Prayer (The Pagano Family Book 5)

by Susan Fanetti

  She cracked open an eye and saw him scratching George’s ear. Lennie sat back a few feet off, surveying the scene with trepidation.

  “We’re okay, right?” John asked, and she knew he was talking to her now.

  “Yeah, we are.”

  More than anything in the world, she wanted that to be true.

  ~oOo~

  “UDDOS! UDDOS! UDDOS!” Carina grabbed Cuddles’ ear and used it to pulled herself to her feet. The dog, who was sitting at Katrynn’s side and had been enjoying a thorough head-scratch, leaned into the baby’s pull and let her use him. His eyes slid to Katrynn’s as if to say, Kids, amirite?

  Once she was on her feet, Carina gave the dog a hug and then lifted his lip and stuck her fingers in his mouth. “UDDOS!” The dog licked her face until she giggled and fell on her diapered bottom.

  Then the circuit started again.

  “Cuddles, buddy, you are a saint,” Bev said, patting his head as she set a plate of cinnamon crumb muffins on the table and then made her ungainly way to the seat of a chair.

  “I can’t believe how fast she’s changing,” Katrynn said and took a sip of her coffee. “Is ten months early to be walking and talking?”

  “A little, but not prodigy early. And she’s not walking yet. Close, though. She can stand on her own, and she’ll take a step, but she hasn’t figured out how to take the second one.” Bev smiled at her little girl. “She just stands there, spread eagle, and wiggles her butt, then falls down and starts over. She’s cruising like crazy, and she gets really mad when she can’t get from one place to another by holding on, because she refuses to crawl anymore. But Cuddles follows her around all day, like her own personal bodyguard, so she’s figured out that if she holds onto him, he’ll walk her around.”

  As if to illustrate Bev’s point, Cuddles stood up now and turned from the table. Carina, holding that ear in both hands, went along, shouting the dog’s name all the way.

  “Cuddles is the best dog in the whole world.”

  “He really is.” Bev sat back and rubbed her hands over her big belly. She squirmed uncomfortably and then relaxed. “How’s the shop? Grace has to be working out better than what’s-his-name? Shaun, right?”

  Katrynn picked up a muffin and tore a piece off. Before she popped it in her mouth, she said, “Yeah. Shaun. I’m so sorry about that.”

  “Don’t be silly. Hiring is hard. Remember Jessa? She’d’ve robbed us blind, except that you saw what she was doing. I’m the one who hired her, thinking she was ‘peppy.’”

  Katrynn remembered Jessa vividly. She’d stolen about five grand worth of stock in her three months in their employ. Katrynn had had to figure out how to deal with that without telling Nick that they had a thief on their hands, and without Bev finding out that Nick was involved in their bookkeeping. The stress of those few weeks had nearly crushed her. But she’d managed it.

  Shaun, the first assistant manager that Katrynn had hired, had lasted about two weeks. He wasn’t a thief, but he was an asshole. She had been impressed with his experience, which included eight years in retail management, and she had bought his explanation that he was interested in a lowly assistant manager position because he’d just moved to the coast to reduce the stress in his life. His references had been good—a little generic, maybe, but free of red flags.

  Then he’d started hounding Jamie. After only a week, the young clerk had come to Katrynn and asked not to be scheduled with him. She’d only say that he made her ‘uncomfortable’ and wouldn’t elaborate, which was, frankly, unlike her. Katrynn had gone to Shaun, who’d said there’d been a ‘misunderstanding,’ and he was sorry for it.

  By the end of the next week, Katrynn had fired him. His ‘apology’ to Jamie had been more over the line than the ‘misunderstanding.’

  He’d been gone about five days when she got an email from a female employee at his most recent job—one from which he’d gotten a good but generic reference. Apparently, ‘misunderstandings’ were a recurring problem for Shaun.

  She still wondered if she should have done more about him. But he wouldn’t be getting a generically decent reference from her. She could still, at least, do that.

  “Grace is doing great,” Katrynn answered Bev. “She picked up on our process really fast, and she thinks like we do. I really like her, and so do Jamie and Greg. Oh—I’d like to hire one or two more part-timers for the summer. Maybe a couple of Cove kids, just to cover the weekends?”

  A flash of something warped Bev’s expression for a moment, but then she put a smile back on and waved her hand dismissively. “You’re in charge, Katrynn. If you need more staff, then you’d know better than me anymore.”

  “Hey. It’s your shop. You’re in charge. I’ll bring the applications over, and we’ll go through them together. Or—could you stop by the shop, and we can sit in the back and do it like we usually do?”

  Cuddles and Carina had meandered their way around the kitchen—which was closed in at every entrance with baby gates—and now Carina wanted up. Katrynn knew this because she stood at Bev’s side with her arms over her head and shouted “UP-UH! UP-UH! UP-UH!”

  Bev picked her up and set her on what remained of her lap, and Carina grabbed Bev’s muffin and began to destroy it, gleefully mashing it on the table.

  Over that din, Bev said, “Nick is not reasonable on the matter of the shop. He doesn’t want me there at all. It’s okay. I get what he’s trying to do, and I’m doing okay, I think. Better, anyway. He’s been right about most of it. I just miss the shop. I miss you.”

  They saw each other a few times a week, but Katrynn understood. It was different when they were at the shop. The shop was their thing. “We miss you right back. It wasn’t the shop that was stressing you out so much, though, was it?”

  “No. But that was where I had my little nervous breakdown, so I guess Nick can’t get around that. Or maybe he just wants it to be the shop, rather than our home, that I couldn’t handle. I understand that.” She sighed. “Anyway, it would be a fight, and I don’t want the stress of a fight with him. I do feel better. Having the help I couldn’t stand to admit I needed has helped. And I’m being a better mom because my head isn’t so full of all the things I have to do and all the ways I don’t think I can manage doing it.”

  She contemplated her belly as she rubbed her hands over the swell. Bev had always gotten quite big at the end of her pregnancies, but this time, she hadn’t seemed to have gained as much weight. Her belly was still huge, but the rest of her wasn’t as swollen as she’d gotten with the girls. “He’s found a therapist he wants me to see.”

  “Is that good?” Katrynn thought it was good—Bev had been diagnosed with postpartum depression but wasn’t on any meds because she was nursing and pregnant, and she hadn’t started any kind of talk therapy, either. Her only treatment thus far was rest and stress-reduction.

  “Yeah, I think so. It’s weird not to have any input in who I see, but Nick…well, you know. He has to be able to trust anybody I might confide in. He’s found somebody. If I don’t like her, he’ll keep looking, but still—I hope I like her. I’m feeling better, but I’m so scared that I won’t feel right when Ren gets here. I just want to love my kids and be the mom they need and be happy again in this life I have that’s so perfect.”

  It wasn’t a perfect life. Sitting here in this vast, beautiful kitchen, the morning sun surrounding them, overlooking a beautiful yard awash in late-spring freshness, where a handsome, young, bare-chested man worked opening the pool for the season, while they ate delicious muffins and drank rich, aromatic coffee and tea, and a china-doll-lovely little girl in pink flowered leggings and a yellow t-shirt squirmed down from her mother’s lap to play with a golden retriever, Katrynn saw the perfection. It was everywhere.

  But it wasn’t a perfect life. Bev herself was proof of that. She was proof of it, but she was blind to it, and Katrynn thought that that disconnect might be what she’d fallen into.

  “How are things with
John?”

  Katrynn’s mind had just turned toward John, had just begun to pick up its fretful refrain about the problems she couldn’t see around his perfection, and she felt herself physically flinch when Bev asked a question plucked straight from her own thoughts.

  “They’re good. Too good, maybe.”

  In the few days since that horrible scene with her mom, and that intense encounter in her apartment the same afternoon, she and John had been solid. They hadn’t talked yet in any depth about her mom, but they were good, back where they’d been. He’d wanted to talk about what had happened, but she still didn’t know how, so he’d let it drop.

  He was so patient with her. Too patient. She’d been relieved when he’d charged into her apartment and shoved her to the wall, when he’d been so angry and demanding. It had been what she’d needed then—to be forced out from behind the shield she’d been building.

  Bev laughed. “How can they be too good?”

  “I don’t know…it feels like a fantasy. He always says the right thing, he’s always exactly what I need, he always just seems to know. That can’t be right. I’m not seeing him realistically. I’m afraid it’s all going to blow up when the fantasy fades.”

  “This is the guy who bailed on you and then left the country, then started a fight with your date in the middle of your work, right?”

  Katrynn laughed. “Yes. But since we’ve been together, he’s been perfect. And you’re making my point—none of that first stuff matters anymore, and it probably should.”

  “But you haven’t forgotten it, have you?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Are you maybe still holding it against him?”

  “What? No!”

  Bev picked up a fresh muffing and took a bite. She chewed thoughtfully and swallowed before she said, “You say it probably should matter. Why?”

  “Because he did those things, and they hurt me.”

  “But he regrets them, and he’s been ‘perfect’ since. Is that what you expect? That he stays perfect? Are you saying you won’t try to work it out if he makes another mistake?”

  Defensiveness overtook Katrynn, charging through her body and straight out of her mouth. “Why are you psychoanalyzing me? I’m not the one who—” She stopped, realizing just in the nick of time that the rest of the sentence would have been ‘had a nervous breakdown in the bathroom.’

  But Bev must have finished the sentence herself, because hurt and anger crossed her face. God. Out of nowhere, lately, Katrynn was spewing venom at the people who loved her best. What the hell was wrong with her?

  “I’m sorry,” Bev said, not sounding particularly remorseful. “But I’m not shutting up about it. We’ve been friends for years. I’ve seen you in relationships. Usually, you change yourself to suit the guy—you shut up and you deal. You try to invent the fantasy, and that never works out. I understand—I lived that for a long time, too. I’m not saying I have life figured out, but I do recognize that pattern. With John, you’re not doing that. Instead, it seems like you’re doing the opposite. You’re not trying to polish up a turd. You’re trying to find the flaw in the diamond. I know you both well, and I love you both. You’re good people. I see you two together, and I am telling you that I see a diamond. The flaws are there in both of you, but the flaws make it real.”

  A loud, metallic clatter broke into the moment before Katrynn could process Bev’s speech or her feelings about it. As they both looked toward the sound, Carina squealed and began slamming onto the floor one of the cake tins she’d just pulled out of a cupboard.

  “Oh, goody,” Bev lamented dryly over the din. “She’s figured out the cupboard locks. Yay.” She levered herself out of her chair. “Come on, pixie. It’s naptime.” To Katrynn she said, “We finished Ren’s nursery over the weekend. You want to come up and see?”

  Just like that, Katrynn and Bev were back on solid ground. Beverly Pagano did not hold grudges, not even for a moment.

  As Katrynn followed mother and child and dog up to the second floor of this perfect house, she wondered whether her friend was right about what she saw in her and John.

  And if Bev was right, how Katrynn could see it, too. How she could believe it.

  Maybe she just had to leap again—and this time truly let go.

  ~ 15 ~

  John leaned back and called out his office door. “Joey! What’s up with the Lexford job?”

  His brother came to the open door. “Nothing. W-why?”

  “In my book I’ve got it finishing this Friday, but everything here”—he waved at his laptop—“has it going through next week. Something happen?”

  Joey paled and looked like he was sure he’d screwed something up, until Luca called, “That was me!”

  This was how they handled everything when they were all in the office—shouting at each other through open doors.

  Then Luca was at his door, too, and both brothers just came in and dropped into the two yellow vinyl chairs against his paneled wall. The main office of Pagano & Sons could have really used an update, it was like some kind of time capsule from the Seventies, but they were always too busy to see to their own house.

  “What happened?”

  “Tile shipment was damaged. Like somebody dropped the pallet off a fucking building. I called it in last night, but the new ship won’t be here until Friday. Maybe Monday.”

  “Fuck.” John sighed and erased the rest of the week’s plan from his book so he could start over. He had all the digital toys, too, but he liked the feel of a carpenter’s pencil in his hand, and he liked the sense of accomplishment he felt when he looked at the page at the end of the day and saw that everything was scratched out. He also liked the heft of the fat book, the pages of past days crinkled and smudged with graphite, and the coming pages still white and smooth.

  “You should’ve told me,” Joey said. “S-s-s… …scheduling is my thing. Not just a f-fuckin’…secretary.”

  They’d had a secretary, who had worked for their dad for a million years and whom they’d all respectfully called Mrs. Ponti until they day she’d retired last year. Luca and John had decided not to fill her position. They’d lost out on two major bids to big-muscle national construction companies, and they’d had a tight year. Since so much of their administrative work was digital now, and since Joey was in the office all day, every day, anyway, they’d figured they could go without a secretary. Joe’s aphasia made him not great on the phone, but Luca had the office calls routed to his cell and handled that himself.

  This year, too, was shaping up to be pretty snug, profit-wise. They were busy enough, so far, but they were getting mostly small and medium jobs. A lot of residential work, like the Lexford job, which was a simple remodel. It was a high-end job, with a solid margin, but that didn’t mean it employed many workers. Their commercial division had been the company’s lifeblood, but that work was drying up.

  Pagano & Sons had built some impressive buildings all through Rhode Island, but not for the past few years. The big corporate players, who could shift money around and underbid the fuck out of the locals, had been cutting in hard on the major projects.

  Sitting at Quinn’s one night after work last fall, at the end of a peak work season that had never really peaked, John and Luca had gotten drunk and maudlin together, wondering if the business that their father had built from nothing and handed over to them would outlive the man who’d built it. Pop was getting old, and his health wasn’t great. If the business folded under Luca and John’s stewardship, they might as well just put their hands around his neck and squeeze.

  It was still early in this new season, not quite mid-May. But truly, it was later than it seemed. They should have had their whole season booked, and they had a terrifying hole at the end of September. Two weeks with no jobs lined up. Zero jobs.

  And now there was a hole in this week. “What are we gonna do with that crew? The whole job stalls until that tile gets here.”

  Luca leaned forward and
leaned his elbows on his knees. “I told ‘em not to come in.”

  “W-we payin’ ‘em?”

  John and Luca both nodded. They didn’t use day labor. Their guys were full-time employees, every one of them. It wasn’t their fault the job was fucked, and they had kids to feed and mortgages to pay.

  “Guys, we…we can’t…afford…”

  John shook his head. “It doesn’t matter, Joe. You know that.”

  Luca punched his own thigh. “We need that damn Tyler-Orvo job. If we get that, it’ll make next year, and we can scrape by until then. Hell, it’ll make the next three years.”

  There was a small voice in John’s head that piped up at times like this and wondered if it would really be so terrible if the company went under. He hated that voice. Pagano & Sons was important to the family and meant everything to their father. Carlo Sr. had made it almost literally with his bare hands, and he’d named it Pagano & Sons before he’d had any idea that his sons would work there with him—before he even knew that there would be sons, in the plural, to work there with him. Now he was retired, unhappily so, and Luca and John and Joey were the Sons. Pop fed off of news about the business like it was his oxygen.