Miracle (The Pagano Family Book 6) (7 page)

He needed to stop and get to his Jeep. But he didn’t want to stop. She’d gathered handfuls of his coat in her hands and was pulling, keeping their bodies together, and his own hands drew her close as well. He opened his mouth and found her tongue with his own.

Then they were kissing wildly. Fuck, it had been so long. So very long since something like this had happened, and even longer since it had been good. Tina felt like, tasted like, hope, and he couldn’t get enough.

With one step backward, she drew him forward, so that she was leaning on her car again and he was leaning on her. He knew she could feel his erection. She rocked her hips, pressing her body tightly to that ridge in his jeans…

…and he fell apart. Suddenly—no, not suddenly, it had been coming on for a while and he’d damn well known it—he could barely breathe at all. He tore his mouth from hers and turned, dropping his hands to his knees. He had to calm down. Fumbling in his coat pocket, he snagged his inhaler and sucked on it as much as his rigid lungs would allow. Nothing happened. He was pretty sure the damn inhaler had been prescribed like a security blanket and actually had no medicinal purpose.

“Do you have your tank?” Tina asked, her hand on his back. Her voice was calm.

“My…car,” he gasped, nodding.

She held out her hand. “Keys.”

He wanted to tell her no, tell her to go away, but this was a bad one, and he didn’t have the air for even one more syllable. He pawed at his pocket, and then she took over and dug into his jeans for his keys. As she turned toward his Jeep, Joey stumbled the few steps to the low brick wall around the parking lot and sat down.

She was gone and back in seconds that felt like hours, and she held out the mask to him—she’d known to switch out the cannula for the mask. He shoved it over his mouth and nose and gasped until he could take real breaths. Panic subsided as air began to circulate through his body again.

Tina sat at his side, quietly watching.

God, he was fucking mortified. He was pathetic. Why had he thought he could have anything good?

When he could, he said, “Go. M’all set.”

She didn’t go. She didn’t argue. She slid her hand under his, weaving their fingers together. Then she sat where she was, at his side, quietly.

When there was any chance at all that he could speak more than a word or two again, he lined up some words in his mind and hoped they’d come. “This…what it’s like…for me. …Tonight…shouldn’t be…a date.”

“Are you saying that because you’re not into me, or because you think I wouldn’t be into you after what just happened?”

He couldn’t answer that question, even though the answer was simple and stark. She’d asked it in a way that would require too many words for a response. When he only stared at the concrete between his feet and said nothing, she seemed to understand.

“Joey, I’m interested. I know about aphasia, and I know about restrictive lung disease. I understand what that means, and I know they don’t have anything to do with who you are. As for kissing or anything else, I know that your lungs can get better, and it seems like you’re trying to make them better. So I’m good with taking things slow, and I’m good with having to stop whatever we’re doing so you can take care of yourself. So, if you don’t want to see each other, I need a better reason than your oxygen tank. If you don’t want me, that’s one thing, but please don’t make decisions about what
I
want or need.”

“Can’t take…being a… …” He didn’t know if his mouth would have made the word ‘burden,’ because his brain wouldn’t let him try. And he wasn’t sure it was the word that really belonged at the end of that sentence, anyway. Maybe ‘joke’ was the word he really couldn’t say.

Tina put her hand on his cheek and turned his head so that they were eye to eye. “Then I guess you have to make a decision about whether you can trust me when I say that I’m not bothered about the way you speak or breathe.”

Fight or surrender. Every day, all day, he faced that choice. This time, though, fighting felt a little bit like surrender. Not giving up, but giving in.

Their fingers were still linked. He squeezed his hand around hers. “I…trust you.”

~oOo~

So what’s the homily today?

Don’t know yet. Only at the 2
nd
reading.

Well, let’s guess. Ash Wed is this week.

Joey chuckled to himself as he typed
SIN SIN SIN WE ARE ALL SINNERS KNOW SHAME AND REPENT
and hit send. It had taken him a few seconds to find the word ‘repent’ in his brain, but otherwise, words were flowing well. They always moved better when he was writing, and typing was even better than handwriting.

LMAO
, Tina replied.
Yep. Bet that pizza’s sitting hard right now.

Hah. Nope. That was good. No shame there. At all.
He wondered if she’d understand all he meant by that.

Her reply suggested that she had:
I’m calling it. If he mentions 1 Cor 15, I want another pizza. And another kiss.

Before he could send a text back, Luca punched his right arm. “You’re getting Pop worked up, shithead. Put your phone away,” his brother grumbled.

Joey looked down the pew and got trapped in his father’s disappointed eyes. He mouthed
Sorry
. Before he put his phone away, he quickly tapped out a message to Tina, who stayed home with her mother while her father and brothers came to Mass. He didn’t want to leave her last text unanswered, and that was more important than anything else.

Even if it’s not COR, you can have both. Gotta go. Got caught.
He hated emojis, but she seemed to love them, all of her texts had at least two, so he added a grinning face.

“Joe!” Luca barked under his breath. Joey put his phone in his suit coat pocket. He glanced up and down the pew and saw that all of his brothers, his father, and Carmen, and even her daughter, Teresa, were staring at him like he deserved a time-out.

His mood was too good to care. So he turned his attention to the Mass.

Joey decided he’d give up self-loathing for Lent.

~oOo~

It was 1 COR 15, btw.

KNEW IT. When can I collect my pizza and my kiss. Tonight?

Joey smiled, and a rush of heat warmed his cheeks. She really didn’t seem to care that he’d ruined their kiss. Maybe he hadn’t.
I can’t do pizza 2 days in a row. Something else?

Can you do kisses 2 days in a row?

Joey was typing
We’ll have to see
when John snatched his phone from his hand. “What is
with
you today? You’ve been staring at this thing and laughing all day. And I swear you’re fucking blushing right now.”

They were back home, and the women were putting together Sunday brunch. Joey had tucked himself into the nook next to the staircase, trying to find privacy without being absent from the family doings. He hadn’t noticed his brother coming up on him.

Joey grabbed for his phone, but John yanked and turned, and they might as well have been twenty—no, thirty—years younger, playing one of their ‘games’ of keep-away.

“John…don’t.”

But John, his forty-year-old brother, was evading his attempts to get his phone back and was reading the texts on the screen. As Joey’s chest tightened, he gave up the fight and focused on keeping his breath. Better to let his brother read the texts than to need his tank.

John turned back around. “This is a woman.”

Joey stared and held out his hand.

A shit-eating grin took over his brother’s entire smug face, and he handed Joey back his phone. “Tina who?”

“F-fuck you. Go to…hell.”

John rearranged his face into something less obnoxious. “No, Joe. I’m sorry. This is good. It’s good. You’ve been…you’re turning shit around, and that’s good.”

“Glad to have…your… … …approval.” He didn’t know why he bothered to try for sarcasm. The bite was gone by the time the words were out. No pacing, no tone.

But John got it. “Don’t be like that. I’m happy for you. Who is she?”

Joey shook his head. “Mine for now. P-please…don’t…”

“I won’t say anything.”

Joey didn’t believe that for a minute. Secrets were hard to come by in their family. But he had to try. Especially when whatever was happening was so new.

“Let me…have this…just for me. For now. …Please.”

“Okay, Joe. Okay. I promise.”

~ 6 ~

The room that had once been Tina’s father’s study had made a pretty nice, roomy bedroom for her mother. Three big windows and a door leading to a small porch looked out onto the back yard, which, though its flower beds had faltered in the years since her mother could tend them, was still a lovely thing, full of trees and, in the warm seasons, lush lawn. In the day, when the drapes over those windows were opened, lots of good light filled the space—not overwhelming or hot, just cheerful.

They’d arranged a chair near one of the windows, a special one that allowed Genie to sit and see the yard, and they’d posted several bird baths and feeders within her view. She spent many sunny days there. On days like this, when spring hadn’t flowered yet but winter was losing steam, the sun felt even more luxurious. Like a gift.

Inside, there was plenty of room for all her machines and special equipment. Matt and their father had converted the space so that all that equipment didn’t dominate what people saw, and Matt had built a pretty cabinet with louvered doors to hold the tubes and syringes, adult diapers, mess pads, cans of liquid food, powders, creams, and everything else their mother required to get through each day.

The nearby half bath had been converted to serve her needs as well, so that preparing her food and washing the equipment to feed her could be done there, and so that her own hygiene needs could be addressed. She couldn’t use the toilet or take a bath or shower, but those who tended her could do their work conveniently.

It was a big house, with six bedrooms and three bathrooms in addition to that half bath, so there had been plenty of room to make Tina’s mother as comfortable as she could be in the life she had left. But it wasn’t much of a life.

On Sundays, when they had no nursing service scheduled and the market was closed, their father went to Mass at Christ the King, just as the family always had. Matt and Angie went, too, but they came from their own homes and met up at the church—and Angie usually sat just behind Nick Pagano rather than with his family.

Tina stayed home with their mother and watched a Mass on television, broadcast from a church in New York. Father Mike came from Christ the King once a week to sit with their mother and pray.

She couldn’t receive communion because she couldn’t swallow and took all her nourishment through a gastrostomy tube or an IV. The host couldn’t be converted for her tube. Though she’d never been able to describe her feelings about this, Tina’s mother was devout, and Tina knew that it caused her pain.

For her own part, Tina was Catholic the way she was Italian. She didn’t think it was possible not to be. She didn’t know if it was the same way with other religions, but the Protestants she knew—those few who expressed any religious leaning—seemed to think of religion as a thing they
did
. Catholic was a thing Tina
was
, and every Catholic she knew felt the same. It was a culture. It was nearly an ethnicity. It was where you came from and, whether you were devout or lapsed, whether you embraced it or rejected it, it shaped you. You couldn’t avoid it. You could stop practicing Catholicism, but you could never stop being Catholic.

Tina wasn’t devout. She spent too much time mad at God to be devout. She believed, but her faith was perhaps a bit shaky. She’d lost the faith in God’s ‘mysterious ways,’ that ‘everything happened for a reason,’ when her mother collapsed in the market and had been left with this faint impression of a life. What reason could there possibly be, what good thing could possibly come, from torturing a good, warm, loving,
devout
woman this way?

It didn’t seem like God was paying much attention, frankly. Best case. Worst case was that He was a cruel jerk, a kid pulling wings from flies. The story of Job seemed to offer evidence for the worst case. That thought made Tina feel sad and lost, so she didn’t think it much. She simply let herself be Catholic because she didn’t know how else to be.

She sat with her mother every Sunday and watched Mass, and every day, she read to her the day’s passage from her Catholic devotional.

On this day, she’d done the same, but with the delightful bonus of texting with Joey while he was at Mass, which happened at the same time at Christ the King and on television. Her mother noticed that her attention was more on her phone than on the TV, but she didn’t seem to mind. Maybe it was Tina’s smile that made it okay.

Because Tina was certainly smiling. If her tea with Joey had been a great date, their pizza had been her best date. And then he’d texted her to make sure she’d gotten home okay, and when she’d texted him that morning, he’d sent one right back to her. No stupid games, no ‘should I or shouldn’t I,’ no trying to act like it meant less than it did.

They’d had playful banter going about the Mass; then she’d taken a big risk, saying she wanted another pizza and another kiss, and she felt a little ill waiting for him to reply. It had taken him longer to come back than it had before, and she’d felt a little more sick.

Then he’d texted
Even if it’s not COR, you can have both. Gotta go. Got caught.
And everything was okay.

After the Mass broadcast was over, Tina prepared her mother’s second meal of the day and flushed her G-tube. She hooked the bag of Ensure on the IV stand and connected it to her tube, and she sat cross-legged on the floor and read
Lucky
, by Jackie Collins, aloud while the nourishment dripped into her mother’s belly.

Her mother was devout, but she liked her smutty stories, too.

It was less than an hour before Joey texted again. And a few minutes later, they’d planned to see each other again that very night.

If dating had always been this easy and great, Tina might have done a lot more of it.

~oOo~

For this date—a movie and sushi—Joey meant to pick her up at her house, so Tina had to tell her father what was going on.

She was twenty-eight, and Joey was thirty-five. It shouldn’t matter what her father thought.

But it really did, and not simply because she still lived at home. She was the only girl, and the youngest, and she still lived at home and helped him take care of her mother. He was her daddy. And she was his little girl. He was proud of her and worried for her, and she was devoted to him.

So it mattered.

They’d spent the afternoon doing their own things—he spent the time watching movies with his wife, and Tina spent it working on her dissertation, writing what she hoped was the last chapter before the conclusion. Around six o’clock, just as she was starting to think about getting in the shower and mentally combing through her closet for a good outfit—a real date outfit!—her father knocked on her door.

“Come in, Daddy.”

He opened the door just enough to poke his head in. Since a traumatically embarrassing episode when Tina was fourteen, when he’d knocked and then stepped in without waiting and found her stark naked, he was shy about coming into her room at all, and that was fine with her.

“You busy,
tesorina
? I was thinking about making a ziti and tossing a salad. You want to come help? We can try that Sangiovese the new guy brought in. But if you’re writing, I can just make some sandwiches and bring you up your dinner.”

The market often had sellers of various kinds of specialty foods, or wines and other libations, coming in and offering samples, and their father always brought it home and did something with it. He never stocked a special item unless someone he knew and trusted liked it.

Tina closed her laptop and swiveled her desk chair around. She waved at her bed—made, as always; no breakfast until beds were made had been a rule all her life, and though it didn’t apply now, she’d never broken the habit—and her father came in and sat down on her pink patchwork quilt.

Little had changed in her room since she’d redone it when she was fourteen. A few details here and there, as things broke or became obsolete, but otherwise, the room was as it had been for half her life: crème on crème striped wallpaper, white wrought-iron bed mounded with pink linens and pillows, a vintage mahogany vanity and matching seat that she’d picked out from an antique shop in town, a white chest of drawers and nightstand she’d had since she was a baby, white lace curtains, a greyish green area rug with big pink roses on the wood floor. Her desk and chair were IKEA and didn’t really suit, but she’d needed more space and storage than the little desk with the hutch bookcase she’d had as a kid could handle. The IKEA bookcases fit in a bit better.

It was funny; her personal style tended to be dark and stark, but she liked light, pretty, girlie things around her.

Her big, hairy father looked out of place surrounded by all that pink.

“You need to talk to your old papa, honey?”

“I do. I can’t have dinner with you tonight. I’m going on a date. He’s going to be here at seven-thirty.”

Her father’s expressive eyebrows went way up. “Yeah? And he’s coming here? Not the first time, then.” He knew that she made a practice of ‘trying out’ men in safe spaces first.

“This will be number…three.” She didn’t know how Joey felt about their talk over tea, but she was going to call it their first date forever. Even if they didn’t have a number four.

“Really. This boy local?”

She smiled at his choice of the word ‘boy.’ “Yeah. It’s…it’s Joey Pagano.”

The smile that had accompanied those elevated eyebrows disappeared, and he frowned, dropping the eyebrows, too. “Please?”

Her father didn’t like Joey much. He thought Joey was responsible for Angie joining up with the Pagano Brothers. Tina, who’d been paying close attention to Joey, and thus to Angie, back in those days, thought it was the other way around. Angie had always wanted to be a gangster, even when he was a little kid. When he and Joey started hanging out, it seemed, to her youthful perception, that Joey hadn’t been all that interested. Not uninterested, but not nearly as enthusiastic as Angie.

But she’d been young, and inclined to think the best of Joey and the worst of her oldest brother, who had a tendency to be a bully and then be super sweet to make up for it. So she might have been wrong.

At any rate, Angelo Sr. blamed Joey for Angelo Jr.’s career choice. He’d tempered his feelings after Joey got hurt, but not much.

“Don’t be mad, Daddy. I really like him. And you know he’s not the same as he was when he hung out with Angie.”

“He’s a lot older than you.” This was good. He wasn’t engaging the topic of her brother.

“Not that much. Seven and a half years.” Less than that, in some ways. In a few ways, she felt more experienced than he was, as if he’d spent the past ten years in cryogenic stasis. “He’s going to come in and say hi tonight. Will you be nice, please?”

“When am I not nice?”

“Daddy.” She could count off several instances in which her dates had walked back out the front door looking like they’d just seen the end of their life. It hadn’t happened in a long time, because she hadn’t dated anyone she’d wanted to bring home in a long time.

That earned a knowing grin and a wry tilt of his head.

He grew serious again. “You like him? You think he’s good? His problems aren’t a problem for you?”

“Yes, yes, and please, Daddy, of course not. Should they be?”

“You know I love your mamma with my whole heart. But you know our days are hard, now, too.”

“Joey’s not like Mamma, and you know it. He just has to do some things differently. You know I understand. My life is devoted to understanding and helping.”

He smiled warmly and nodded. “You are my good baby girl. You’re gonna make a difference in the world, make it better. I just don’t want you to lose that. I don’t want you dragged into any Pagano messes. Joey got the way he is in a Pagano mess.”

Tina got up from her chair and went to sit at her father’s side. She picked up one of his beefy hands. “I know all that, and I’m still happy about this. So will you be nice to him?”