Miracle (The Pagano Family Book 6) (35 page)

There was more that she’d practiced, but Joey was kissing her, and that was better than any word she could say.

Epilogue

~ ten years later ~

“Daddy, be careful! My dress!”

Joey caught the door before it closed. He reached down and grabbed the mound of fluffy white fabric. “Sorry, mouse.”

With a long-suffering roll of her seven-year-old eyes, Gessica gathered up the pouf that was her skirt and set it in her lap, and Joey closed the door.

As he got in, he looked in the rearview mirror and triple-checked that everyone was secure. “Marco, sit. …Buckle…up.”

At the ‘way back’ seat, Marco threw himself back down and grabbed the seat belt. “Why can’t I sit up front? Mamma went with Nonnie.”

“Not old…enough.” Once he heard his son’s buckle snap in, he shifted his eyes to the car seat at Gessie’s side. His baby girl, Christie, sat like an angel, her curly hair in two brown puffs on the sides of her head, and slapped her chubby hand over her mouth to blow him a kiss when she saw his eyes meet hers in the mirror. He reached up and grabbed it out of the air, giving her a wink in the mirror. She was on her best behavior so far today. They’d pay for that later.

“I’m nine!” Marco’s complaint continued.

Joey turned in his seat and faced his son. “I know. …Was there. Not old enough.”

He turned back to the wheel and belted himself in. One more glance to make sure the inmates weren’t planning a riot, and he backed out of the parking space at Christ the King and headed home, where his wife and the rest of the Pagano women were already in full party mode.

~oOo~

Luca’s truck was parked in the driveway, blocking Joey from parking at his own house, so he landed in front of the neighbor’s house and began the process of freeing his kids. Marco was up and banging against Gessie’s seat, agitating to get loose, before Joey could get the door open.

“STOP, MARC!” Gessie slammed her back into the back of the seat, and her little veil and tiara went askew. Feeling that happen, she shrieked and clamped both hands on her head. “DADDY!”

Realizing that she was missing out on all the fun, Christie started to yell, too.

Jesus. “Gessie…chill. Marco, sit.”

“Why can’t she get out herself? Did she turn into a moron all of a sudden?”

“DADDY!”

Joey stopped helping Gessie navigate the seatbelt around her dress. He leaned on the back of the seat and leveled his here-is-the-end-of-your-leash look at his son. “Watch your…mouth, son.”

Abashed, Marco settled back on the seat, and Joey found the clasp of Gessie’s seat belt in her miles of First Communion dress. He freed her and lifted her out.

Tina was coming up the street. The sunlight on this late morning in April shone down on her and made her glow like an angel. Her long hair was up in its customary ponytail, the fall of it lying gracefully over one shoulder. Damn, she was beautiful.

She smiled and offered her hand to Gessie, who took it and stood with her, turning on her father as if she’d finally been saved from his masculine incompetence.

To Joey, Tina said, “Need help?”

Marco was climbing out now, too, and he pushed between his parents and ran off toward the house. Christie was still yelling, now with intent, since she was the only one still trapped in her seat.

Joey bent down and kissed his wife’s cheek. “M’all set. Got…monster.”

Tina leaned in and smiled at their littlest. “Hush, you. Daddy’s coming.”

Christie kept yelling, but she smiled and waved at her mother. When that little drama queen learned how to hide her pretense, they were all in serious trouble.

“Okay. You get the monster, I’ll help Gessie change.”

“NO!” Gessie dropped her mother’s hand and hugged herself protectively. “I want to wear this forever. I’m a princess bride!”

“You’re a First Communicant, not a bride or a princess, and there is fruit punch and chocolate cake and strawberry ice cream, all your favorites, and everybody’s going to be playing in the yard. Do you want to sit out your own party because your dress is pretty? Gessica Pagano, you know better than that. I like pretty clothes, too, but clothes are not as important as family. We have lots of pictures of how pretty you look.”

By the time Tina was finished with her lecture and Gessie was hanging her head in shame and disappointment, Joey had Christie in his arms. She’d settled as soon as her dimpled arms were locked around his neck.

He came over and lifted his oldest daughter’s chin. “Your day, mouse. …See the…good. Don’t get…lost.”

Gessie gazed up at him, and he could see her thinking about what those few words might really mean. His children had had to learn how to understand their father’s abbreviated, halting way of speaking. Their ability to understand him seemed to occur on an axis with their own development, but their comprehension didn’t progress on a straight line. It was a wave.

Tina had explained to him that it had to do with their facility with abstract and concrete concepts and how that tracked with their own language development. He tended to speak in partial sentences and try to fill the words he could say with as much meaning as he could. Tina called his speech ‘poetic.’

He thought that romanticized the situation an awful lot.

Of his kids, Gessie was the one who consistently understood him best. She was insightful and intuitive like her mamma. And sensitive like him.

That was a hard lesson he’d learned about himself, back in his days with a team of therapists of all stripes: he was sensitive. He felt the world keenly. Far too keenly. He’d fought that lesson for a long time, because it had made him feel weak. But once he’d acknowledged its truth, he’d realized that it was the opposite. It was a strength to feel things so much.

More than therapy, his wife had shown him that.

Tina had recovered almost entirely from her own challenges with expression. She had to work harder than most people, but she had become so adept at the work that no one who didn’t know her history would recognize anything odd in her speech. When she was very tired or stressed out, her words stuttered or died out, but most people simply thought she was distracted—which was true. Joey could see the embers of panic in her eyes when it happened, though.

It had taken her years of work to regain her speech and her writing. They’d started a family while she’d striven to recover. But when Gessie was two, Tina had hung a shingle in Quiet Cove and started a private therapy practice. The five-year gap between Gessie and Christie accounted for the time that she’d gotten her practice off the ground.

She worked almost exclusively with expression disorders. And she had a growing collection of furry creatures. Mimi and Poppy went to work with her every day.

Gessie took his hand, and Joey looked down and saw understanding in his little girl’s eyes. He lifted her hand and bent to kiss it, then walked with all his girls back to their little yellow house.

~oOo~

Joey stood at the grill on the patio, watching the burger patties and sausages sizzle, and thought about Pop. The grill had always been his station, for every warm-weather event they’d ever had. Back in those days, all the parties had happened either at the house on Caravel Road or on the beach. Christmas Eve at Nick and Bev’s was the first big holiday tradition to shift elsewhere. Now, they still did Easter and Christmas Day and Thanksgiving at the house, and they still all, or most, got together for birthdays and anniversaries, but they tended to throw those at their own homes.

Almost everybody was here today. Eli and Rosa had come with their kids, Ted and Rita. Eli’s brother, Jordan, had been in town anyway, visiting Theo and Carmen with his husband and their new baby, so they were here, and baby Maggie was being loved on by every Pagano woman and most of the men. Joey and Tina’s little house was bursting with happy people and loving family.

Even though they were all close, in spirit as well as, for the most part, geography, and their kids were each other’s best friends, it still felt as if something among them had been diluted. Just a little.

The family had just gotten so big, and the kids were getting older, with other friends and interests of their own. These days, too, the family house was nearly empty. Carlo and Sabina’s kids were grown. In fact, three of Pop’s grandkids were grown now. Trey was twenty-five, and Ben and Teresa were both nineteen.

Ben and Teresa were in college—Ben at Yale and Teresa at Bryn Mawr, her mother’s alma mater—and neither had come home for Gessie’s First Communion. They had finals coming up.

Trey had gone to college, too, just as he’d promised his father. He’d gone to Princeton and gotten a degree in international finance or something like that. Joey supposed that the degree was useful in his work.

“She looks so much like Genie. Don’t you think?”

His father-in-law had come up to his side.

At Angelo’s question, Joey blinked out of his thoughts and looked out over the yard and saw Gessie—dressed now in pink shorts and a flowered t-shirt, her fancy hair taken down and caught back in a ponytail just like her mother’s—playing outside the little house he’d built her, pretending to water the plastic flowers in the window boxes. Claudia and Olivia, John and Katrynn’s eight-year-old twins, seemed to be ‘preparing a meal’ inside. Claudia leaned out the little window and called Gessie in ‘for tea.’ Joey knew it was Claudia because her color was yellow; that was how they kept the identical girls straight: Claudia in yellow and Olivia in purple.

Gessie set the plastic watering can down under a window box and bent over to smell the plastic flowers.

He thought Gessie looked just like her mother. But Tina looked a lot like
her
mother.

Genie had died not quite a week after they’d returned from their honeymoon in the Bahamas. Tina had been heartbroken but not devastated. She’d said it was like her mother had been holding onto her fraction of a life until she could be sure her kids would be okay, and had finally decided that she could rest.

The night of the day they’d gone to see her and give her the gifts they’d bought her in Nassau, she’d gone to sleep and hadn’t woken. Four days after that, she’d been gone.

Even these years later, when Angelo spoke of his wife, there was a catch in his voice.

“Yeah,” Joey answered. “Like Genie.”

~oOo~

Joey sat with his brothers and brothers-in-law, drinking Pellegrino with Theo while the others drank beer, listening to their talk about the Red Sox. He’d finished grilling, and most people had eaten at least one round, going back occasionally to nosh on some of the side dishes, and the afternoon was beginning to age.

Then Nick came into the yard from the side gate.

Bev and their kids had been there all day; Bev had enlisted seventeen-year-old Elisa as caretaker for the littlest kids, and sixteen-year-old Lia had been helping serve. Carina and Ren had been causing trouble with Johnny and Rita. All four had been born within eighteen months of each other, all eleven or twelve now, and they were the family’s Fearsome Foursome. Carina was almost invariably the ringleader. The property damage those four had done over the years was well into the thousands of dollars by now.

Currently, they were emptying out the sandbox. Joey thought they meant to bury something. He hoped it wasn’t a body.

Immediately behind Nick, dressed similarly in a custom suit and a sharply-knotted tie, side by each with Angie, was Trey.

Joey’s eyes went straight to Carlo.

Trey had joined the Pagano Brothers right out of college, telling his father that he’d done what Carlo had demanded and now he was going to make his own choice. He wanted to be part of the family legacy. He wanted to be a Pagano, and that was the way he wanted to do it.