Simple Faith (The Pagano Brothers Book 1)

by Susan Fanetti

  “Your uncle was a very wise man,” Jerry said.

  “Yes, he was,” Vio agreed. “So we need to think on how to set the board, yeah?”

  “Yes,” Nick said.

  “Looks like we’ll be here awhile. Coffee?” Vio pressed a button on the table, and a few seconds later, one of the servers peeked in.

  ~oOo~

  They arrived back in the Cove at nearly six that evening, and Nick excused them all for the night. On the ride back from the meet, Nick, Donnie, and Angie had all been warm with Trey and encouraging of the way he’d handled himself—and, as Angie put it, his ‘great big hairy sack’—and Trey was glad they weren’t pissed at him, but he still felt a low hum of foreboding, like he’d crossed a line and couldn’t go back.

  As the men separated in the PBS lot, and Trey and Nick were alone, Nick dropped his hand onto Trey’s shoulder. “All back-slapping aside, today you spoke out of turn and without thinking first, and that’s dangerous business.”

  “I know, Uncle. I’m sorry.”

  “I know you’re sorry. But you’re wrong that you know. I think that’s the problem—you don’t know how much you risk. The lessons you’re learning are coming without many hard consequences so far, but in our world, mistakes can be deadly. Not thinking gets people hurt. What you said today was good, but if Vio had taken it badly that you’d spoken, the meet could have gone off the rails, and the good work we did today wouldn’t have happened. And more damage than that. If he’d taken it as a sign that you reach above your rank, we might have lost a strong ally.” He paused to let all that get its claws into Trey’s conscience, and then added, “You had good counsel to offer. How should you have said it, rather than speak out like you did?”

  “I should have asked for permission to speak.”

  “Yes. And if I had said no?”

  “Would you have?”

  Nick answered with only a slight narrowing of his eyes. He wanted his own answer.

  “I should have been quiet until I could speak with you alone.”

  “Exactly. You don’t challenge me in a meet with people outside my circle. Ever. Even if I’m wrong, even if you see what I don’t. And you trust me to be wise enough to want the counsel of a man I invited to sit at an important table.”

  “I do trust you. Completely.”

  Nick squeezed his shoulder, and that was the end of the topic. “Are you going back to Lara now?”

  “Not right away. I told her I didn’t know how late I’d be, so she went to her father’s for dinner. I thought I’d go by the house and see my folks.”

  “Good. Give my love to your parents, and to Ben. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He gave him one more squeeze and let go.

  “Good night, Uncle. My love to Aunt Bev and the girls.”

  Nick got back into the Navigator, and Ray pulled away. Alone in the lot, Trey walked to his own car.

  That foreboding was like a shadow surrounding him in the dark.

  ~oOo~

  The house on Caravel Road, where he’d grown up, was brightly lit and inviting as Trey pulled up on the driveway beside his brother’s Subaru. Their father’s car wasn’t in its usual place.

  He went in the side door, and found Misby in the kitchen, pouring herself a glass of wine. “Hi.”

  “Trey! Hello, darling.” She offered her cheek, and he kissed it as he gave her a one-armed hug.

  “Where’s Dad and Ben?”

  “Your father has a client dinner tonight, and Ben is upstairs getting dressed to go out with friends. I thought tonight I would be abandoned, but you have saved me. You can stay?”

  The thought of having Misby all to himself made him smile. “I can and I will. You want to go out for dinner? I can call Dominic’s and get us a table.”

  She patted his chest. “For me, you don’t need to steal a table from someone. Let’s order pizza and sit on the patio and drink wine.”

  “That is perfect.” He hugged her again. “I love you, Misby.”

  “And I you. I’ll call the pizza. You say hello to your brother.”

  Trey took the steps up two at a time and stopped at his brother’s closed door. The soundtrack to Hamilton was playing, and Ben was singing at full volume. He had a good voice.

  Trey was ninety-percent sure his brother was gay. Or bi, anyway. He hadn’t dated much in high school, and wasn’t dating much that Trey knew about in college, and what little he’d done had been with girls, but still. There was a lot about Ben that seemed like he might be gay or gay-adjacent. Show tunes. Fashion consciousness. Fabulous hair. A squealing fear of spiders and blood. A tendency to squeal when he felt anything strongly, from fear to glee.

  And the fact that Jordan, their gay uncle-cousin-whatever—their aunts had married a father and his son, to whom Jordan was son and brother, so the family relationships got a little weird on that branch—had gotten drunk a few years ago and muttered, not very quietly, that that boy’s closet’s so deep he needs spelunking gear.

  Ben hadn’t been there when he’d said it, and those who’d heard it had let it drop without comment. But he hadn’t been wrong.

  If Ben was gay, Trey didn’t know why he wouldn’t just say so. Nobody in the family had blinked when Carmen married Theo and Rosa married his son Eli, bringing Theo’s other son, Eli’s brother Jordan, into the family—and later his new husband Bennett, and then their adopted little girl. Catholic dogma aside, gay was okay with the Paganos.

  And yet, Ben was circumspect about his sexuality. Which was his right—but still, it was weird.

  Trey knocked on the door, loudly enough to be heard over Ben rapping that he was not throwing away his shot, and the music cut out. “Open!” Ben yelled, and Trey went in.

  “Hey, bro. Just stopped in to say hi. Heard you’re going out.” He offered his hand for the sidewise slap—palms and then backs—they’d been doing for most of their brotherhood. Their parents had adopted Ben on the day he was born, from a Latina teenager. He looked Latino, with deep olive skin, and dark brown eyes and hair. He was several inches shorter than Trey or their dad, about five-nine. But Misby was Argentine and their dad was Italian, both olive-skinned and dark-haired, so it was Trey, the one who actually had Pagano blood, but also had his bio-mom’s blond hair and green eyes, who looked like he didn’t fit in the family.

  Ben was dressed for a night on the town, in black leather pants, slim, pointy-toed black shoes, and a dark purple button-up shirt in a fabric that almost shone. A night on the town or a trip back in time to the 1970s.

  “Hey. Yeah. I’m picking up Rez, and we’re meeting Jason and Tiffany at the boardwalk. There’s that new club. It’s wicked cool. You want to come?” ‘Rez’ was what Ben, and no one else, called their cousin Teresa.

  The new club he meant, of course, was Cyclone. Even after Trey’s ‘conversation’ with Kevin Swinton, he and his brother were still grumbling about the way things worked. This month, they were late on their payment. Trey owed them another visit, but he didn’t want to play that game with his little brother and cousin in range.

  “Nah. I’m just going to hang with Misby and have pizza. I only have a couple hours.”

  “You haven’t been around much lately. Rez and I’ve been out on the beach just about every other morning, and you’re never home.”

  “Busy,” he said. His brother wasn’t going to be the first person in his family to know about Lara.

  Ben didn’t like the curt answer, and his smile faded out. “Yeah, okay. Well, I gotta go.” He went to the open door and put his hand on the knob, the universal signal for ‘get the fuck out of my space.’ Trey got the fuck out.

  They went down to the kitchen together, and Ben grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge. “I’m out. I’ll be late, don’t wait up.”

  He headed right for the door, but their mom barked, “Ben Pagano!” and Ben slumped back to kiss her cheek.

  “Night, Mom.”

  When Ben could first talk, he’d called their mom Misby, too. Trey had giv
en him the name—he actually remembered that, telling his new baby brother that their mom’s name was Misby. But when Ben was in kindergarten, he’d used it at school and gotten teased for it, and he’d come home crying and declared that it was ‘stupid,’ and he was going to call her Mom from then on. And he had.

  Trey had been eleven years old then. He remembered the potent, complicated conflict he’d felt—angry that Ben would so easily discard their mother’s name like that, and hurt that he’d called it stupid, but glad, too, to have it all to himself again.

  He wasn’t sorry Ben wouldn’t be around tonight, or that their dad was in Providence. He wanted his mom all to himself.

  ~oOo~

  One thing about living in a family full of architects, landscape designers, and construction workers: everybody’s house was awesome. In his family, at least, the old saying that ‘the cobbler’s children go barefoot,’ didn’t apply. Every house a Pagano owned, whether it had been built from the ground by their own hands—like this one—or bought and remodeled, had been done well and tastefully. This house, the heartbeat of the family, built by Trey’s grandfather and now owned by his father and uncles and aunts, was not the grandest of them, but the most loved. They’d all grown up here, like Trey and Ben.

  Trey had always loved the back yard best of every space here. He had memories of playing back here with his dog, Elsa, when he was little. He’d never wanted another dog after her, because she’d been perfect, and if he couldn’t have her he wanted nothing. He had memories of parties and cookouts, and quiet dinners like this one, just sitting on the flagstone patio with pizza, feeling cool blow into the summer evening, listening to the buzz of night bugs and, a mile off, the muted rush of the surf.

  He and Misby chatted lightly for a while. She talked about her charity work, and gossiped about the family. He gave her some juicy tidbits about Quiet Cove politics he’d heard. Then, when he was on his third slice and Misby was picking at her second, he refilled their wine glasses and said, “I need to tell you something. To talk to you about it.”

  She sat up straight. “Is there something wrong?”

  He realized as he spoke that there was more than one thing. He’d wanted to tell her about Lara, but the day he’d just had was spinning in his head. “No, no. Just some things on my mind.”

  “You know you can tell me anything.”

  “If I ask you how you really feel about my work with Uncle Nick, will you tell me the truth?”

  She gave him a sharp look; she hadn’t been expecting a question like that. “I’ve never told you anything but truth.”

  “No, you tell me that you’ll love me no matter what, and if what I do fulfills me, that’s enough.”

  “And that is truth.”

  “But what do you think about it? In your head? Or your heart?”

  She considered him for a moment before she answered. “My thoughts that stay in my head are for me only.”

  “Misby, please.”

  With a sigh that said she didn’t like being cornered, she relented. “I think that I have faith in you. I know that the work you do is not always legal, and I know that it can be dangerous. But I believe that you are a good man, and you are honorable. I know that Nick is an honorable man. And I loved Uncle Ben very much. The first don of the Paganos saved my life. In a true sense, he saved me from a monster. He is so important to us that we named your brother for him. So I expect you will follow in the footsteps of these good, honorable, and not always legal men. You will act in ways that are right, if sometimes dangerous, and brutal. I see no shame in what you do.”

  “Why doesn’t Dad see that?”

  “He does, darling. He does. But he sees also that Joey will struggle always to speak and breathe. He knows the reason Teresa is an only child, and how Bev was hurt, and Tina, and Manny and Luca, and John. All of them hurt because the Pagano Brothers’ business touched them. So much suffering in the family, so many people hurt who are not part of that world. Ben was honorable. Nick is honorable. But death and pain surround them. The people they love have been hurt. Your father sees that, and he hates that you could be hurt, or could cause someone you love to be hurt. That is the feeling of a father who loves you with his every breath, and wants what is best for you.”

  It was the very thing they’d been talking about with the Marconis a few hours earlier—the way their enemies went for loved ones, and how to keep that animal inclination from changing the game. Misby said the Paganos were honorable, and that was the root of it: they kept the game on the field. In La Cosa Nostra, families were sacrosanct.

  Unless a traitor shat on the rules, which was how Tina, Joey’s wife and Angie’s sister, had been hurt.

  Yeah, this world was violent. But it was violent no matter what side of the pews Trey was on. That was the reality of being a Pagano. “I miss Dad. The way we used to be.”

  “So does he. You will have it back, I know this. You both want this too much to lose it forever. But you are so much alike. So stubborn and righteous.”

  Trey didn’t like being compared to his father. He’d been too much a disappointment to think his father would appreciate the comparison, and he spent too much time angry at his old man to appreciate it himself. So he didn’t answer. He finished his wine and refilled his glass. Misby had only had a sip since he’d last refilled hers, but he topped it off and killed the bottle. He’d come out here to talk about Lara, not his father.

  Misby sensed the change in him. “There is something else? Something wrong?”

  He was glad to talk about Lara, if he could shift gears to this new topic. “No. Something right. But … different. I …”

  Her hand covered his. “A woman.”

  He laughed. “It’s that obvious?”

  “Not until this moment, no. But now, your face is full of it. You love her.”

  “Yeah. I do.”

  “This is good, yes? I don’t … have you loved before?”

  He shook his head. “This is the first.”

  A beautiful smile illuminated her pretty face. “Well, we must meet her!”

  “That’s what I need to talk to you about. It’s complicated.”

  “Trey, I know this family is much to take all at once. I remember. But— “

  “It’s not that. It is, but it’s more than that.” He sighed and took a long drink of his wine. He wasn’t getting his words out right. “She’s different.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean she’s … she’s like Aunt Manny, a little. Not the same, but—“ Okay, now he sounded like an idiot.

  “You mean she has problems. Mentally.”

  “Yes. She’s super smart—she’s an actual genius. But she was hurt when she was a kid, and it made her different.”

  “Like Manny.”

  Uncle Luca’s wife, Manny, had started her life in an orphanage—a Ukrainian orphanage, in fact—and had Reactive Attachment Disorder. She had trouble managing her own emotions and connecting with people and interpreting their emotions and social cues correctly. Trey knew she’d been a lot worse when Luca had met her, twenty-some years ago. She’d been violent and impulsive, apparently. Now, she was only sort of brusque and standoffish. A bit like Lara, but also very different.

  “Not quite like Manny. Do you know what Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy is?”

  “Yes, I think. This is when a parent makes a child sick on purpose, yes? To be seen as a martyr by doctors?”

  “Yeah. Lara’s mom did that to her. Until she was seven. So she has some strange tics about new places and people, and some weird stuff about food, and … she’s afraid of women. I can’t get her to come home with me.” He threw in one more bit, which in comparison was barely worth mentioning. He hoped. “Also, she’s older than I am.”

  Misby sat back and stared at him. He knew the look—she was taking in everything he’d said, getting to know it, dealing with anything judgmental she might need to feel, getting over it, and figuring about the right thing to say.
r />   “For a mother to harm her own child …”—she leaned close and grabbed Trey’s hand again—“It breaks my heart.”

  “Mine, too.”

  “You love her,” she repeated.

  “Yes.”

  “This is why you are thoughtful tonight about your work and your father. Because there is someone you love, to bring into your world and your family. And you worry.”

  Trey smiled. His mother was keenly perceptive. He wanted to tell her more, about what Lara did for Nick, and how she’d been hurt, but those weren’t things he could share.

  “She is how much older?”

  “Eight years. Her birthday is three days before mine. She’ll be thirty-four.” In just a couple of weeks. He’d already started on her birthday gift.

  “Eight years is not so much. Thirty-four is young. What weird stuff about food?”

  “Her mom poisoned her. So she doesn’t like food with a lot of taste. White stuff, mainly. Bread and pasta and cheese. And fresh fruits and vegetables. Raw. And she won’t eat anything in a private home that she didn’t see made.”

  Misby took her hand back and set it on her heart. “Oh, this poor girl. But pasta and salad is easy. And a vanilla cake from Corti’s.”

  She was planning already. “What are you thinking, Misby?”

  “That you will come for your birthdays. For dinner. Just us, you and your … Laura?”

  The difference in pronunciation was normally almost imperceptible, but in Misby’s subtle Argentine accent, Trey heard the ‘U.’ “Lara. L-A-R-A. Lara Dumas.”

  “That’s a lovely name. You and Lara, here with your father and me, and Ben. I can’t unmake myself a woman, but I can try not to frighten her. Unless you wish a large party, we can do something intimate this year. There is no reason she must meet every Pagano at once.”

  That could work. It had to work. “You’re not worried about me being with someone that’s different? Or that Dad will be?”

  “Trey Pagano, I’m disappointed in you. This family is made up of love, however it comes. Your father knows that as well as anyone. Love comes as it will. If you push it to pass by you because it doesn’t look like you think it should, then you will be ever lonely. If this is the woman your heart opened for, then she must be wonderful. And worth your love.”