by Cora Brent
I opened the window and breathed in the urban perfume of hot concrete and exhaust fumes. Rocco and Getty have always been like brothers to me. We were so close in age it was impossible to consider them as anything else.
Rocco was driving with one hand. He’d bulked up since I last saw him. He looked so much like Jack.
“So what happened to the Camaro?” I asked.
Rocco yawned and ran a hand through his short black hair as he made the turn onto the Long Island Expressway.
“Sold it,” he said cheerfully.
“I don’t believe you. That car was your first love. What did Sheryl say?”
“She didn’t like the Mustang. She decided she didn’t like me either.”
“What? Damn, I didn’t know that. You guys were together for how long?”
“Eternity. It doesn’t matter.”
“How come you didn’t say anything?”
“It’s a new development, Claudia. Now can we talk about something else? Rabies, maggots, anything would be more pleasant.”
His tone was flippant but I was studying him and didn’t miss the way his mouth turned down briefly. Sheryl had been his on again/off again girlfriend since just after high school. It was always assumed they’d get married sooner or later. I stifled the urge to press him for details that he didn’t seem crazy about sharing. After all, when I suffered a very public betrayal last winter, Rocco had never harassed me, trying to get to the dirt. The least I could do was return the favor.
“Well, I like the ‘stang better,” I said, kicking off my shoes and rubbing my toes. It had been a dumb idea to travel in heels. “What is it, a ’75?”
“’73,” Rocco answered proudly. He’d cut his hair really short, eliminating the thick dark curls that used to fall into his brown eyes and turn all the girls weak. “You know, it came to me on its last legs, was almost juice for the crusher. Jack made a lot of noise about taking up so many shop resources to get her moving again.”
“Jack,” I muttered. “How is Jack?”
“He’s good. He’s ecstatic. Anya’s got him wrapped around her little finger and he seems to enjoy being there.”
“I’ll bet.”
Rocco raised an eyebrow. “You gonna be okay with this?”
I frowned. “You could have said something you know, warned me.”
“You already yelled at me for that. Besides, you knew way back around the new year that they were together.”
“Jack doesn’t do ‘together’. He does what he wants and then walks.”
“This is different, Claudia,” Rocco said quietly. “It was from the beginning. Wasn’t really my place to go gossiping about it.”
I shrugged. “Fair enough.” And it was. I couldn’t expect Rocco to get in the middle of the strangely aloof relationship I had with my father. That was my own mess to sort through.
“You still didn’t answer my question. Are you okay with it?”
“I’m here, aren’t I? Besides, it’s not like Jack requires my blessing.”
“No,” Rocco agreed. “I think he’d like to have it though.”
“Consider it given.”
The miles passed and we left Queens behind, heading deeper into central Long Island. I felt at once nostalgic and depressed as I watched the scenery pass. When I was a self-important teenager I’d decided that living here was like being trapped in a box. Trapped by the mighty shadow of New York City, trapped by the geographic isolation of an island. Or maybe I just felt trapped by familiarity. Now, as I stared out the window, I had the uncomfortable feeling that I’d been staring too long at my own reflection.
I should have been shrewder about men than I was. I’d been raised with them. Jack and his brothers were a circus of male antics. My grandmother could never contain them and didn’t try very hard anyway.
Back in high school we studied Shakespeare for an entire semester and that was like a grueling endurance test. The only thing that stuck with me was a poem. He was admonishing women not to fret over the fickle nature of men. I could almost feel old William shrugging across the centuries as he said that men weren’t meant to be faithful. Or honest. That women ought to just pay no mind and sigh their heartbreak away. I didn’t think William and I would have gotten along.
“Claudia?” Rocco asked and I felt like he was speaking to me from the other side of an underwater tank. “You okay? You look sick or something.”
“I’m fine,” I answered and again my own voice sounded dim, muted.
I’d been with Garret for two years, since my junior year at ASU. He was older, established, a family law attorney with his own condo and a receding hairline. He seemed like the steady answer to every doubt I’d ever had. I could admit sometimes that he might be a little dull but Garret was stable. Garret was nice. Garret was so goddamn polite he always thanked me within five seconds of convulsing through one of his fish-faced orgasms. Then he would hop straight over to the bathroom to slide the condom off and rinse his hairless ass beneath the shower before returning to bed and sinking into an Ivory-soap-scented slumber.
Yup. A downright pristine fucking gentleman.
Following the great Rose Bowl cuckold I’d thrown my engagement ring into a Phoenix canal and told Garrett I’d faked every single weak orgasm. It was immature. I knew it. I didn’t care. Humiliation was a bitter pill. It was still stuck in the back of my throat after six months.
I didn’t have time to think about Garrett anymore because we were in Lutztown now and Rocco was finally coasting the car down the street of Giordano headquarters. Before my grandmother had fled to a more tropical climate, she’d sold the house to Jack. It was the dormered white expanded ranch she’d shared with my grandfather for nearly forty years. It was here they’d fought their battles and raised three sons and a granddaughter, all the while operating their own business. When Jack bought the house he inherited the ugliest set of orange living room furniture this side of 1978 and also my great-grandfather, Papa, who was dumped on the front lawn by my grandfather’s sister when he started to wander a mental fantasyland.
“Showtime, kid,” Rocco winked as he braked beside the curb. I stuck my tongue out at him like I’d been doing for two decades.
“Don’t be a jerk,” I scolded because Rocco seemed to be enjoying my homecoming discomfort more than he ought to. I paused before slipping my shoes back on and putting my hand over the door handle. “Seriously. Scale of one to ten, how bad could it be?”
“Forty-two,” he mused and nodded to where Jack and his bride-to-be had emerged from the house I’d grown up in.
Anya looked as bitchy and brassy as ever as she hung on my father’s arm like a blonde tumor. She waved.
“Shit,” I sighed, and Rocco gave me a little shove to force me out of the car.
As I spilled from the confines of the Mustang, the hem of my knee-length cotton skirt somehow got caught on a sharp edge. In the struggle to regain my footing the thin fabric ripped clear to my thigh. A girlish squeal tore out of my throat as the summer breeze flirted with my sweaty skin.
It would have been awkward enough to greet my father and his fiancé with an indecent amount of flesh on display. But as I cursed and held the ruined edges of the skirt together it all got worse.
Not five yards away, in the shade of an elderly maple tree, was a man. He was grinning while casually tossing a baseball in the air and catching it with the same hand. The gray t-shirt he wore was plain with patchy red lettering that read Lutztown High School. Maybe it had once fit him, but now it was definitely too small. I swallowed as I paused in slow motion and watched the considerable muscles of his upper left arm flex and threaten to pull the seams of the shirt apart.
This guy was actually eerily familiar but I couldn’t figure out why at the moment because my mind was a scrambled egg mess of travel fatigue, the horror of bodily exposure and the sight of my youthful father draped all over a mean girl I’d never expected to see again.
Feeling rather self-conscious, I glanced back
to where the seductive muscled god had stopped tossing his baseball.
Our eyes locked and he nodded, a gesture of recognition. He knew me.
And yes, I realized I knew him too.
Time had abandoned the skinny, overactive boy who was always in motion. Instead, there stood a man.
I didn’t have time to dwell on the fact that I was face to face with a very changed Easton Malone because Jack was approaching me stiffly. He had a nervous smile plastered to his face as if I was someone he only half remembered and was fearful of offending.
“Hey, Jack,” I said coolly and expected a handshake or a shoulder slap.
My father surprised me though. He suddenly lunged forward and squeezed my ribcage until I felt a small, painless crack.
“Glad you’re home, Claudia,” he said hoarsely and I hugged him back rather awkwardly while trying to remember the last time we’d embraced.
I couldn’t.
CHAPTER FOUR
JACK
Why the hell was it so hard for Jack to remember her as a baby?
She was a baby once. He was there. There were a bunch of pictures that confirmed how he’d clumsily held her pink-swaddled little body with a look of stunned confusion. He didn’t look like anyone’s father in those pictures. Even now he sometimes still didn’t feel like one. But he could remember everything about how he felt during that strange year; the panic, the dread, the surreal occasion of being grimly pushed into a kitchen chair by his father and the lecture that followed while his mother cried in the background.
“You will take care of the child. Goddamn it son, if you do nothing else for the rest of your sorry ass irresponsible life, you will do this!”
All of that was clear as glass. It’s just that Jack couldn’t remember staring down into the trusting eyes of an infant and soothing her to sleep. It seemed like Claudia Jean Giordano had emerged as a cynically precocious little girl who always called her father ‘Jack’ with a hint of disdain and couldn’t believe that she’d been so unlucky as to be stuck in his care.
He could have done better, been better. But what the fuck do you know when you’re fifteen years old? Nothing! He knew nothing. He’d been careless and stupid and altered the course of his life. It used to seem unfair. Long after he should have known better he held onto that idea, that life had cheated him somehow. He didn’t get to leave Lutztown. Whatever half-formed plans he’d ever had as a kid had ended the minute his daughter screamed her way out of Sarah Holstein’s womb.
Sarah had escaped. She didn’t try to make it work between them, not really. It probably couldn’t have anyway. The night before she left, the night Jack begged her to stay with him, with Claudia, she’d cocked her head and given him a pitying look.
“I’m already gone, Jack.”
She meant it. He only saw her once more after that and he didn’t like to think about that time.
Jack had every intention of picking Claudia up from the airport himself. But then Rocco asked if he could do it instead and he had to admit that Claudia would probably prefer it that way. He knew he was a punch line to her, a chronic and enduring disappointment. She saw him as unreliable, a serial womanizer, an indifferent parent. Every true and biting accusation was always right there in her dark eyes, mirrors of Jack’s own eyes. He always figured there’d be plenty of time, that when she got older they’d laugh together and be buddies and shit but that was always a fool’s dream. Like the time he showed up at that school in Arizona, figuring he could do the dad thing and take her to go buy a new laundry basket or something. She’d been mortified by the sight of him and not one single right word could make its way out of his mouth. The visit was a disaster and no visit or conversation since then had gone any better. Claudia was twenty-three now and Jack was starting to believe things between them never would get better. The thought hurt. It hurt a lot.
He felt a sudden burst of nerves when Rocco drove up with Claudia in the car. What kind of man was nervous about seeing his own daughter?
“Hey Jack, “ Claudia said, looking him up and down with a tired smirk.
She flinched when he hugged her because hugging wasn’t something they really did, not even when she was little. She hugged him back though and that made him happy. He hadn’t been at all sure she’d show up. He knew Claudia’s problem was more with him but he vaguely remembered that she and Anya had never been friendly either.
Claudia somehow managed to rip her skirt climbing out of Rocco’s stupid car. She acknowledged Anya kind of awkwardly, mumbled something about needing to change and then grabbed her bag, refusing all offers of help as she dragged it into the house and up to the second floor where she would be staying.
Jack felt a soft arm circle his waist and looked down to see Anya giving him an encouraging smile. The other day Anya had remarked that the mere fact that Claudia was coming to the wedding showed that she cared, that she was happy enough to be his daughter to fly across the country for the best day of his life. Anya was amazing. Jack knew he hadn’t done anything to deserve a woman like that. If there was any balance in the universe then all the ways he’d fucked around with women would have made someone like Anya out of his reach. But, he reflected wryly, lucky for him the universe didn’t concern itself much with fairness.
Anya kissed his cheek and nuzzled his neck. Jack had never been the type to accept public displays of affection. There was a time and place to get cozy. No one needed to see it. But that was the way he used to feel before Anya. Now he just wanted to be next to her all the time and not just because they knew how to dirty it up between the sheets like no one’s business. She made him happy just by holding his hand.
“Should I put out the food?” Anya questioned, while Jack watched Rocco stroll across the lawn and motion to Easton to throw the baseball he was holding. Easton faked like he was going to rifle the thing but then he laughed and tossed it softly.
Jack shrugged and lightly started rubbing the back of Anya’s neck. “Sounds good. Claud will get hungry at some point and you know these gorillas are always ready to feed.”
His sweet girl squinted up at him. “You okay?”
“I’m good. I mean, she’s here so that’s step one.”
Anya bit the corner of her lip. He’d told her everything about the troubled relationship between him and his daughter, how for some reason he felt like he was now running out of time to fix it. All Anya could do was listen though. There was nothing she could say to make it better. Jack had to do that himself.
“I’ll corner her later,” he said with some determination. “After the boys take off. We’ll talk then.”
Claudia was tough. But she wasn’t invulnerable. He knew damn well that she was still miserable over the shit that son of a bitch Garrett had pulled on her six months ago, playing tonsil hockey with some bimbo on national television. He had definitely felt a father’s rage over that one. In fact he’d been tempted to fly out to the desert and remove that dickhead’s kidneys with a fucking melon scoop. Claudia hadn’t wanted to talk about it to anybody, not even to Rocco, who she talked to a hell of a lot more than she talked to Jack. She was still hurting though. He was hurting for her.
Getty showed up as Jack started to follow Anya into the house.
“No one rang the dinner bell yet,” Jack told him because his brother, named Gaetano but called Getty by nearly everyone, had an infamous appetite. Luckily he worked out like a fiend so his eating habits hadn’t started showing on his six foot two muscular form. Yet.
Getty stood toe-to-toe with him to be obnoxious. He was three inches taller and loved it. Little brothers, Jack mused, shaking his head. They never really stopped trying to change the pecking order.
“Where’s my niece?” Getty complained, shoving a mop of dark curly hair out of his face and carelessly pushing a baseball cap on his head backwards.
Jack crossed his arms and answered his question with a question. “Where’s the dessert?”
“What dessert?”
“The c
annoli you were supposed to bring.”
Getty scratched his chin. “What the hell kind of a host invites guests for dinner and forces them to bring their own food?”
“The kind who gets his pantry raided three times a week and is looking for just a little bit of compensation.”
Getty scowled and jogged back across the lawn, heading for his black and white GTO. He snapped his fingers at Rocco. “Hey, meathead. Want to tag along to Rignetti’s?”
Rignetti’s was a famous bakery up the road. Jack had been eating their Italian pastries since before he had teeth. The place had been a local tradition for decades.
Rocco kind of froze though and stopped bullshitting with Easton long enough to shoot Getty a glare. Rignetti’s was owned by the family of Rocco’s long-time girlfriend. Actually, now she was his ex-girlfriend. Rocco hadn’t said much about the big blow up with Sheryl, other than she was pushing for some kind of commitment after eight long years of back and forth.
“Jackass,” Rocco muttered in answer to Getty’s question before he moodily stalked into the house.
Getty laughed and was on his merry way. That moron always liked to see how he could stir things up.
Easton caught Jack’s eye and shook his head a little, as if to say ‘What can you do?’. He was a good kid. Jack was perfectly fine with getting him as part of the package deal when Anya moved in. He’d even kind of miss Easton when he left for school in August. His own brothers never treated him with half the respect that boy did.
Anya was bustling around, getting all the food laid out on an old gray folding table Jack’s mother used to use to cut her sewing patterns. Jack stood in the doorway, watching her fuss over where to place the macaroni salad and how to position the plastic forks. She backed away a few inches, tilted her head and absently stowed a lock of curly blond hair behind her ear.
“Cut it out,” she scolded without looking at him.
“You talkin’ to me?” Jack asked innocently, moving aside when Easton pushed through the door and headed for the living room.
“Yeah,” Anya said, tossing in a tough girl attitude with her hands on her hips and her Long Island accent kicked up a notch to compete with him. “I’m talkin’ to you. You think I don’t know what’s going on in that head of yours, Jack Giordano?”
