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

So she tried to be her mother’s daughter and remind everybody who Genie Corti still was.

~oOo~

The nasty weather broke the day after the cocktail party, and the break held into the weekend. The temperature made it into the fifties by noon on Saturday, and the market was packed. Quiet Cove was a small town, and lots of people walked, carrying totes and baskets, pushing little folding carts, or towing their kids in wagons, to do their errands. A day of warm sun after weeks of grey sleet and sludge brought everyone out.

The hours passed quickly as Tina worked behind the butcher case, taking orders for meats and cheeses, calling them back to Bobby at the slicers, laughing with the customers. She didn’t have the interest in arguing politics or religion that her mother had, but she liked the Red Sox, and she was up on town gossip. And she was good with people. So she managed the rapport pretty well. She’d never be Genie, but she could keep the customers happy anyway.

When their father led the last customer out in his usual way, chatting with them as they went through the door, then closing up behind them, Tina turned to Matt and took off her apron. “Will you run the totals back here tonight? I’ve got somewhere to be.”

Her brother smirked in that way only older brothers could. “Hot date?”

Maybe. Probably not. But hopefully warm, maybe even cozy. “No. Just dinner with a friend.”

“I know this friend? She hot?”

Tina rolled her eyes. “Not your type. Will you run totals?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’ll put it on your account.”

“Just take it off what
you
owe
me
, jerkwad.”

He grinned at her, and she hung up her apron and went to tell their father she was going.

~oOo~

Tina hadn’t been joking about smelling like salami. And pepperoni and every other kind of sausage and meat they sold. The smell permeated the skin and stayed there for hours. Her father and brother hardly ever smelled like anything but market.

Thank God they didn’t sell fresh fish. They left that to the fish market a couple doors down.

She should have told Joey she’d meet him at eight. That would have given her enough time to shower and make an attempt, at least, to smell like something more appealing. But by the time she got back to the house to change, it was six-twenty. There was barely time to wash her face and hands before the critical ritual of standing at her bursting closet and despairing that she had nothing to wear.

It wasn’t officially a date—at least, she wanted it to be, but she’d probably be better off not dressing for an official date. There was something skittish in Joey; he almost seemed to be doing this against his will. She didn’t want to scare him off by showing up in something that said she was hoping he might take it off later.

Which probably wouldn’t happen even in a best-case scenario. He could scarcely stand for her to touch him at all. She didn’t understand why; she sure hoped it wasn’t simply that he didn’t want
her
, specifically, to touch him.

Not exactly a confidence booster.

But she’d forced the issue,
again
, and now there was pizza at Santini’s and maybe some ice cream down the street after. Or probably not. It looked like he was on a diet. He’d lost noticeable weight since that first afternoon.

So pizza was probably a bad idea, too. Fuck, she hoped he wasn’t going to sit and watch her eat. She didn’t mind eating like a person on a date, but it was weird to be the only one eating at all. Shit. Fuck.

Okay, okay. She needed to dress like they were just hanging out but be cute enough to catch his eye in case his eye was catchable. She thought his eye was catchable. There’d been a few looks that had seemed interested. Skittish, but interested.

Come on. Okay. Dark red skinny jeans. Crocheted black sweater with a black cami underneath. Black buckle Docs. And her biker jacket.

She pulled the elastic from her hair and brushed it out, did her face with a bit of extra liner and lips to match her jeans and her nails—which needed a touchup, but no time for that—and called it good enough. She hoped.

In the mirror, plain old Tina stared back. Nothing special, but nothing awful, either.

Before she left, she went in to sit with her mother for a few minutes. Leslie, her weekend nurse, was still on duty, but she was down cellar doing some laundry. The room was bright; her mother didn’t want to settle down for the night unless her husband was there to do it.

To Catch a Thief
was playing on the television. When she saw Tina, her mother’s left eye moved vigorously, and Tina paused the movie.

“Yep. I have a date. I’m going to say good night now, because I hope I won’t be in until late.”

Her mother’s left index finger flexed, and Tina picked up that hand. “Do you think I look okay?”

The eye moved up and down.

“Can I tell you a secret?”

Yes.
It moved several more times.
Of course.

“It’s with Joey Pagano.”

Her mother had known about her high school crush—she’d come upon one of Tina’s spiral school notebooks, with
Tina Pagano
,
Mrs. Joey Pagano
,
Joey + Tina
doodled all over the inside of the back cover, in hearts and puffy letters. Such a dork.

‘Come upon’ was a bit passive as a description. ‘Hunted down’ was probably more apt. Her mom had been a snoop, and Tina had gone to inventive lengths to keep her diaries secret. At any rate, her mom had been kind and loving about it, and Tina had been glad that somebody had known. She’d really been lovesick over the guy. Pathetically so. It had helped to have somebody to talk to about it.

But her mother had also known about Joey’s troubles, and how they’d happened, so when her eye simply stared without moving, Tina read an essay in that stillness. “It’s good, Mamma. He’s…different. But in a good way, I think. His troubles don’t matter. Not to me. You know that.”

Up and down. And a twitch of the hand Tina held.
I know.

“Okay. I’ve got to go, or I’ll be late. I love you.”

I love you, too.

~oOo~

Santini’s was a typical pizza place—a little nicer than a take-out joint, but not somewhere people generally went for a romantic evening out. Unless you were Lady and the Tramp.

It was the kind of place that had plastic, red-checked tablecloths and, for centerpieces, chianti bottles with candles stuck in their mouths. Napkins were of the paper variety, from dispensers on the table. They served pizza, salads and breadsticks, a couple of pasta dishes, and soda and beer on tap.

Most of the year, their clientele was largely kids’ sports teams filling up after a game or a practice. The wall behind the counter was full of plaques and framed group photos of all the teams Santini’s had sponsored through the years, and a shelf ran along the top of the wall to hold trophies as well.

On this Saturday night at the end of February, the diners were groups of high school kids and a couple of families with young ones. It was pretty loud.

No, not romantic. But safe, and, for that, a good start.

He was already sitting at one of the tables—one as far as possible from the rowdy teens—with a glass of water. When he saw her coming his way, he stood.

Tina used the seconds it took her to cross the dining room to check him out. Without being especially dressed up, either, he looked good. Handsome. Black button-up shirt and faded jeans. He’d shaved, and she was a bit sorry about that; she liked the stubble of beard he sometimes had.

The top two buttons of his shirt were undone, and she could see just a hint, a suggestion, of hair. When he’d been younger, he’d waxed—she knew he had; even when she was a teenager, she’d known he’d waxed. She knew the shiny, almost plastic sheen of skin made unnaturally smooth. Angie and Matt waxed, then and now—they were massively hairy Sicilians, and they got chest, belly, back, ass, neck, and upper arms done regularly.

They used the same salon she did. Left to nature, she, too, was a hairy Sicilian. Their father, who thought men belonged in barbershops and women in beauty parlors, had an impressive pelt of hair all over his body.

But Joey seemed to be natural these days. If that little triangular hint was any indication.

Tina stopped thinking about what was under Joey Pagano’s clothes. She hadn’t even sat down yet. Getting a little bit ahead of herself.

His tank wasn’t on the back of his chair, as far as she could tell. Just his coat. She wondered about that—was his pulmonary function improving so much already?

When she got to the table and said hi, he smiled and reached out as if he meant to help her with her coat, but then he dropped his hands, and she took her own coat off and hung it on the back of her chair.

She sat, and he sat. “Sorry I’m late. Did you order?”

He shook his head.

And then they just stared at each other.

~ 5 ~

Fuck, she was beautiful. Beautiful and sweet and smart. Way out of his league. Who was he kidding? He didn’t have a league. She was starting in the majors, and he was sitting in the cheap seats with a stale hot dog and a warm beer.

The jeans she wore—dark red, like blood—hugged the full length of her slender legs, into her boots, and he could see a strappy little t-shirt under the loose knitting of her black sweater. Her hair was loose, but she tucked it behind her ears, showing those pretty, perfect shells, with a single, sparkling diamond dot in each lobe.

Fuck. He couldn’t be friends with her. He was hard before they’d even ordered a fucking pizza.

Joey sat and stared at her, afraid to make any attempt to speak and end up sounding like the loser that he was.

She stared back for a second or two, then gave her head a brisk shake, like she was waking up from a nap, or hypnosis, and said, “You want me to order?”

No, he didn’t. He wanted to do things the way things were supposed to be done. He shook his head. “Got it. What d’you…like?”

“Pretty much anything. But no fruit and no eyes.”

Was she a vegetarian? He frowned and found that word. “Veggie?”

She laughed. “God, no. I meant literally eyes on the pizza. No anchovies.”

Relieved, he laughed. “M-meat…supreme?”

“Perfect. And breadsticks.” She nodded at his glass. “And whatever you’re drinking.”

He glanced down at his sweating glass. “Water.”

Tina tilted her head, and her hair on that side slipped loose from behind her ear and draped over her shoulder. A vivid image of reaching out and letting that dark satin slide over his hand assailed Joey, and he had to close his eyes for a second.

He opened them when she asked, “Are you on a diet?” She was blushing. “Sorry, that was rude. Just…you’ve lost weight, and if you’re working on it, I’m sorry I suggested pizza. I’m good with going someplace else, if that’s better. And I didn’t mean to suggest that you needed to lose weight or anything. I just noticed that you had. I mean…whatever you want.”

When she stopped talking, she clamped her mouth shut with an audible snap, and her blush had deepened. Joey didn’t exactly mind if she was feeling self-conscious, too.

“P-part of…th-th-th…” Fuck. The word ‘therapy’ never wanted to come out of his mouth. He closed his eyes and thought about what therapy meant for him. That was one of Gayle’s strategies: to find new words in the concepts behind the words that wouldn’t come.

Tina sat quietly and waited. She didn’t huff or fidget, and when he opened her eyes, her expression hadn’t changed. She seemed interested, and the blush was fading.

“Making…changes. Pizza’s okay. …Worked it out.”

Her smile was wide and sunshine-bright, rimmed with those perfect red lips. “Okay, great! Then meat supreme sounds wicked awesome.”

With a smile, he went up to the counter and placed their order. He wasn’t especially worried about placing it. He recognized the kid at the counter, and though he didn’t do the ordering often, he could get through it here with minimal fight. Santini’s was familiar to him, and that helped. The wider his comfort zone, the smoother his speech. To a point.

He ordered a medium pizza, a basket of breadsticks, and a glass of water for Tina, paid, then carried the breadsticks and her drink back to their table.

Now for the hard part.

Deciding to be proactive and get her talking right away, like at the coffee shop, Joey jumped in and asked a question. “You still…work...at the market, too?”

“Just a couple Saturdays a month, or during the holidays, when things get nuts. I stopped for a few years, but then my mom got sick, and I’ve been…I don’t know. Trying to keep people remembering her? You know how she was there. I’m not her, but I try to keep the banter going. Dad and Matt are too introverted for that.”

“…Heard about…your mom. Sorry.” He wanted to ask how Mrs. Corti was doing, but he wasn’t sure he should.

“Thanks. She’s still my mom, the same as ever, inside. She just can’t show it, except to the people who know how to see her and care to look.”

That was the moment when this dinner became a date, at least as far as Joey was concerned. Right then, feeling a pain in his chest that had nothing to do with his lungs but everything to do with the thing between them, he decided that he wanted to try. Just try. Go slowly. Not be an idiot, not drop all of his guards, but open up to the possibility that somebody could understand him, could see him, and not merely the cage he was trapped in.

He could open himself to the possibility that Tina Corti, whose doe eyes had once batted hopefully at him behind glasses and now seemed capable of seeing him clearly, might not think him less of a person because words and breath came slowly. That she might not find his struggles annoying or amusing. That she might think him worth the effort.

Their pizza came out, and a few minutes was devoted to the server dishing out slices onto their plates, refilling their water glasses, and asking if they needed anything else.

When they were alone again, Joey asked, “Tell me about her,” because he wanted to hear Tina talk about her mother.

“My mom?”

He nodded.

After a sip of her water and a bite of her slice—she’d shaken parmesan and pepper flakes over it first—she said, “I guess you heard that she had a stroke at the market. More than two years ago now. It was a hemorrhagic stroke, and—”

She stopped because he’d reached out and set his hand on hers, and now she was staring down at their hands. Joey never interrupted people when they spoke, not since the shooting. He couldn’t remember if he literally ever had, even once, in all those years. But he’d seen her starting an explanation that sounded almost boilerplate, like she’d repeated it over and over before, and it wasn’t why he’d asked.

He knew about the stroke; Mrs. Corti had dropped at the market, when it was full of customers, and it had been all over the Cove for weeks after. So he didn’t need the medical details, unless that was what Tina truly wanted to talk about.

When she looked back up at his face, her big brown eyes were even wider than usual, with surprise and curiosity. Joey girded himself for the effort to explain.

“Know…about the…stroke. Unless you… … …”—he closed his eyes and tried to find the words he wanted, and, again, she waited, with no sign of impatience—“…need to say it. …Tell me…her.”

Her eyes went even wider and seemed to glisten, almost like tears had washed in. She smiled and laid her other hand over his.

Then she told him about her mother. The woman she loved, not the stroke victim.

~oOo~

They ate about half the pizza, while Tina did most of the talking and Joey most of the listening. When she asked him questions, she tried to ask questions that could be answered without words, or those that came in series, with simple responses building up a more involved answer. That might have been her training as a therapist. It probably was. He didn’t want her to do therapy on him, but it was nice to be with somebody who understood what he needed.

His family had never gotten the hang of that, of thinking about ways to arrange their part of a conversation so that Joey could handle his part more easily. They just expected him to keep up, or they didn’t, but unless
his
answer was expressly needed, they didn’t much bother with him.

It wasn’t their fault, really. They were a big family, and he didn’t want them all sitting around focused on him all the time. Everybody had always had to fight—for second helpings at meals, for parental attention, for their voice to be heard. It was why they were all so loud and chaotic. They all just got louder and more boisterous until they had the attention they wanted. Joey had been like that, too.

In fact, he’d been good at it—eating fast, talking fast, making the most noise. He’d learned early that being the youngest of four boys meant a hard scramble against bigger, stronger opponents. They all had their roles in the family: Carlo was the brain, Luca the brawn, John the good son. As for his sisters, Carmen was the replacement mother and Rosa the baby.

That had left clown for Joey. So that was what he’d been.

Until the shooting. After that, he’d just been…nothing.

Walking to the parking lot with those melancholy thoughts vying for attention, Joey wondered if he really did want to open himself up to the dangers of trying to connect with someone. He was just getting his feet under him from the last time, and that had sent him into a years-long death spiral.

Then they got to Tina’s car, and he smiled. She drove a Mustang. Just a couple years old. Dark red. Seeing that shiny muscle car pulled his attention back to the cool chick he’d just had a nice dinner with. If it had been a date, it had been his first in years, and his first good one in longer than that. Fuck, it had been his first time eating with someone other than family in nearly that long.

She unlocked her car and opened the door. While he tried to decide how he wanted to say goodbye, Joey handed her the box of leftover pizza, and she leaned in and set it on the passenger seat.

Her ass was right there, cute and firm, but he tried not to notice it.

She stood again, and he prepared himself for the likelihood that she would just say ‘bye’ and get into her car, and that would be the end of the night. Instead, she closed the door and leaned back against it.

Tucking her hair behind her ears, she looked up at him. “Joey, can I ask you a question?”

He nodded.

“Did we just have a date?”

He wanted to ask her what she thought, if she wanted it to be a date. But he decided that he was not a kid with time to play games. He’d be thirty-six in a few weeks, and he needed to decide to have a life and live it or give up and wait to die.

Every day, he had to make that decision. Multiple times a day. Every time a workout made his chest ache, every time he looked around at the people who were stronger, heartier,
easier
than he was, every time he had to use his tank to breathe, every time he struggled to speak and saw that glaze of bored impatience come over the eyes of the person he was struggling to speak to—each time he faced any and all of that, he had to decide whether to fight or to give up. Usually, the chances were about even for which he’d choose.

Right now, he decided to fight.

“Hope so.”

Her smile seemed to brighten the dark parking lot. “Me too.” She took a step so that her body nearly touched his. “Will you…can we…will you kiss me?”

Stress and excitement were significant triggers for trouble. The same kinds of stimuli that would quicken the breath of a normal person stopped Joey’s right up. Though it would seem perfectly harmless to normal people—standing out here with Tina, considering a simple kiss—facing the idea of letting himself feel, putting those feelings in someone else’s hands, felt profoundly dangerous to him.

Already, his chest had tightened, just at the prospect of admitting that he wanted this to have been a date. At the prospect of kissing her, an iron band clamped down, and he could feel the strain coming on.

But he wanted to kiss her. Just a quick one, to give her what she wanted, what he wanted. Then he’d say goodbye and get to his Jeep, a couple cars down, where his tank was. He’d be okay.

She was still standing right in front of him, looking up with expectant shyness. In her eyes, he saw the girl she’d been when he’d been a different man. He hoped she wasn’t waiting for that guy to show up—he was long dead.

Circling her upper arms in his hands, he bent and pressed his lips to hers.

A tiny grunt escaped her as she opened her mouth, and her tongue brushed over his bottom lip. He’d meant the kiss to be quick and light; he was in the danger zone and couldn’t afford for it to be anything more—and here was the problem with going this way at all. He didn’t have the physical capacity to follow through. As soon as he got excited, he fell the fuck apart.