As much as he abhorred small talk, he finally caved and asked, “Have you had a house on the beach for long?”
She flinched a little, looking surprised that he’d spoken after so long. With a suspicious glance his way, she answered, “Ten years.”
“You spend much time out here?”
“No.”
Okay. So no chitchat. They walked on in silence again for another hundred feet or so, and then she surprised him.
“If you had one week only to live, what would you do?”
He grinned. She was better at small talk than he was—probably part of the job description for a socialite. Maybe it was a little clichéd, and it was definitely morbid, but that was a pretty good conversation starter.
“Um, I don’t know. I’m not really somebody who keeps a ‘bucket list.’ I guess…I guess I’d come home. Here. This is my favorite place. With only a week to live, I’d come here and sit on the beach with my dog and my kid and just…be. Not very exciting, but I’d want peace before I died, and this is where I find it. Home.”
She’d turned during his speech and now was watching him. “You have a child?”
“Yeah. A son. Trey—well, Carlo III, but he’s called Trey. He’s three—four in August. Do you have any kids?”
Her brow creased, and then she shook it away. “No. Do you have also a wife?”
Sabina had the kind of accent that lingered after a long time away from the culture and language in which it belonged—subtle but noticeable. Every now and then, he’d noticed, her syntax broke a little, and she phrased things clearly but a step out of the ordinary. It was in that phrasing that she seemed to him most exotic. Charmed, he smiled, despite the viper pit of a question she’d phrased in that not-quite-typical way. “No. I did. Our marriage was annulled a couple of months ago.”
“Annulled? With a child?”
And now she was nosy. Instead of being offended, though, he was charmed by her directness. Anyway, he had a suspicion she might have more insight than most about why. She was Latina. It wasn’t a stretch to ask, “Are you Catholic?”
Her head swiveled quickly to him, and he was surprised by her surprise—and by her hesitation. It was a couple of seconds before she answered, “I was born Catholic, yes.”
“So am I. I didn’t want a divorce. She left us. It’s not so hard to make a divorce an annulment, really.” If you knew the right people, it was easy. And the Paganos knew all the right people. Realizing the ease with which he was talking about this, Carlo was surprised at himself. Stunned, actually. They’d gone from tense silence to him telling her things he didn’t talk about outside his family.
She nodded. “I apologize.” With a brush of her fingers along her pretty nose, that big ring glinting in the moonlight, she added, “For my nose in your business.”
“It’s okay. Hey—what would you do if you had one week to live?”
That made her laugh. She had a lovely laugh. Melodious. “I think I would do this. Walk on the beach at night. Sit and watch the waves in the day. As you say…just be.”
Somewhere in the middle of her words, the humor with which she’d started to speak made a turn, and there was a tinge of sadness in her tone as she stopped speaking. His sense was strong that she was, simply, done speaking. So he didn’t reply, and they walked on down the beach in a silence that had become companionable.
~oOo~
Sabina was limping a little by the time she pointed up the dunes toward a large, traditionally styled home. Carlo had spent the past few hundred yards engaged in an internal conflict—staving off the strong urge to pick her up and carry her. James Auberon’s wife brought out the gallant in him, it seemed. But he had a suspicion that she would take it ill if he suddenly swept her up into his arms. So he walked alongside her and tried not to notice how carefully she set her feet down with every step. He sighed heavily with relief when she indicated her house.
Having surfed all over the Rhode Island coast, Carlo had seen the house often. It was both beautiful and nothing particularly special. Two stories and a loft, facing the water, with an enclosable veranda across the front of the first floor and a balcony across the second floor. The precise kind of moderate opulence one would expect for a wealthy man’s beach house. Auberon probably called it his “cabin” or something similarly obnoxious in its faux modesty.
All the lights in the house were on—people around here had a tendency to do that; the aesthetics of a brightly-lit beach house at night were hard to top.
Carlo stopped at the tideline as Sabina turned up to climb the dunes to the house. After a few steps, she realized he wasn’t following her and turned back. She cocked her head. “Come up.”
“Are you sure?”
“You may sit on the veranda. I’ll bring you a drink, and you can call your brother. Come.” Without waiting to see if he would, she turned and continued her climb to the house. He followed.
As he climbed behind her up the steps onto her veranda, he noticed that she was leaving a dark footprint with every step of her right foot. She was bleeding. She’d been limping, but not to the extent he would have thought, seeing these prints.
“Sabina?”
In the act of opening her front door, she turned. “Yes?”
He gestured to the plank floor of the veranda. “You’re bleeding.”
“Ai. Yes. I think found a piece of shell in the sand. No matter. I have bandages.”
“May I help?”
Her eyes narrowed to slits. “No, I think I don’t need your help.”
She took everything he said as if it were a move of some kind. It wasn’t. She was beautiful and charming, but she was married. And he wasn’t back in the game yet after Jenny. He had no ulterior motives at all—in fact, he wanted to get back to Quiet Cove and check in on Trey. But he supposed it wasn’t paranoid of her to think that a man she barely knew might have bad intent when he was trying to get into her house.
“Okay. You’ve been walking on it for a while, haven’t you?”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t move.
“Okay. It’s probably pretty deep if it’s still bleeding. You need to make sure you get all the sand out of it. Soak your foot in hot water for a while. Do you have a washtub or something? And lots of antibiotics.”
Still she didn’t move.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sliced my feet up around here. I’m happy to help. Just help.”
Expressions moved across her face with surprising speed. She was the very definition of conflicted.
“I’ll just wait out here, if you want. I have no other intent, Sabina.”
“Bina.”
“Hmm?”
“Bina. I am Bina.”
He smiled. “Bina. May I help you?”
With a single bob of her head, she conceded. Then she turned and stepped up into her house, leaving the door open behind her. He followed her in.
The house was as handsome, and predictable, on the inside as it was on the outside. It had obviously been professionally decorated in the kind of tasteful eclecticism that predominated among the affluent summer-home dwellers in the area. Lots of weathered whitewash, all the accent hues ocean blue and sage green.
Trying not to bloody the pale wood floors or the light, woven area rugs, Bina was limping now much more noticeably. She hobbled to the kitchen and began opening cabinets. And closing them. She was searching. She didn’t know where things were in her own kitchen. This was a woman used to having a staff.
Finally, she came out of the pantry with a white plastic tub and waved it at Carlo, lifting her eyebrows in a question. He nodded. “That’s perfect. Do you have first aid supplies?”
Her look had a hint of pride, and she turned back into the pantry and came quickly out with a small first aid kit. She’d known where to find that.
He took the tub from her and brought it to the sink to fill with hot water, running the stream over his wrist to check the temperature, as he did for Trey’s baths. Looking
over his shoulder, he saw her watching, her expression now inscrutable. “Washcloth?”
She stared at the drawers under the counter, clearly trying to remember. When she did, she took a step forward and opened a drawer, pulling out a white tea towel. “This will do?”
“Yes.” Terry cloth would have been better, but he thought he might really put her at a loss to get that specific. “Have a seat.” He nodded toward the rustic, whitewashed table surrounded by wooden chairs painted ocean blue.
She sat, and he squatted, setting the tub on the floor between her feet. He moved to lift her right foot, but she pulled away and put her foot into the tub herself, hissing very quietly when the sole of her foot hit the hot water.
“Sorry. It’s going to sting.” Then he put the tea towel into the water and wet it thoroughly. He wrung it out, then eased his hand around her slim ankle. She went stiff at his touch, and he stopped and looked up. For a moment, she simply stared back, and he stayed quiet, waiting. Then she nodded, and he picked up her foot and, as gently as he could, cleaned her wound.
Her feet, like the rest of her, were lovely. Her toenails were polished a dark, dark red, darker than the color of dried blood. The sand had worn the edges away a little. The sole of the foot he held was red and abraded from her long walk in the sand and saltwater, and he dabbed gently with the cloth to clean it. The cut, when he found it under the sand and blood, was about an inch and a half long and fairly deep—any deeper and he would have suggested a trip to the ER for stitches. It was still bleeding a little, but he was able to get it pretty clean, and there didn’t seem to be any shell left behind. Just the omnipresent sand.
He eased her foot back into the water to let it soak, intending to rinse the towel out in the sink. Before he stood, he lifted his head and met her eyes. She was crying. Just tears sliding down her face, nothing more. When he looked, she wiped them abruptly away.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to hurt you. Did I hurt you?”
“No.” It was a gasp more than a sound. “No. You did not hurt me.”
She was staring at him in a way that made him feel…something. Something different. Something more. A tightening in his chest. A heavy pressure in his gut. A fullness in his cock. Jesus. He felt ulterior motives coming on. He realized that he still had his hand around her ankle, and that his thumb was moving back and forth, caressing her.
He let her go and stood up. “Okay. Um. Just let it soak for a while, and the rest of the sand will loosen and float out of the wound. Then lots of antibiotic cream and a good bandage. You probably want to wrap your whole foot, just to make sure the wound stays covered. Okay? I’m gonna go ahead and call my brother. I’ll wait outside for him.”
“Wait. Carlo?” The R in his name rolled when she said it. He could feel it. Right now, he felt that a lot.
“Yeah?”
“Thank you. For…for everything.” She smiled. He thought it was the first true, wholehearted smile he’d seen from her. Jesus. It was a little sad, but brilliant nonetheless. Jesus. He had to get out of here.
He returned her smile as he stepped away. “You’re welcome. It was my pleasure. Good night, Bina.”
He left her house. She let him go without another word.
~oOo~
“Daddy! Daddy Daddy Daddy Daddy!”
Carlo pulled the pillow from his head and found his son bouncing on his knees on the empty side of the bed. Elsa sat at the side, her furry head bobbing up and down in time to Trey’s bounces.
“Hey, pal.” He rolled to his back and held his arms out, and Trey dropped full-force onto his chest. “Oof. You get a good sleep?” He glanced at the clock. Not yet seven a.m.
“Yeah! Aunt Rosie told me FIVE STORIES!” Trey held his hand up, his fingers splayed wide. There was still sandy goop from last night’s s’mores between his fingers.
“Five! You must have been super-extra good on the ride home, then.”
“Uh huh. I was! Did you catch the tail?”
Carlo blinked his sleepy eyes fully open. “What?”
“Uncle Joey told Pop-Pop you didn’t come home because you went to chase some tail. Did you catch it?”
Joey needed another broken nose. “No, pal. I didn’t. Sorry I wasn’t here to put you to bed.”
“That’s okay. Aunt Rosie read me FIVE STORIES.” Again, his sticky hand spread wide. “And Mrs. D. brought doughnuts and beagles for breakfast. I don’t want a beagle, but some of the doughnuts have jimmies. Can I have one with jimmies?”
‘Mrs. D.’ was Adele Dioli, who’d lived in the house next door for at least thirty-five years. She’d been their mother’s best friend. Her husband had died six or seven years ago. Since shortly thereafter, she’d spent a lot of time in the Pagano house. She’d become sort of a de facto housekeeper, running errands for their father, cooking meals for him, keeping track of the actual housekeeping service. To everyone but Carlo Sr., it was blazingly apparent that Adele wanted something more. The few times one of the kids had tried to point it out, their father had first brushed it off and then gotten angry. So everybody now shut up about it and let her constant attentions become a private sibling joke.
“We have Mass first. So how about this? We get a quick bath and get the sticky off you. Then, if you can sit quietly with your books at Mass, you can have a doughnut with jimmies when we get home.”
Trey’s face got serious. “Can I have two?” He held up two fingers.
“For two doughnuts, you will have to be very, very good during Mass. Like a little mouse. Can you do that?”
He nodded solemnly, making tiny squeaking noises. Carlo laughed. God, he loved this boy.
“Good job, pal. Let’s get you in the bath, then.”
~oOo~
Carlo didn’t attend Mass regularly in Providence; in fact, he really didn’t at all. His faith was not lapsed, but it wasn’t exactly emphatically active, either. Still, being Catholic was as much a part of his identity as being Italian-American. It was culture to him at least as much as it was religion. And in Quiet Cove, there wasn’t even a question. Mass on Sunday. Period. If a Pagano was in the Cove on Sunday morning, then he or she was sitting in a pew at Christ the King by nine o’clock.
Almost half the population of the small town of about five thousand year-long residents was of Italian descent. The population blossomed in the summer to more than double its census, but far fewer of the summer people had Italian blood. The place became positively WASPy by Memorial Day. Still, the pews at Christ the King were SRO for all four services every Sunday morning.
The Pagano family took up almost a whole row near the front, both sides of the aisle: Carlo Sr., Carlo, Trey, Carmen, John, Rosa—and, genuflecting and dropping his ass at the end just before Mass began, Luca. Even he wasn’t rebel enough to blow off Mass. On the other side of the aisle, Uncle Ben and Aunt Angie—their three daughters were all grown, married, and living away—and Aunt Betty, Uncle Lorrie, and Nick, Lorrie and Betty’s only living son. Joey sat next to Nick. Carlo didn’t like that. Uncle Ben and Uncle Lorrie were the Paganos most people thought about when they heard the name. Ben, the eldest brother, was the Don of the family; Lorrie was his right hand. Nick was coming up in the family, a capo in his own right.
Of all Carlo Sr.’s kids, Joey was the only one who’d been dazzled by the family infamy. For the others, it was a weight they’d had to carry. But Joey wanted to live in the world of The Godfather—or even Goodfellas or The Sopranos. Those fictional worlds weren’t exactly like the real version, but that had not dissuaded Joey. Uncle Ben, deferring to his youngest brother’s desires for his children to stay out of that life, had always set him away. But if Joey had moved to the other side of the aisle, maybe something had changed.
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