Her father hadn’t even managed to be in the same state for her graduation. Either of them—high school or college.
She couldn’t empathize, because she couldn’t fathom a bond so deep. But she could see his pain in the set of his shoulders and the shake and break of his voice. She stood and went to him, taking his hand in both of hers. “Oh, John. I’m so sorry.”
He laughed sadly. “It’s fucked up. He’s not dead yet. He was more his old self tonight than he’s been in a long time, but I feel…I don’t know what I feel.”
“Grief.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s it. Jesus, Katrynn. Pop’s—”
Rather than finish his thought, John dropped his head.
Perhaps it was empathy Katrynn felt after all—not for his feelings about his father, but simply for him. His pain was her pain, and she could feel it cramp her chest. She released his hand and insinuated herself between him and the bookcase. She tucked his head to her shoulder and held him. “I love you.”
His arms went around her and tightened like a vise, and they stood there for a long time. John didn’t speak, he didn’t cry, he didn’t move. He simply held her, his grip right on the edge of stealing her breath, with his face tucked against her neck, buried in her hair.
Katrynn held him just as tightly, her arms hooked around his neck and her hands laced in his hair.
She began to sing quietly, like a whisper. She hadn’t planned to do it, but standing there, bound so tightly together they might have been fused into one, she felt consumed by the need to offer him as much comfort as she possibly could. The words came up as if she’d gone looking for them: the first song they’d sung together, one they’d sung since more than once. Come in, she said, I’ll give you shelter from the storm.
He flinched in her arms, and his hold got even tighter, tight enough to make it hard to sing. He lifted his head and stared down at her, and his eyes showed something she’d never seen in them before. Sadness, she supposed. The kind that bored down deep.
“I need you.”
She smoothed her fingers over his cheek. “I’m here.”
When he kissed her, she knew at once that he needed more than that, and she elbowed away the small discomfort that had arisen with the thought that they were about to have sex in his childhood bed while most of his family—including children—were in rooms in the same house. Instead, she focused on him, giving him what he needed, helping him undress her and then himself. When he walked her back to the bed, his mouth still consuming hers, his hands clutching her body, she let him move her as he wanted.
With his arms around her waist, he laid her gently on the bed. When he moved to settle over her, however, she pushed on his shoulders, and, understanding, he lay on his back instead. She straddled him, taking hold of his cock and sliding down onto it. They both shivered at the intensity of the contact in this emotional moment.
His hands dug into her thighs, and she took hold of his forearms and pulled until he came up into a sitting position. She couldn’t think of a closer, more intimate position than this: as he wrapped his arms around her, she enclosed him in the circle of her arms and her legs so that her body was in complete contact with his, embracing him utterly, inside and out.
She kissed him, joining even their breath, and John grunted and thrust under her. Together, they picked up a slow, rocking rhythm, neither of them chasing a release. Without speaking, without directing, they both seemed to know what they needed—to be close like this for as long as they could.
Eventually, John’s body changed as his pleasure began to peak beyond the need for their quiet connection, and Katrynn responded to the new tension in his limbs, the deep heave of his breath. When she came, it rolled over her quietly but intensely, and she clenched around him, keeping herself tethered to him. Still in her own throes, she felt him swell inside her, and he groaned as if in mortal pain.
When it was over, they sat as they were, in the middle of his twin bed, holding each other. Finally, John leaned back and pushed her hair back with his hands. His eyes were wet, and her neck was, too, and she understood that he had shed tears.
“Stay with me here tonight. I need to be here. I need to be close. And I need you.”
A dozen questions and hesitations leapt to Katrynn’s mind. They were in a house full of people—somebody else’s house. The bed was too narrow for two. She didn’t even have a toothbrush with her. She had work in the morning. George and Lennie hadn’t seen her since noon.
She voiced none of them. All she had to do was look into John’s aching hazel eyes to understand that he needed this, to stay in this room, this house, with her. So she nodded, and when she did, the obvious ease her agreement had given him erased any and all hesitations she’d had.
They got up and resettled under the comforter, spooning together with their heads on the same pillow. John tucked her close, his arm secure over her waist, and linked fingers with her. Nestled together like that, they relaxed, and Katrynn felt John’s body slowly settle toward sleep.
As she sought sleep herself, she let her mind roll over the events of the night. To have a family so bonded, a history so settled—Katrynn had wanted something like it for all her life. She knew her mother had done all she could to resist her own nature and make a family for her children, and Katrynn valued her attempt, but she had fallen woefully short. Katrynn wanted for her own children a family like John had.
And they would have it. John’s family was her family now, and their children would grow up in this bond.
Her eyes popped open as a truth, a need, struck her. “John?”
“Yeah, baby?” His voice had already thickened with approaching sleep.
“I want to go off the Pill soon. I want to try for a baby as soon as we’re married.” After the words were out, Katrynn realized that no second thoughts had gotten between the idea and its utterance. She had simply chased something she wanted.
“Please?” Sleep had left his voice, and she felt him rise up on his elbow.
“I do. I’m thirty. I want kids. I want our kids to know this family.” She looked back at him. “Do you want that?”
He kissed her. “Yes. God, yes. But we haven’t figured out where to live yet.”
She took a big breath and jumped again before doubt could silence her. “I’ll move into the beach house for now. Until we outgrow it.”
“Yeah?” He smiled, the first genuine smile of the night.
“Yeah. I hate moving, but I love you.”
“I love you so fucking much.” He kissed her again. “We can start trying for a baby right away, if you want. I’m game.”
“Nope. I don’t want to be sick and bloated or whatever on my wedding day, and I want to be able to drink. So no. Condoms until then.”
He nodded in agreement and then settled back on the pillow. Katrynn did, too.
“You amaze me, Katrynn.”
She looked back at him. “Why? What’d I do?”
“You managed to make me feel hopeful again tonight. Thank you.”
Katrynn snuggled deeper into the warmth of John’s body and held his arms close to her chest.
They slept together in his childhood bed in his family home, and Katrynn felt immersed in love.
~oOo~
A couple of weeks later, as August tapered off into its last days and the exodus of summer people back to their normal lives had dwindled as well, Katrynn and Grace were alone in the shop, their shifts overlapping in the middle part of the day. Grace was unpacking a new shipment of bestselling hardbacks, and Katrynn stood behind the counter, flipping through her personal copy of The New Yorker. The issue was about two weeks old; she had a few favorite magazines, and she liked to read them, in hard copy, cover to cover in chronological order, but lately, with so much of her time devoted to work, and John, and wedding planning, and now preparing to move, her reading materials were starting to back up.
Lady Catterley jumped up onto the counter, walked onto the magazine, and promptly lay d
own. Katrynn laughed. “Cat, you are a diva, you know that?”
“A hairball diva,” Grace said as she came around the corner with an empty packing box. “I found tumbleweeds of white fur rolling around in the Reading Room last night.”
Katrynn stroked the long-haired, pure white cat and came up with a handful of silky strands. “Wow, she really is shedding. More than usual. It seems late in the season to be shedding.”
Unaffected by the talk about her, the cat cleaned an ear and then jumped down and sauntered off into the shop. Katrynn watched her go, wondering. “She seems fine otherwise, but she hasn’t been to the vet in a while. I’ll make an appointment.”
“I can take her,” Grace offered. The vet’s just down the block from my place. I can bring her home and take her in before work in the morning.”
“Yeah? That’d be great. I have an account there, so I’ll make the appointment and let them know to charge me.”
She supposed she should talk to Bev about it, too; Lady Catterley was actually her cat, since she’d inherited her with the shop. Katrynn wondered how old she was. “I’ll call Bev to let her know, too.”
Grace gave a noncommittal nod to that; she’d only met Bev a couple of times, so Katrynn didn’t think she really thought of Bev as her boss. It was sad, really, and Katrynn hoped Bev would be back someday.
New baby hormones seemed to have reset whatever had been out of whack in Bev’s head for the past year. Or maybe it was therapy, or the help Nick had hired for her, or all of it together, but Bev seemed her sunny old self again. Katrynn saw her often; she was still giving Elisa piano lessons, and she went over just to visit as often as she could. Ren, more than a month old now, was a beautiful, contented little guy, and Carina was a hilarious little hellion. Katrynn thought that Lia, a drama queen and master manipulator, had met her match in her baby sister. Or maybe she’d found a partner in crime.
And Elisa, as always, was the quiet, sweet worrywart, trying to do everything right and make sure nobody got hurt. But she’d just started kindergarten, so she was off on her own for the first time. Katrynn had gone over after Bev had dropped Elisa off for her first day at Christ the King School. There had been tears, but not the scary kind that came with head-banging and concussions.
Katrynn coveted Bev and Nick’s family. Now, with her own marriage and family-building just on the horizon, her body ached with the want of it.
Alone again at the front desk, the shop deserted of customers, Katrynn let her mind wander over the terrain of her future while she flipped through The New Yorker, skimming desultorily over the headlines and bylines, reading the cartoons.
She flipped a page with the header “Fiction” and sharpened her focus. She hadn’t scanned the contents of this issue, so didn’t know what fiction piece was printed, but it was usually her favorite part of an issue.
When she read the title, her interest honed to a point. When she read the byline, her head emptied of anything but the pages before her: ‘The King of Rhode Island.’ By Atticus Calhoun.
A typical New Yorker illustration accompanied the story: a striking, dark-haired man in a pinstriped suit, with a chiseled chin, a Roman nose and intense green eyes. He wore an elaborate golden crown, and in one hand he held a scepter with a green, white, and red orb at the top. In his other hand, he clutched three men: a uniformed police chief; a suited, bloated man with a flag lapel pin—a politician, then; and a Catholic cardinal or bishop, or whoever would wear a red miter and cape. The men all looked terrified, and as if they were being squeezed to death.
No. There was no way Atticus would be stupid enough to write a story about Nick.
She read the story, her heart thumping more loudly in her head with each word.
Yes, Atticus was exactly that stupid. Not only was it a story about Nick, one that she thought would be recognizable to almost anyone in New England, but it was not a flattering characterization. The King of Rhode Island, named Guido, was a vicious, uncouth bully of a man who had the fear but not the respect of his ‘subjects.’ His death at the end was gory and ignominious.
“Jesus,” she muttered. The story could even be taken as a threat.
“You say something?” Grace asked.
Katrynn slammed the magazine closed. “No, no. Just talking to myself.”
Grace gave her a teasing smirk. “Well I won’t worry until you start having both sides of the conversation out loud.”
Manufacturing the appropriate laugh for that comment, Katrynn picked up the magazine and headed to the door to the staff suite. “I’m going to go back and work on the online orders.”
“I think I can hold back the crowd out here on my own.” Grace swept a hand over the vista of the empty shop.
With another canned laugh, Katrynn went to the back, pressing The New Yorker to her chest as if she could keep the danger inside it from escaping.
In her office, she set it on her desk and stared at the cover. She picked her phone up, meaning to call John, then set it down on the magazine. No. There was enough going on in the Pagano family right now, with their father’s health, and Rosa’s pregnancy, and her and John’s wedding, and Bev and Nick’s new baby, and Elisa starting kindergarten, and Trey starting high school. Everybody was already doubly intense, and none of them baselined at mellow to begin with. John was, by far, the calmest member of his family, and when he blew a fuse, he really blew. He was not reasonable about Atticus. Long months since they’d been in the same room, John’s fists still clenched when his name came up—which was, thankfully, rare.
This issue of The New Yorker was two weeks old and hadn’t made a ripple among the Paganos, as far as Katrynn knew. Of all of them, she thought that only Theo, and thus possibly also Carmen, would encounter it. If they had, she didn’t think they’d said anything.
Maybe it would just go away. If she brought it up, though, she knew John would tell someone. He was not good at keeping things from his family; he rarely even tried. He believed that the things you most wanted kept secret were usually the things that most needed to be said. But if this got to Nick…
Well, she couldn’t play a part in what he might do. Simple as that. So she tucked the offending issue into her bag and hoped that nobody who mattered would know what Atticus had done.
~oOo~
Not much more than an hour later, Katrynn stopped fretting about Atticus Calhoun.
John called and asked her to come home—to her apartment—right away. When he told her why, she dropped everything and did, leaving Grace on her own for an extra two hours.
She pulled into the parking lot and saw John sitting on the flimsy, uncomfortable little bench that her landlord had placed in the middle of what had, in the spring when the project had been undertaken and quickly forgotten, apparently been intended to be a garden.
Next to him sat a tall, scrawny, dirty man, with disheveled, greying blond hair and a ratty beard. For all the world, he looked like someone who’d been homeless for years.
As she got out of her car, he stood and grinned at her.
“Hi, Daddy.”
“Look how beautiful you are.” He spread his arms wide, and she went to him and let him hug her. He stank—like exhaust fumes and road dust, like human sweat and filth.
This was her father. A man who had a home, and a family, who had people who loved him and wanted him, and who preferred to live a life that left him in this condition. Whose own children had never mattered to him as much as his so-called ‘freedom.’
Katrynn’s mother saw it differently, believed that he had no choice but to wander, that it wasn’t about who or what mattered. Katrynn had once thought she had seen her mother’s view. But not anymore. Now she knew what a family could be, what it should be. And she had discovered a family that fit her better than her own, that gave her what she needed.
John’s father was his family’s mortar. Facing the imminent loss of him had them all shaken to their foundations. But as much as they hurt, as worried and afraid as they were,
they had the strength of their deep love for each other.
Katrynn had lived her whole life in the loss of her father. She was shaken more by his sporadic presence than by his absence. Though, yes, she loved him, she didn’t think his death would change much about her life. She wondered how much she’d really mourn.
She stepped back, pushing herself free of his fetid embrace, and found John’s eyes on her. He was worried, and, she thought, angry at her father, and she loved him extra hard in that moment. There stood a man who would always be there for her. Any Pagano man was more reliable for her than her father.
“You need a shower, Daddy.” She cast her eyes around the bench he and John had been sitting on. “Where’s your pack?”
He laughed. “Yeah, the past month or so’s been rough. I got rolled train hopping in Georgia. Lost just about everything.”
Prayer (The Pagano Family Book 5) Page 29