Prayer (The Pagano Family Book 5)

by Susan Fanetti

  The room was neat and clean, but cluttered with girlie shit, too. The closet door was open, showing more red towels stacked on a shelf in tidy little rolls, and other shelves laden with hair-curling gizmos and makeup and creams and liquids. And on the back of the toilet was a silver tray that held brushes and hair-clipping doodads. There was a little glass dish with some jewelry in it, and a strange, black ceramic hand that held necklaces and chains.

  Something on that hand caught John’s eye, and he stared at it, not believing what he was seeing, wanting it to be something else. Anything else. When he couldn’t deny what he saw, his stomach flipped, and for a second he thought he’d heave again.

  On a dainty silver chain, an odd pendant. Shaped like a tiny book.

  Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf.

  He knew that pendant. He knew the woman who called that her favorite book.

  Jesus fuck.

  No.

  No, he had not had a random hookup with Katrynn. Not Katrynn. No. Not even drunk, not even blackout drunk, would he have been so fucking stupid and shitty. No way. He was not that guy.

  But that was her necklace. Not exactly something every chick had.

  How? Had she even been at Quinn’s last night?

  John searched his memory, pushing the black blankness out of his way. He didn’t remember much—going to Quinn’s because he couldn’t face the family love-in after the crush of Christmas, single for the first holiday season in a long time and really feeling it. Sitting at the bar while Quinn served drinks and growled at people. He remembered flirting with Annie, one of the waitresses, and thinking that he’d find her at midnight if he was still around, and at least start off the new year with a kiss.

  After that, it was all just a black swirl. He didn’t remember Katrynn. But that was her necklace.

  Okay. Fuck. Okay.

  He struggled to his feet and then stood there, waiting to see if he could remain upright. Yes. His head hurt like an absolute fucker, and he didn’t think he’d ever want to see food or drink again in his life, but the room remained level. He washed up in—sweet Jesus—Katrynn’s bathroom sink, checked himself out in the mirror and decided he didn’t look too much like a strung-out serial killer, and headed back to her bedroom.

  She was still out, her head still buried under the pillow. The space he’d slept in was now taken up by not one but two Siamese cats—the grey-faced one who’d woken him to this nightmare, and a more typical brown-faced one. They both stared at him, and John felt judged.

  He didn’t know what to do. Wake her? Let her sleep? Leave? Wait? What?

  Here was the problem: he liked Katrynn. Really liked her. She was a bit young for him, maybe, but he would have asked her out, and he thought she might well have agreed, except that their timing sucked. When one of them was single, the other was not. For all the years—something like five or so, maybe more—that they’d known each other.

  In fact, she was dating somebody now, wasn’t she? Yeah—she’d mentioned him at Nick and Bev’s on Christmas Eve. Some guy from Providence. A personal trainer or something like that.

  So, fuck. He had no idea what to do.

  But his clothes were on the floor next to the bed, so he got dressed and then dug his phone out of his pocket and finally checked the time.

  His flight out of Providence was scheduled to leave in less than three hours. If he missed that, he’d miss his connection at Dulles.

  After Monica dumped him in early November, after two years together, he’d crashed pretty hard. He was pushing forty, and he could not seem to get his life started. On paper, it looked good: good job, cool house, great family. But he didn’t have what he wanted, and he could not fucking find it. All around him, his family had everything that he wanted, too: love, children, a future. Only his brother Joey was also still single, and Joey was a pathetic sad sack who used his disability as an excuse not to bother with a life.

  Joey had given up. John had not. Not until Monica had bailed, anyway.

  At Thanksgiving, the women of his family had ganged up on him. From his stepmother to his baby sister. It had been like some kind of estrogen-fueled intervention, telling him how wonderful he was, what a catch he was, he shouldn’t give up, blah blah blah.

  Mainly, he’d felt emasculated and offended. But his sister Carmen had suggested he take some time during the winter work lull and have a change of scenery, and that idea had stuck.

  He was spending a month in Tuscany with family. Leaving in…two hours and forty-nine minutes, unless he missed his goddamn plane.

  Again: FUCK.

  John stood in the bedroom and stared at the lump that was her sleeping form. Now that he knew who she was, the shoulder and blonde hair was familiar—the tone of the skin, the slimness of the arm, the length and color and texture of the hair. No doubt about it, he had drunk-fucked Katrynn Page.

  He had to get his ass moving, and now. Should he just leave? He was not the guy who sneaked out of the bed of a woman he’d accidentally, drunkenly fucked. Actually, he was not the guy who accidentally, drunkenly fucked a woman at all.

  Except, apparently, he was. A woman he liked. One whom he would not be able to avoid, even were he so inclined.

  A note? Maybe leave a note?

  Before him, in her bed, Katrynn moaned quietly and stirred.

  And John panicked. Like some kind of fucking frat boy, loathing himself even as he did it, he turned and sneaked out of her house, grabbing his shoes from the floor near the front door.

  ~oOo~

  Not her house—her apartment. He was right about the location: a small neighborhood of cottages and four-unit apartment buildings on the edge of town, not far from the boardwalk, but without a beach view. They’d been built in the 1940s, when Quiet Cove had really begun to boom as a vacation town.

  He stood in the little parking lot, where his truck was not. Nor was her little SUV. Well, at least they hadn’t driven drunk.

  John sighed. This day was not his day. Fortunately, his bags were packed and ready to go, sitting next to the door at home. He dug his phone out again and dialed his brother Luca, who answered right away.

  “Hey, bro. You at the airport?”

  He wished. “No. Luc, I need some backup. I had a night last night, and I don’t know where my truck is. I think it’s at Quinn’s. Can you come get me, get me back to the beach to get my shit, and then take me to the airport? Like now?”

  Luca laughed. “Shit, John. What’d I tell ya?”

  He’d told him that it was stupid to go out on New Year’s Eve when he had a transatlantic flight the next day. Which, of course, John had known already. He’d told him that he should spend it at the house on Caravel Road with the rest of the family. But that thought had depressed the fuck out of John. Almost as much as the thought of sitting alone in his house had.

  “Yeah, yeah. Give me all the shit you want, but help me out.”

  “I was gonna get wet today, but okay.” It was an unseasonably warm winter in Rhode Island, and most of the Pagano siblings had spent time surfing the winter waves. “Where are you?”

  “Cove Court Apartments. I’m in the lot. Dude, I’m on a stopwatch here. Flight leaves in two and a half hours.”

  “Fuck. I’m on it.”

  John put his phone away. Something pulled his attention, and he turned and looked up, where he figured Katrynn’s windows were. He saw a curtain move, as if someone had been watching and had backed away as he’d turned.

  He hoped it had been one of her cats.

  But probably not.

  Fuck.

  ~ 1 ~

  John headed down the concourse toward the baggage claim. As he was texting Luca to see if he’d arrived yet to pick him up, another text came through. He smiled and opened the photo.

  Giada, in a car, making a cute little duckface, with the message, Già mi manchi! XOXO!

  John didn’t know as much Italian as he probably should have. Prior to this trip, it had been a long, long time since he’
d been in Italy, not since his mother had died twenty years before, and he’d lost most of the useful bits of the language. He could cuss a good game, and drop some good insults, but otherwise, he could barely get by in the big cities, where most residents knew more English than he knew Italian. For his first weeks of this visit with his Italian family, he had relied heavily on their passable command of English.

  But then he’d met Giada, and his four-week vacation had become six-plus weeks. She’d helped him out with the language.

  And some other stuff, too.

  She was gorgeous and funny and enthusiastic about everything, and she played guitar, as he did. She played professionally, though, which he did not, and she’d brought him up on stage with her band a couple of times.

  They’d gone skiing together several times, and they’d spent a few days in Milan. And they’d fucked like rabbits for weeks. It hadn’t been serious—how could it have been serious?—but it had sure been fun.

  All in all, he felt much better than he had when he’d crawled onto a plane on New Year’s Day, carrying on the worst hangover of his life and a whole cargo of self-hatred and self-pity.

  He texted back, Anche tu mi manchi. xo.

  I miss you, too. He was nearly one-hundred-percent sure he’d said that right.

  And it was true. He liked her a lot. He especially liked her casual, ‘let’s just have a fling’ attitude. He was no longer interested in ‘flinging’ in his real life, but on a vacation, while he was rebounding from a variety of disappointments, a fling had been perfect, and the permission to just have fun without wondering where anything was headed had been cathartic.

  Luca was leaning against a post near the baggage claim, and he pushed off and came forward as John approached. John let his guitar and backpack drop off his shoulders, and the brothers hugged hard.

  “You look good, man. A shit ton better than when I dropped you off.”

  “Thanks. It was a good trip.”

  Luca gave him a brotherly punch to the gut. “Got fat.”

  No, he hadn’t, but he’d put on a few pounds. It was impossible to spend more than a couple of days in Italy and not gain weight. Most of it he’d skied and walked and fucked off, however. A few days back in his regular routine would take care of the rest.

  “Fuck you,” he laughed in reply. “You got bald.”

  Luca, past forty, had the same ripped fighter’s physique he’d had since high school. But his hairline had started backing off a bit near his temples.

  Luca flipped him off; then, as the carousel started to move and roll out the baggage from John’s flight, he asked, “You rested? Carm and Theo are having that thing tonight, and we’re all expected. You need to catch some Zs first?”

  “I popped a pill and had a beer and slept the whole flight. What thing?” John’s skis rolled up, and he pulled them off the conveyor.

  “You know—Theo’s writer buddy is in town. Atticus Whoever the Fuck. He’s been around all week, but tomorrow is his book release party at the bookshop.” Luca grabbed John’s suitcase. “Anyway, they’re having a thing for him tonight, too. Cocktails and New York Book Types. I thought you knew about all this. Didn’t Bev wrangle you into doing your Bob Dylan impression tomorrow at the shop?”

  “Oh shit. I completely forgot. Fuck.”

  As they headed toward the exit, Luca said, “I thought that was why you came back on a Friday.”

  No, he’d come back because Giada was heading off on a tour of the UK with her band, and he didn’t feel like being her groupie. Besides, he’d already extended the trip far enough. It was time to get back to his life. They’d said their goodbyes at the train station.

  “No. I was just ready to come home.”

  He wasn’t so sure he was ready to see Katrynn, though. He’d spent the past month and a half aggressively trying not to dwell on the ways he and his life sucked, so he had tried hard not to think about how he’d started off the new year by fucking and chucking her—a woman he considered a friend. A woman he was attracted to. He had put no thought at all into how to make amends for that.

  And now, first thing, he was going to have to face her.

  Bev, their cousin Nick’s wife, owned Cover to Cover Books. Katrynn was the manager. Theo, their sister Carmen’s husband, a writer himself, was friends with this writer Luca was talking about. John was surrounded by people invested in this event.

  Bev had asked months ago if John would play guitar as background during the release and reading of Atticus What’s His Name’s new book. He liked to play for an audience, so he had agreed. That was before he’d been such an asshole, though. Now, he’d much rather have dodged Bev, the bookshop, and Katrynn for a while, until he had his shit together.

  Luca opened the hatch on his truck. “That Atticus dude is an asshole, but Carmen’ll have a stroke if you bail on tonight.”

  John sighed and slid his skis in. “I’m not gonna bail. I’ll shower and change and get over there.”

  “Always the good one,” Luca chuckled.

  He ignored that little dig. It was more or less true, anyway. John had always been the ‘good son,’ the one who did what people expected of him. Whether he wanted to or not. When he allowed himself to think too hard on that, he saw that a lot of his discontent had to do with it: meeting other people’s expectations and not getting around to meeting any of his own.

  Yeah, not ready to open that mental viper pit again just yet.

  Something else that Luca had said had caught his attention. When they got into the truck, John asked, “How is the guy an asshole?”

  “You’ll see. But I speak the truth. Carm and Theo brought him over to the house the other night, and I had to go out to the back yard after a while before I punched the cocksucker.”

  For Luca, that was unlikely to be an exaggeration.

  ‘The house’ was the house on Caravel Road, where all six siblings had grown up, and where the oldest of them, Carlo Jr., now lived with his family. It was where the family congregated more times than not.

  “Surprises me that Theo’d be friends with a guy like that.”

  Luca shrugged. “He was Theo’s student, I guess. I don’t know, maybe he wasn’t always an asshole. I get the impression that Theo’s surprised, too.”

  So a party where the guest of honor was an asshole—no, two parties, tonight and tomorrow—and facing the victim of his own assholery. Quite the welcome home.

  Suddenly tired and feeling less great than he had been, John leaned back in the seat. “Sounds like a great time.”

  Luca laughed. “You never know. Been a while since we had a brawl. Could be fun.”

  ~oOo~

  Theo’s friend’s name was Atticus Calhoun, and John understood what Luca had meant within about five minutes of meeting the guy. He just gave off a certain vibe, and most men knew at least one like him: the kind of guy who spent a lot of time in front of a mirror, who really considered his ‘look,’ who scanned the home page of a couple of news sites every day and considered himself up on the world. Who’d picked up a random fact or two about a whole bunch of shit and considered himself an expert on everything.

  His hair was long and blow-died, and he had on more jewelry than most women John knew wore: silver and turquoise cuffs on both wrists, a bunch of silver rings, a thick silver chain with some kind of stone pendant, and silver hoops in his ears. Silver belt buckle, too.

  He was tan. John would have laid down a decent stack of Benjamins on a bet that the tan had been applied in a salon.

  Calhoun was going for a cowboy-sophisticate look, John supposed, in his jeans and boots, with a tweedy jacket over a black shirt

  Normally, John wouldn’t have paid so much attention to what some guy he’d only just met looked like, but Calhoun kept drawing attention to himself. He fidgeted and gestured and shook his hair like a fucking shampoo model, and he managed to insinuate himself into almost every conversation. He made it impossible not to notice every damn thing about him. He was the kind o
f guy you either found charming or hated on the spot.

  John did not find him charming.

  Theo was a fairly unassuming guy, on the quiet side but with a sharp sense of humor. He was patient and determined, which was good for Carmen, who could be prickly as fuck. John liked his brother-in-law a lot. What he was doing being friends with this clown, though, John couldn’t begin to say. Theo had probably had thousands of students over the years. Why take this one under his wing?