Blame It on Paradise (21 page)

“Hate is everywhere, Lina.”

“Not here.” She placed a hand over her heart. “Or here.” She took his hand and pressed it to her abdomen.

Jack drew her in for a long, hard embrace.

“I want to be with you,” she said. “But I can’t move here. I can’t
live
here.”

“Is it really that bad?” Jack spoke into her hair, deliberately ignoring the fact that after three days on Darwin he hadn’t wanted to return to Boston. “You’ve been here for so long already. You couldn’t get used to it somehow?”

“It’s so loud and busy. People don’t look at you when you pass them on the street unless it’s to snarl at you to stop looking at them, or to tell you to get out of their way. It’s cold—”

“It’s winter. It’ll warm up.”

“It’s too crowded.”

“You could stay on Nahant. You don’t have to go into Boston.”

She cupped his face and held it, her eyes boring into his. “Nahant is your island. Not mine. It isn’t home.”

“It could be,” he smiled weakly.

Returning his smile, she slowly shook her head.

Jack tightened his arms around her, unable to hold her close enough. “What are we going to do?”

“We’re going to have a baby,” she answered. “I’m going back to Darwin, and you’re going to stay on Nahant.”

“So we’re back where we started.”

“Yes,” she whispered. “Right back at our finish.”

CHAPTER 16

Harrison and Anderson DeVoy’s heavy work boots left dark smudges on the mirror-finished surface of the white marble stairs as Jack led them up to the master bedroom. “Nice digs, bro,” Harrison remarked as he openly stared around the place. “How long have you been out here? Four years?”

“Five,” Anderson offered helpfully before he left his brothers to settle in the bedroom with the remote to Jack’s television.

Jack ushered Harrison into the bathroom, and he winced when Harrison dropped his heavy toolbox on the marble floor. The pale champagne tiles had been imported from Italy, and the only reason Jack had wanted them was because the interior decorator had said they were cut from the most expensive marble in the world.

Pushing the ostentatious floor tiles from his mind, Jack said, “I’m sorry I never had you out before now.”

Harrison shrugged a big shoulder. “It’s okay. You get busy, time flies. It’s like that with family.” He kneeled to get a closer look at a big hole in the wall near the door. “What the hell did you do here, hit it with a hammer?”

Jack sat on the edge of the wide bathtub. He and his brother both wore old jeans and flannel shirts—Jack’s from Ralph Lauren, Harrison’s from Wal-Mart—and for the first time in a long time, they actually looked like brothers. “I’m glad you brought Anderson along. He hasn’t been out here in ages.”

“The kid keeps busy.” Harrison unclipped the tape measure from his tool belt. “He came to my house to watch the Bruins cream Pittsburgh last night. Ma and Pop stopped over, too. Baby, baby, baby, that’s all Ma and Beth can talk about these days.”

Jack studied his thumbnail. He’d last seen his family on the night of Harrison’s birthday, six weeks ago. Lina had occupied a few weeks of that time, but her abrupt departure had left him stuffing his days with work.

“You know, you guys could come out here for a change some Saturday night,” Jack offered. “My satellite dish gets at least a hundred sports channels.”

Harrison uttered a noncommittal grunt. “It wouldn’t be the same.”

“No, I guess not.”

Harrison pulled a coil of repair mesh from his toolbox, along with a small tub of drywall compound. “You could come down to the city and join us, you know. If you’re waitin’ around for a hand-lettered invitation engraved in gold, that’s the closest you’re gonna get.”

“Look, Harry, I owe you an apology,” Jack started. “For a lot of things.”

Harry smiled as he stirred water into the white powder in the little plastic tub. “Like missing me and Beth’s wedding because that law professor invited you to his house on the Cape? And the time you blanked on Ma and Pop’s thirty-fifth anniversary party because it was the same night as Reginald Wexler’s customer appreciation day?”

“C-W’s clients spend millions on our products. If I have to put on a penguin suit once a year and slap them on the back for doing business with us, then I do it.”

“And that’s more important than Ma and Pop?”

“No. Of course not. But if I want to get ahead, sometimes I have to do things I’d rather not do.”

Harrison shook his head regretfully. “Reggie Wexler says jump, Jackie boy says, ‘Is over the moon high enough?’ ”

“I’m not proud of the way I’ve behaved. Especially recently.”

“If you want to confess your sins, Jackie, you should’ve called a priest over to patch this wall, not me.”

“I called you because I need to talk to you.”

Harrison laughed. It was a full, throaty sound, just like their father’s, and Jack’s pangs of guilt grew sharper.

“Remember the woman I brought to your birthday party?”

“Is that a trick question?” Harrison grinned, dropping to one knee to use a utility knife to tidy the ragged edge of the hole. “She’s not exactly the type you forget. Where is she, anyway? Mom said you guys were out here ‘rooming’ together. That’s her nice way of sayin’ shackin’ up.”

“Lina moved back to the Harborfront Regency a while ago.”
Nineteen days ago, to be exact,
Jack calculated in his head.

Harrison sat back on his heels and faced Jack. “You guys have a fight?”

Jack leaned over and rooted through Harrison’s toolbox for a putty knife. “We’re having a baby.” He handed the tool over to Harrison. “That led to a fight.”

“No, sir!” Harrison said, giving it his Southie best so that it contracted into “Nosuh,” the ultimate expression of disbelief in Eastern Massachusetts.

“She’s due about the same time as Beth, in late September.”

Harrison worked steadily on patching the hole, but Jack knew that he was listening as well.

“There’s still a quality of unreality to the whole thing, even though I’ve had a couple weeks to get used to the idea. I plan everything, Harry. When I get up in the morning, when I fall asleep at night, when I work out, what I eat…I leave nothing to chance. But this baby came out of nowhere.”

“You sound like a frickin’ kid.” Harrison scraped the excess compound from the patch and tossed his putty knife into one of the twin marble basins. It landed with a worrying clink that Jack forced himself to overlook. “ ‘I didn’t plan it,’ ” Harrison mimicked in a high-pitched whine. “You didn’t have a single condom in your nightstand when you decided to play Who’s Got the Sock Monkey with that girl?”

“If you really must know, I keep them in the medicine cabinet.” Jack did a double take. “ ‘Who’s Got the Sock Monkey?’ Is that what you and Beth call it?”

Harrison coughed to cover a blush. “Never you mind about me and Beth. The point is, you had rubbers, you didn’t use ’em, and now your Caribbean Queen’s walkin’ around with a Jackie Jr. cookin’ behind her bellybutton.”

“She’s from the South Pacific, and she gets part of the blame, too.”

“Do you think she did it on purpose?”

“No. God, no. I might not have found out about it if I hadn’t walked in on her phone conversation. She was telling someone else.” Jack was still stung by the fact that Lina would tell someone else before mentioning her pregnancy to him.

“So she told you because she had to, you flipped out—”

“Not because of her,” Jack interrupted. “Well, not only because of her. I had a bad day at work.”

“—and she left,” Harrison finished.

A familiar spike of regret pierced Jack’s heart, inflaming the wound caused by her departure.

“Have you talked to her?”

“We talk every day. She’s in Montreal this week, and last night we were on the phone until about two this morning.”

“Have you seen her?”

Jack stood and stretched while Harrison cleaned his tools in the basin. “All the time. She’s still at Coyle-Wexler, and we had lunch a couple days ago. It almost got out of hand.”

“They get a little whacko over the littlest things,” Harrison said knowingly. “It’s the hormones or something. How out of hand was it?”

Jack thought back on his ill-fated luncheon with Lina, which had taken place at the rooftop restaurant at the Harborfront Regency. Over New England crab cakes with roasted corn, what had started as innocent conversation about Coyle-Wexler’s progress with the tea trials had become sizzling banter that led to the hasty decision to take advantage of the fresh queen-sized bed in Lina’s penthouse. The moment the elevator doors had closed them in, Jack, unable to stop himself, had taken Lina in his arms and assaulted her with kisses. She had returned his ardor, driving him half out of his head with desire simply by tracing the rim of his ear with the tip of her tongue. He’d hoisted her onto the gold rail affixed to the back wall of the car and would have taken her right there had the elevator not stopped and opened to a fleet of wide-mouthed housekeepers staring at his bare rump. The heat of Jack’s embarrassment had managed to cool his burners, and with an uncomfortable smile he’d hiked up his trousers and followed Lina into the penthouse. Where she’d promptly collapsed into a fit of laughter that left her crying and wheezing.

The mood broken, common sense prevailed, and Lina and Jack had spent the rest of the day talking, but not touching.

Jack almost smiled. “Is it my imagination, or does pregnancy make a woman even sexier?”

“Only if you love her.” Dawning comprehension spread across Harrison’s face and he froze in the middle of using an Egyptian cotton hand towel to dry off his putty knife. “If you’re in love with her, Jackie, why don’t you two just get hitched?”

“She won’t ever leave Darwin Island. I can’t leave Coyle-Wexler.”

“You’re a real idiot, Jackie,” Anderson butted in, entering the room and joining the discussion in the middle. “Lina’s the perfect girl for you.”

“I thought you were watching television,” Jack grumbled.

“Yeah, well what’s goin’ on in here is way more interesting.” Anderson helped himself to a palmful of Jack’s aftershave, a skin-conditioning astringent imported from Japan. “Besides, with a hundred and two sports channels to choose from, I couldn’t decide what I wanted to watch.”

“What makes you think that Lina is so perfect for me?” Jack asked his baby brother.

“The fact that she’s not like any other chick you’ve ever been with.” Anderson leaned against the wall, crossing one ankle over the other. “Most guys lift weights on their lunch hour or run to work out, but you twist around like a frickin’ Auntie Anne’s original during the ass-crack of dawn. Most guys pop open a Bud after work, but you uncork some fancy green beer from some country with a name I can’t pronounce. You don’t dig the regular, Jackie, you never have. Why should it be different when it comes to fallin’ in love? Ordinary’s never been good enough for you; you hardly even notice it. Lina ain’t ordinary. Not by a long shot.”

Jack stared at his baby brother, wondering when the kid had done so much growing up. He realized that there was work yet to be done when Anderson pushed away from the wall and said, “Say, you got any chips and salsa downstairs? I sure could go for some nachos right now.”

Anderson left to raid the pantry while Harrison packed up his tools and snapped the lid back on the drywall compound. “I gotta agree with Andy, but you still got yourself a real pickle of a problem, Jack,” Harrison said.

“You’re thirty years old and you sound like an old man,” Jack complained before he realized that he was hearing his father’s words through his brother’s mouth. “The tea trials at Coyle-Wexler will be over soon, and one way or the other Lina will be leaving. She’s been hopping all over the globe since she got here, and it kills me to think that one of these days she’ll leave and she won’t hop back.”

“Then you’re just gonna have to let her go.”

All the air seemed to rush out of Jack’s lungs.

“Or,” Harrison said, picking up his toolbox, “you’re gonna have to do some hoppin’ yourself.”

“Have Mom and Dad said anything about Lina?”

Harrison grinned. “They both keep saying, ‘Just imagine what their babies will look like.’ Dad says it like he’s expecting something from a Stephen King movie, and Mom says it like she’s going to have a pack of little Halle Berrys running around the house. Mom really likes Lina. She’s more worried about whether Lina can cook a good corned beef than anything else.”

“I haven’t told them about the baby, and I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t either,” Jack said.

“It’s your news to tell, Jackie. But you gotta let me be there when you do. I haven’t seen Dad’s head spin since the time Andy got drunk with his buddies and they shaved his head.”

While Harrison made predictions regarding his father’s reaction to Jack’s baby news, Jack himself spent a long moment contemplating his own thoughts on a totally unrelated matter. When he finally spoke, he gave Harrison pause. “Remember that Thanksgiving Football Classic my senior year, when we played Mattapan?”

“I remember the brawl after the game better than I remember anything that happened on the field,” Harrison said. “You got a shiner so bad you ended up with two stitches above your eye.”

“What started that fight?”

Harrison shrugged a heavy shoulder. “Bunch of stupid kids acting stupid because we got beat by some black kids from Mattapan.”

“I see Shariq Hillen from time to time.”

“Mattapan’s quarterback? No foolin’?”

“He’s an attorney with Dunton, Howse, Thompson & Auffrey, in Boston. He’s probably one of the best defense attorneys in the state.”

“Wow.” Harrison used the broken nail of his left thumb to scrape putty from the cuticle of his right thumb. “I guess Hillen’s doing good for himself.”

“Every time I see him, I think about that game we lost to his team, and the names I called him afterward. He’s always very polite, very gracious toward me, but in the back of my mind, I know he still sees me as that ignorant Southie prick who called him just about the worst thing you can call a black person.”

“We were all ignorant pricks back then, Jackie,” Harrison tried to console him. “We were dumb kids.”

“Yeah, with a bunch of ignorant parents in the background egging us on. Every time I see Shariq, I want to apologize, but then on the other hand I feel like I should just let well enough alone.”

“Being with Lina’s really made you reexamine your whole life, huh, bro?”

“She’s not like anyone I’ve ever dated before. Not by a long shot.”

Harrison caught a laugh at the back of his throat. “All your babes have been beauties, Jack. You never settled for less than the cover girls.”

“I’ve never dated a black woman before. When I first started at Coyle-Wexler, I had a little bit of a flirtation going on with Adrian Allen, another attorney, but it never led to anything. We were both new and I was definitely more interested in building my career than building a relationship. She’s married and she’s got a kid. She seems so happy. I met her husband at one of the Coyle-Wexler holiday parties a few years ago. Seems like a good guy. Definitely a lucky guy. She’s wicked smart and she’s drop-dead gorgeous.”

“Can I ask you a real doofus question, bro?”

Jack nodded. “Fire away.”

“Is it…” Harrison uncomfortably cleared his throat. “Is it different being with Lina?”

“Different how?”

“You know. Is it different with her than it was with the white girls you’ve dated?”

A quiet laugh escaped Jack as he said, “Yes. I love Lina. That makes all the difference in the world.”