Prayer (3 page)

When he took the call confirming that the job was done, he’d wedged his phone between his shoulder and his ear so he could fix the bow on the back of Elisa’s dress.

The violence of his life would never change, even though now his own hands stayed clean. But it no longer darkened him as it once had. This was his balance—this home, his wife, his children, his family. And another child on the way. He smiled. He knew it would be hard for this one to be so close in age with Carina, for Beverly more than anyone else, but he couldn’t be sorry to know that their love would bring forth another token. Another happy voice in this chorus.

Speaking of which, Beverly walked into the living room, looking lovely and radiant in her own red velvet. She came over and kissed him, stepping back just as he started to wrap her in his arms. “It’s time to eat, people!” she called, raising her voice above the chattery din.

It took some time to get even a hungry crowd of this size moving in tandem. Gina and Ashley took control of the kids’ table. At the adults’ table, everyone, without being prompted, began opening the little foil-wrapped boxes Elisa had placed on their plates. Sterling silver key chains engraved with the Pagano family crest—another of his wife’s ideas. Small tokens of the thing that bound them all together. Family. Even Donnie and Katrynn got one—they had become, over the years, members of the family, through their tight bond with Beverly.

Once everyone was seated, the kids at their table, the adults at theirs, Nick at the head and his Uncle Carlo directly across from him, a spread of gorgeous fish dishes arrayed for the adults and more kid-friendly tuna tetrazzini for the children, Nick raised his glass.

“Before we set in, I’d like to toast you all. I know this is a break in long-standing traditions, and it means a lot to me and Beverly both that you’ve joined us here tonight. We lost Uncle Ben and Aunt Angie this past year, and they left holes we’ll never be able to fill. Family was important to them, and I think they’d be glad to see us all together for this important meal. Thank you.” He lifted his glass to a mingled chorus of
“Salute
!” and “
Cin cin
!”

Then he nodded to his uncle. “Uncle Carlo, would you do us the honor of saying grace?”

Carlo Sr., obviously moved, nodded. “I’d be honored, Nick. You mind if I say something first?”

Nick shook his head and held out his hand, indicating that his uncle should go ahead.

Carlo Sr. cleared his throat. “You’re right that being here, eating at your table on Christmas Eve, isn’t our tradition. When my father passed, my brothers and I went our own ways—in many things. But I’m the last of my generation now, and our children are making a new generation. It’s time for new traditions. These children should grow up in a family that’s together.” He looked at Beverly and smiled. “I guess it took a woman like Bev, who sees things like they should be, and thinks the way they are is no excuse, to remind us that we belong together. So thank you, Bev—and Nick, too—for bringing us all together on this holy night.”

“Hear, hear!” Luca exclaimed, grinning at Beverly. All of the diners raised their glasses and toasted her. She blushed and smiled down at her place setting.

Then Carlo Sr., the patriarch of the Pagano family, nodded to Nick, the don of the Pagano Brothers. The older man bowed his head and folded his hands. The rest of the table followed suit.

But Nick reached out and took Beverly’s hand, linking their fingers together. He had thought many times over the years that she had given him his family. Now he understood that she had bestowed that gift on all of them.

~oOo~

~oOo~

Nb. If you’re curious about Nick and Bev’s anniversary weekend in New York, you can find that short story, “Rich Love,” on my blog:
www.susanfanetti.com
It’s one of the Pagano Family “Snapshots.”

PRAYER

To love another is something
like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall
into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief
.

Anne Sexton, “Admonitions to a Special Person”

Prologue

A bowling ball landed on his stomach, and he woke with a groan to a room with about a hundred times the light any earthbound room should have. Even through his eyelids, the light burned. He groaned again for good measure and found his hands so he could cover his face and save his sight for someday—much later—when he would want to use it again.

The bowling ball began to knead his belly, digging its claws in through the sheet. Not a bowling ball, then. A cat.

He didn’t have a cat.

Fuck.

Lying on his back, with his hands protecting his face from the punishment of a cheerily sunny morning, John Pagano tried to pull some kind of memory out of the churning black sewage that his brain had become.

New Year’s Eve. Last night. At Quinn’s. He must have had a righteous good time.

Okay…

But who had a cat?

He turned one hand slightly to the side and pried half an eyelid open, groaning again as actual sunlight lased straight into his brain. After an agonizing second, he saw an angular grey face with blue eyes. A Siamese.

He didn’t know anyone who had a Siamese cat.

Said cat noticed his barely-open eye and meowed. He or she—it—sounded like a kid. Weird.

At his side, a soft, decidedly female voice moaned, and some shifting around happened. John turned his head, using his hand like a visor to block the sun, and peeped over there to see a head being buried under a pillow. Long, blonde hair and a pale, bare shoulder. Pretty. But not, on that slight evidence, especially familiar.

The turning of his head had woken up the rest of his body, no part of which was pleased with his choices of the night before, whatever they had been. He was suddenly extremely sick, and he sat up—which did nothing whatsoever to improve the sickness. He belched, then realized that there was more to do than that, and leapt up, upsetting the cat, who complained with another of those near-human yowls.

Somehow, he managed to intuit where the bathroom might be in this completely unfamiliar house, and he made it to the toilet.

When he was done—for the moment, at least—he sagged back against the cool porcelain tub. Then he saw that he still had a damn condom on.

Upside? Condom. Good to know that his id was responsible about safer sex.

Downside? Dear God. He was too old for shit like this. Blackout nights were for the Early Twenties, not the Late Thirties. And going home with random women and passing out in their beds? There was no age when that was cool.

Shit, he hoped at least he’d gotten her off. Whoever she was.

He peeled the condom off his hung-over dick and flushed it.

Fuck. New Year’s Eve. That made today New Year’s Day. Fuck! He had a plane to catch. What time was it?

He made to dig his phone from his pocket, then remembered that he was naked. Sitting on the floor in a strange woman’s bathroom.

Not yet ready to try his feet again, he surveyed the bathroom on the off chance that maybe the mystery woman had a clock in here.

It wasn’t a bad bathroom. Old fashioned, with the heavy, white porcelain fixtures and the white octagon and black diamond tile pattern on the floor that marked the building as about seventy or eighty years old. If they were in Quiet Cove—and shit, he hoped so—then he had a general idea where.

As far as décor, there were red towels hanging tidily on the rods and a large, funky red print in a black frame next to the door. The walls were painted a near-white he recognized as ‘Swiss Coffee’—a standard contractor-grade color. A rental, then. Nobody chose Swiss Coffee on purpose for their own walls in their own house. He, on the other hand, as the Chief Supervisor at Pagano & Sons Construction, had ordered vats of the stuff.

The room was neat and clean, but cluttered with girlie shit, too. The closet door was open, showing more red towels stacked on a shelf in tidy little rolls, and other shelves laden with hair-curling gizmos and makeup and creams and liquids. And on the back of the toilet was a silver tray that held brushes and hair-clipping doodads. There was a little glass dish with some jewelry in it, and a strange, black ceramic hand that held necklaces and chains.

Something on that hand caught John’s eye, and he stared at it, not believing what he was seeing, wanting it to be something else. Anything else. When he couldn’t deny what he saw, his stomach flipped, and for a second he thought he’d heave again.

On a dainty silver chain, an odd pendant. Shaped like a tiny book.

Mrs. Dalloway
, by Virginia Woolf.

He knew that pendant. He knew the woman who called that her favorite book.

Jesus fuck.

No.

No, he had not had a random hookup with Katrynn. Not Katrynn. No. Not even drunk, not even blackout drunk, would he have been so fucking stupid and shitty. No way. He was not that guy.

But that was her necklace. Not exactly something every chick had.

How? Had she even been at Quinn’s last night?

John searched his memory, pushing the black blankness out of his way. He didn’t remember much—going to Quinn’s because he couldn’t face the family love-in after the crush of Christmas, single for the first holiday season in a long time and really feeling it. Sitting at the bar while Quinn served drinks and growled at people. He remembered flirting with Annie, one of the waitresses, and thinking that he’d find her at midnight if he was still around, and at least start off the new year with a kiss.

After that, it was all just a black swirl. He didn’t remember Katrynn. But that was her necklace.

Okay. Fuck. Okay.

He struggled to his feet and then stood there, waiting to see if he could remain upright. Yes. His head hurt like an absolute fucker, and he didn’t think he’d ever want to see food or drink again in his life, but the room remained level. He washed up in—sweet Jesus—
Katrynn’s
bathroom sink, checked himself out in the mirror and decided he didn’t look
too
much like a strung-out serial killer, and headed back to her bedroom.

She was still out, her head still buried under the pillow. The space he’d slept in was now taken up by not one but two Siamese cats—the grey-faced one who’d woken him to this nightmare, and a more typical brown-faced one. They both stared at him, and John felt judged.

He didn’t know what to do. Wake her? Let her sleep? Leave? Wait? What?

Here was the problem: he liked Katrynn. Really liked her. She was a bit young for him, maybe, but he would have asked her out, and he thought she might well have agreed, except that their timing sucked. When one of them was single, the other was not. For all the years—something like five or so, maybe more—that they’d known each other.

In fact, she was dating somebody now, wasn’t she? Yeah—she’d mentioned him at Nick and Bev’s on Christmas Eve. Some guy from Providence. A personal trainer or something like that.

So, fuck. He had no idea what to do.

But his clothes were on the floor next to the bed, so he got dressed and then dug his phone out of his pocket and finally checked the time.

His flight out of Providence was scheduled to leave in less than three hours. If he missed that, he’d miss his connection at Dulles.

After Monica dumped him in early November, after two years together, he’d crashed pretty hard. He was pushing forty, and he could not seem to get his life started. On paper, it looked good: good job, cool house, great family. But he didn’t have what he wanted, and he could not fucking find it. All around him, his family had everything that he wanted, too: love, children, a future. Only his brother Joey was also still single, and Joey was a pathetic sad sack who used his disability as an excuse not to bother with a life.

Joey had given up. John had not. Not until Monica had bailed, anyway.

At Thanksgiving, the women of his family had ganged up on him. From his stepmother to his baby sister. It had been like some kind of estrogen-fueled intervention, telling him how wonderful he was, what a catch he was, he shouldn’t give up, blah blah blah.

Mainly, he’d felt emasculated and offended. But his sister Carmen had suggested he take some time during the winter work lull and have a change of scenery, and that idea had stuck.

He was spending a month in Tuscany with family. Leaving in…two hours and forty-nine minutes, unless he missed his goddamn plane.

Again: FUCK.

John stood in the bedroom and stared at the lump that was her sleeping form. Now that he knew who she was, the shoulder and blonde hair
was
familiar—the tone of the skin, the slimness of the arm, the length and color and texture of the hair. No doubt about it, he had drunk-fucked Katrynn Page.

He had to get his ass moving, and now. Should he just leave? He was not the guy who sneaked out of the bed of a woman he’d accidentally, drunkenly fucked. Actually, he was not the guy who accidentally, drunkenly fucked a woman at all.

Except, apparently, he was. A woman he liked. One whom he would not be able to avoid, even were he so inclined.

A note? Maybe leave a note?

Before him, in her bed, Katrynn moaned quietly and stirred.

And John panicked. Like some kind of fucking frat boy, loathing himself even as he did it, he turned and sneaked out of her house, grabbing his shoes from the floor near the front door.

~oOo~

Not her house—her apartment. He was right about the location: a small neighborhood of cottages and four-unit apartment buildings on the edge of town, not far from the boardwalk, but without a beach view. They’d been built in the 1940s, when Quiet Cove had really begun to boom as a vacation town.

He stood in the little parking lot, where his truck was not. Nor was her little SUV. Well, at least they hadn’t driven drunk.

John sighed. This day was not his day. Fortunately, his bags were packed and ready to go, sitting next to the door at home. He dug his phone out again and dialed his brother Luca, who answered right away.

“Hey, bro. You at the airport?”

He wished. “No. Luc, I need some backup. I had a night last night, and I don’t know where my truck is. I think it’s at Quinn’s. Can you come get me, get me back to the beach to get my shit, and then take me to the airport? Like now?”

Luca laughed. “Shit, John. What’d I tell ya?”

He’d told him that it was stupid to go out on New Year’s Eve when he had a transatlantic flight the next day. Which, of course, John had known already. He’d told him that he should spend it at the house on Caravel Road with the rest of the family. But that thought had depressed the fuck out of John. Almost as much as the thought of sitting alone in his house had.

“Yeah, yeah. Give me all the shit you want, but help me out.”

“I was gonna get wet today, but okay.” It was an unseasonably warm winter in Rhode Island, and most of the Pagano siblings had spent time surfing the winter waves. “Where are you?”

“Cove Court Apartments. I’m in the lot. Dude, I’m on a stopwatch here. Flight leaves in two and a half hours.”

“Fuck. I’m on it.”

John put his phone away. Something pulled his attention, and he turned and looked up, where he figured Katrynn’s windows were. He saw a curtain move, as if someone had been watching and had backed away as he’d turned.

He hoped it had been one of her cats.

But probably not.

Fuck.