Brothers, not anymore. They’d both died. Now it was just Nick Pagano, Joey’s cousin, at the head. And Don Pagano was not someone with whom to fuck. Everybody knew that, too.

Being made meant that a man had the don’s respect and trust, and this don had a legendarily fierce reputation of his own. A made Pagano man was also not someone with whom to fuck. An enforcer—a man who did the dirtiest of dirty work—was especially fearsome.

When Angie spoke, therefore, he expected people to fear him, and they did. That wasn’t entirely true within his own blood family—he loved them all, and vice versa, even if he was a self-important dick—but he didn’t always temper that tone of his, the one that added ‘or else’ to every sentence he uttered.

Tina was in a mood of her own on this night, so she flipped him off and said, “If you’re in such a rush, why don’t you help get dinner on the table, then, asshole.”

Not waiting for his reaction, she turned and headed toward the front of the house. At the hall tree, she toed off her booties and hung up her coat and bag. Then she went to the room that had once been their father’s study.

The light in the room was dim; it had been well past the early dusk of this January day when she’d left Boston, and now it was full dark. The only illumination was the television, playing a
Law and Order
episode. The drapes were drawn; Tina’s father had already buttoned up the room for the evening.

Her mother sat on a hospital bed, the back and knees raised so that she could watch television comfortably. A pink and yellow crocheted afghan was laid tidily over the more practical hospital-grade blankets that covered her skeletal legs. She was wearing one of the old-fashioned, quilted-silk bed jackets that Tina had found on Etsy and bought her for Christmas—she’d gotten one in each of six colors. Today, she was wearing the red one. And Crystal, her primary home nurse, had done up her hair that day with a red ribbon.

For all the years Tina could remember, Genie Corti had had a gloriously shiny head of hair in a perfect dark-walnut color. She’d been vain about that lustrous mass. When she’d noticed her first strand of grey, while Tina was in third grade, she’d transitioned from natural to colored without a blip. She had never allowed even the hint of grey roots.

Now, her hair was short, dull, and steel grey.

“Hi, Mamma,” Tina said, brightly, and kissed her mother’s forehead. “How was your day? You look beautiful.”

Her mother grunted, and her left eye moved frantically. Since suffering a massive stroke two and a half years earlier, her loud, demanding, ferocious, hilarious, loving mother had been able to move almost nothing but her left eye. According to all the tests over all this time, she likely had otherwise almost completely normal brain function. But that brain was locked in an almost completely inert body.

Her whole right side sagged dramatically, like a candle left too close to a radiator, and that eye had been milky since a procedure to try to preserve its sight had gone wrong. Her left side was slack as well, though not so horribly. On good days, she could twitch the fingers of her left hand.

Tina took that hand now, but it lay limp in her hold. She knew her mother could
feel
, however, so she squeezed. “I’ll come check on you after dinner. Do you need anything?”

That deep brown left eye moved back and forth.
No
.

“Okay. I love you.”

Up and down.
Yes.
The closest her mother could now come to saying she loved her.

Tina wiped the drool from her mother’s chin and kissed her cheek.

~ 3 ~

The indoor pool at the gym was not remotely like the ocean, but almost from the first stroke, Joey had remembered how much he loved the water. Even this water. In fact, in some ways, swimming here was better. The rhythmic movement of his body as he sliced down the lane, the muting of the sounds around him, the way it all served to reduce the entire world to this one place—it calmed him. He thought a lot of thoughts while he swam, and few of them were self-hating or despairing.

Sure, the first time he’d gotten into the water, two days after his first trip to the RTC in Boston, he hadn’t even made one length of the pool before he had to clutch the side and reach for his tank. That day, his brain had been its usual riot of misery and anger. It had been worse, actually. Those few days right after he’d seen Tina in Boston had been fucking rough. Once again, he’d found himself in the position of abject humiliation before a woman he liked. He’d spent years trying to avoid that shit and then
bam
. With little Tina Corti. What the fuck?

She wasn’t so little anymore. Back when she was in high school, she’d been braces and glasses, zits and a stick body. Now…mother of God. She was gorgeous. No braces, no glasses, no zits, no stick. She looked a little bit like a taller, younger Manny, actually, except with big brown eyes instead of Manny’s eerie ice blue. They even had similar styles—Tina was emo to Manny’s punk.

Joey knew he’d seen her around town; he would have had to. Her parents owned Corti’s Market, and she worked there. Or used to. Now, she was working in Boston. But it felt like it had been years since he’d laid eyes on her. Damn, that gangly girl who used to bat her puppy eyes at him was working on a
PhD
. She did some kind of therapy with kids and animals, like that big black dog, Mo.

Animal-assisted therapy. She’d talked at length about it while they’d sat at that coffee shop and he’d sucked on a bottle of water because he hadn’t been able to face the hurdle of figuring out an order and saying it to the guy behind the counter.

He’d enjoyed that conversation, though he hadn’t done much to participate in it except listen. Yet it had been the first time in longer than he could remember that he’d been comfortable with someone not named Pagano.

And then she’d tried to kiss him, and he’d acted like an idiot. A freak.

But he did not want anything romantic, not with anyone. Or, more accurately, he wanted it badly, but he knew he wouldn’t get what he wanted, and he couldn’t deal with what he’d get.

Even so, it ate him up that the good time with Tina had ended so stupidly, and he’d been more depressed right after it than he’d been since the first days after John and Katrynn’s wedding. He’d almost bailed on the whole ‘new life’ enterprise.

But he hadn’t. He’d started on the new diet, and he’d started working out, usually with John, and he’d gone to his therapy sessions, even with the shrink. Every time he was at the RTC he worried that he might see Tina there, and then regretted when he didn’t.

He hadn’t seen her since that one time.

Now, more than a month later, he was working out five days a week—three in the pool and two with weights—plus therapy, and he’d lost nine pounds. He’d increased both weight and reps in his weight training, going from dying-old-man level to out-of-shape middle-aged man. And he was up to eight lengths of the pool. It wasn’t an Olympic-size pool, his speed was closer to geriatric than athletic, and he needed a few minutes of oxygen after, but it was a lot better. He was starting to feel better in general.

He could really feel it in his chest. Evan had already cut him down to weekly pulmonary rehab sessions, and he’d had a couple whole days now—rest days, when he wasn’t working out—that he hadn’t needed a hit from his tank. It had been years since that had been the case.

His speech…that was always his biggest problem, and he wasn’t seeing improvement yet. Gayle was encouraging, and he was doing his ‘homework.’ Yet his brain maze remained intact, and it frustrated the fuck out of him.

But it had been only a matter of weeks.

He hoisted himself out of the pool and went to the bench where he’d left his tank and towel. He sat down and fixed the cannula over his face, then rested back and closed his eyes, feeling his lungs relax as they got extra help to fill his body with air.

“How’d it go today?”

Joey opened his eyes as John sat beside him. He was dressed for the gym, not the pool, and drenched in sweat; the weather had been shitty, lots of freezing rain, so John, a long-distance runner from way back, had been running on the treadmill. He hated it, and it always put him in a bad mood.

“Good.” He didn’t try to say more; he was still feeling mentally relaxed from the swim, and he didn’t need to invite frustration.

“You want steam before we shower? We should get to it, then.”

Joey nodded and stood up. They met at the gym when it opened, at five in the morning, so they could work out before they went in to the office. Joey liked it that way—not many people around to see him.

~oOo~

Joey, John, and Luca stood at the table in Luca’s office and stared down at the blueprint, site map, and papers strewn over it.

The three brothers ran Pagano & Sons Construction, the company their father had built out of nothing. Really, Luca and John ran it; Joey just did the scheduling. He wasn’t much good for anything else. Most jobs required talking to people. Scheduler was a job that normally required talking to people, but his brothers took those parts of the job on themselves, leaving Joey to do the figuring and organizing.

It was fairly complicated work, making a whole lot of different elements work together to keep a job on time and on budget, and he knew what he was doing and did it okay. But he wouldn’t have been able to hold the job down for any other company, so he always felt like a charity case and an imposter.

“This weather is for shit. We can’t get any work done like this. Snow would be better than this constant ice.” Luca crossed his arms over his chest.

They were fully engaged in a huge project to build a market square near Quiet Cove—one of those ‘lifestyle centers,’ with shopping and restaurants, office space and a hotel/condominium combination. They’d gotten the contract late in the last season, and they’d slammed through the fall trying to get the job sufficiently underway to allow them to get some work done through the winter, because the client, Tyler-Orvo, a big developer with a national footprint, was dead set on a May grand opening.

They’d hit their goal in the fall of full enclosure and could have focused through the winter on interior work. But Mother Nature had not been in a friendly mood this winter. It wasn’t like the previous winter—not so far, anyway—which had been all freezing cold and then a huge dump of snow at the end. This had been gloomy and wet, always hovering just below freezing during the day and crashing into frigidity at night, so that every slushy drop was a menace. They’d lost a major shipment of plumping fixtures to a big highway wreck, and they’d been left reeling from delay after delay as other trucks struggled to get to their destination, men struggled to get to their work and stay safe and healthy at it, and the weather took its toll on the site.

It was the end of February, and Tyler-Orvo remained adamant that the development open before Memorial Day.

Joey picked up the scheduling sheet. He worked out the schedule on his laptop and sent regular updates to his brothers, but he always printed out a copy when they met like this. Luca liked to hold paper in his hands.

“The…Eastman truck is in…Philly. …Be here tomorrow…offload by…noon. Weather’s…clear tomorrow.” Rather than continue to verbalize his thinking, he bent over and drew some lines and arrows on the sheet, reordering the plans for tomorrow. After another moment’s thought, he worked out the rest of the week. Then he pushed the paper toward Luca and John.

They looked it over. John nodded, then asked, “What about Crew Three?”

Joey reached across the table and tapped the answer on the sheet he’d sketched on.

“You think they can get that done by Friday?” John squinted at the page.

“Yeah. Mario’s…back.”

“That’ll help, yeah,” Luca said. “If you’re right, Joe, this’ll gain us a whole week.”

Joey didn’t answer. He was right. As long as the weather held tomorrow—and he’d checked the map for the entire continent—and the load came in on the Eastman truck, then they could catch up some lost time. Even if the weather went back to hell the day after.

“Okay. Make it so. Good job, Joe.” John’s wide smile was almost paternal and possibly patronizing, but Joey just looked away. One of the great losses of his post-shooting life was the ability to fight effectively with his brothers, with words or with fists. They got away with a whole lot of crap he’d have thrown down over before. Like being patronizing shitheads.

He picked up the scheduling sheet. “Leaving early…Boston. At… …lunch.” He had appointments with his shrink, with Evan,
and
with Gayle this afternoon. A real team effort today.

“Right, right.” Luca nodded. “Can you get this out before you go?”

“’Course.”

~oOo~

His shrink was an old hippie chick with long, grey hair that she usually wore in two braids over her shoulders. She wore long, flowing skirts with wild patterns, and sweaters long enough to be dresses. And always some necklace or other with a big stone hanging from the chain. Dr. Carole Behring—though she wanted to be called Carole. What a trip she was.

Her office, in a building across the street from the medical center, suited her fashion. It was full of colors and fabrics and smelled a little like the import shop in the Cove—which doubled as a head shop if the owner liked you well enough to let you back where he kept the bongs and pipes and other paraphernalia. Even before the shooting, Joey hadn’t been into that shit. It dulled the world too much. But he’d had friends who were into it. For his part, booze was his drug of choice.

Not so much anymore. It fucked with some of his meds and made his brain mush. He’d been drunk twice since the shooting. Both times, he’d been rendered completely speechless, and once, he’d ended up in the ER because even the mask hadn’t been enough to help him breathe.

Basically, that bullet had removed all the enjoyment from his life.

This was his fourth weekly visit with Carole. He didn’t mind it as much as he thought he would, but neither did he understand what good it could do. Talk therapy probably worked best when the patient could talk. But she was nice, and Dr. Turillo insisted that he do this so he could have the other stuff, which he promised his pop he’d do, so he went and sat in Carole’s funky yellow chair. It had taken him a little bit to make himself make the call, though.

The first time, he’d barely spoken, and she’d peppered him with questions he could answer with a nod, a shake, or a shrug. She’d taken pages of notes. The second time, he’d wanted to do that again, but she’d said that she wanted him to lead their talk, and he didn’t want to do that, so they’d sat there for fifty minutes not saying much of anything.

The third time, she’d asked him a question: “What makes you most happy?” It had taken him a long time to find an answer, and not because he couldn’t find the words. He’d finally tried to tell her what he thought would make him happy, but after he struggled forever through that ordeal of an answer, she’d asked, “But right now. Today. What makes you most happy?”

He had never come up with an answer. He thought it was a stupid question.

If she asked this time, though, he’d say that figuring out a schedule that gave the job time back made him most happy today. For that moment, he hadn’t felt like a charity case or an imposter. He’d had value.

So when he sat down, right away, he said, “Have a…thing. A…an answer.”

“For what?”

“What makes me…happy. Now.”

She smiled and lifted her arched eyebrows.