“Oh, goody,” Bev lamented dryly over the din. “She’s figured out the cupboard locks. Yay.” She levered herself out of her chair. “Come on, pixie. It’s naptime.” To Katrynn she said, “We finished Ren’s nursery over the weekend. You want to come up and see?”
Just like that, Katrynn and Bev were back on solid ground. Beverly Pagano did not hold grudges, not even for a moment.
As Katrynn followed mother and child and dog up to the second floor of this perfect house, she wondered whether her friend was right about what she saw in her and John.
And if Bev was right, how Katrynn could see it, too. How she could believe it.
Maybe she just had to leap again—and this time truly let go.
~ 15 ~
John leaned back and called out his office door. “Joey! What’s up with the Lexford job?”
His brother came to the open door. “Nothing. W-why?”
“In my book I’ve got it finishing this Friday, but everything here”—he waved at his laptop—“has it going through next week. Something happen?”
Joey paled and looked like he was sure he’d screwed something up, until Luca called, “That was me!”
This was how they handled everything when they were all in the office—shouting at each other through open doors.
Then Luca was at his door, too, and both brothers just came in and dropped into the two yellow vinyl chairs against his paneled wall. The main office of Pagano & Sons could have really used an update, it was like some kind of time capsule from the Seventies, but they were always too busy to see to their own house.
“What happened?”
“Tile shipment was damaged. Like somebody dropped the pallet off a fucking building. I called it in last night, but the new ship won’t be here until Friday. Maybe Monday.”
“Fuck.” John sighed and erased the rest of the week’s plan from his book so he could start over. He had all the digital toys, too, but he liked the feel of a carpenter’s pencil in his hand, and he liked the sense of accomplishment he felt when he looked at the page at the end of the day and saw that everything was scratched out. He also liked the heft of the fat book, the pages of past days crinkled and smudged with graphite, and the coming pages still white and smooth.
“You should’ve told me,” Joey said. “S-s-s… …
scheduling
is my thing. Not just a f-fuckin’…secretary.”
They’d had a secretary, who had worked for their dad for a million years and whom they’d all respectfully called Mrs. Ponti until they day she’d retired last year. Luca and John had decided not to fill her position. They’d lost out on two major bids to big-muscle national construction companies, and they’d had a tight year. Since so much of their administrative work was digital now, and since Joey was in the office all day, every day, anyway, they’d figured they could go without a secretary. Joe’s aphasia made him not great on the phone, but Luca had the office calls routed to his cell and handled that himself.
This year, too, was shaping up to be pretty snug, profit-wise. They were busy enough, so far, but they were getting mostly small and medium jobs. A lot of residential work, like the Lexford job, which was a simple remodel. It was a high-end job, with a solid margin, but that didn’t mean it employed many workers. Their commercial division had been the company’s lifeblood, but that work was drying up.
Pagano & Sons had built some impressive buildings all through Rhode Island, but not for the past few years. The big corporate players, who could shift money around and underbid the fuck out of the locals, had been cutting in hard on the major projects.
Sitting at Quinn’s one night after work last fall, at the end of a peak work season that had never really peaked, John and Luca had gotten drunk and maudlin together, wondering if the business that their father had built from nothing and handed over to them would outlive the man who’d built it. Pop was getting old, and his health wasn’t great. If the business folded under Luca and John’s stewardship, they might as well just put their hands around his neck and squeeze.
It was still early in this new season, not quite mid-May. But truly, it was later than it seemed. They should have had their whole season booked, and they had a terrifying hole at the end of September. Two weeks with no jobs lined up. Zero jobs.
And now there was a hole in this week. “What are we gonna do with that crew? The whole job stalls until that tile gets here.”
Luca leaned forward and leaned his elbows on his knees. “I told ‘em not to come in.”
“W-we payin’ ‘em?”
John and Luca both nodded. They didn’t use day labor. Their guys were full-time employees, every one of them. It wasn’t their fault the job was fucked, and they had kids to feed and mortgages to pay.
“Guys, we…we can’t…afford…”
John shook his head. “It doesn’t matter, Joe. You know that.”
Luca punched his own thigh. “We need that damn Tyler-Orvo job. If we get that, it’ll make next year, and we can scrape by until then. Hell, it’ll make the next three years.”
There was a small voice in John’s head that piped up at times like this and wondered if it would really be so terrible if the company went under. He hated that voice. Pagano & Sons was important to the family and meant everything to their father. Carlo Sr. had made it almost literally with his bare hands, and he’d named it Pagano & Sons before he’d had any idea that his sons would work there with him—before he even knew that there would be sons, in the plural, to work there with him. Now he was retired, unhappily so, and Luca and John and Joey were the Sons. Pop fed off of news about the business like it was his oxygen.
Carlo Jr. had snubbed the idea of making a life of the company. He was an architect instead. Though they sometimes all worked together, John didn’t think Pop had ever fully forgiven their big brother for that betrayal.
Luca felt about the company like their father did, like his bones were made of two-by-fours and his blood of cement. But Pop had wanted to pass his legacy on to serious, accomplished Carlo Jr., his firstborn, and it had been a long time before he’d seen second son Luca, an extrovert—a fighter, and, in his youth, a partier—as mature enough to take the helm. Luca was a great leader for the company and had always been the best choice of them all, but Pop would never see him as anything but second best. If the company folded, their father would blame Luca.
John, the good son, had never considered working anywhere else. Of course he’d had adolescent fantasies of being a famous musician, but he’d started working at the family business while he was in high school, and he’d always known he’d spend his working life right there, because that was what Pop wanted.
And he enjoyed the work. He was good with his hands—they were all good with their hands in their particular ways—and he found peace and fulfillment in making something beautiful with them. Music or cabinetry, it didn’t matter; there was something real in that beauty.
When Pop retired, he’d finally acknowledged that Carlo Jr. was not going to swoop in and take over, and he’d given Luca the lead and brought John up as Luca’s second. Now John rarely got to do the work he enjoyed. Instead, as Chief Supervisor, he pushed papers and went to meetings, and he and Luca sweated the books. He also drove from job site to job site, checking up on the people who did that work. He was the guy the workers grumbled about.
He hated this work. Deeply. He was bored, and he was stressed, and he missed ending each day tired and sweaty, feeling like he’d accomplished something real.
“I still say we need…need…to go to…N-N-N-”
Luca cut Joey off and stood abruptly. “You have got to lay off that, Joe. We are not asking Nick for a favor.”
Joey stood up, too, and faced off with Luca. “He could hand us that…that…Tyler-O-Orvo job.”
“The cost is too high. I’ve paid the only debt I’m ever going to have to the Pagano Brothers.” Luca turned to John and asked, “You heading out, bro?” effectively canceling the conversation Joey wanted to have.
John had been thinking about the debt he owed Nick. There was no telling when that marker could get called. It had been three months, but it could be years, even, before it was called. There was no telling what he might have to do to clear it, either.
At Luca’s question, John looked up with a start. “Uh, yeah. Yeah. No rush, though, if Lexford is stalled. You checking in today, too?”
“Nah. I’m doing some more research on Tyler-Orvo.”
“You need help?”
Instead of answering, Luca said, “Hey, sugar.”
Luca had never called either John or Joey ‘sugar,’ but he commonly called women—strangers, friends, family, his wife—by that endearment. John had been writing in his book, but he looked up and saw Katrynn standing there, dressed for work in a pretty black dress, a denim jacket, and a pair of low-heeled black boots.
He now knew that she had at least a dozen pairs of boots, most of them black, with tall shafts and low heels, and she could hardly walk past a boot in a shop without stopping to consider it.
She’d never come to his work before, and without calling first, she’d have had no idea that she’d find him here. This visit was the definition of impromptu. He stood. “Hey, baby. Everything okay?”
She looked at Luca and Joey, seeming conflicted and freaked.
“Katrynn? What’s wrong?”
Clearing her throat like she was about to give a presentation, she said, “I have something to say, and I just need to say it.”
Fuck. He knew why she was here. Fuck. Goddammit.
Offense and hurt boiled up in John’s belly. He’d let her off the hook after that debacle in Connecticut. They’d needed to talk, but she hadn’t wanted to, and, yet again, he hadn’t pushed. He’d felt like he’d already been a bully coming after her the way he had, fucking her on the floor, and he hadn’t wanted to lean on her again, so he’d let her drop it. And now, when he was caught off guard, here she was with ‘something to say.’ Goddammit. Even when he thought he understood a woman, he did not understand women.
“Guys, get out.” If he was about to get dumped, the very last thing he needed was his brothers standing by as witnesses.
Luca and Joey left. Luca gave Katrynn’s elbow a little squeeze as he passed by. Joey closed the door on his way out.
“Do you want to sit for this pronouncement?” He heard the ice forming over his words. He could be a real bastard when he was hurt, and he felt the barbs lining up. All the shitty things he could say to make her hurt, too.
She frowned at his tone, and he could see her second-guessing herself. Good.
“No, I don’t need to sit. I need you to come over here, though.”
That knocked him back a step. Why would she want him close enough to reach her if she was going to dump him? Not that he’d hurt her like that, but in his experience, women with something harsh to say liked to say it from a distance.
He came around his desk and stood before her, arms crossed. She was wearing her
Mrs. Dalloway
pendant. Somehow, it seemed fitting. “What do you need to say?”
Her frowned deepened. “Are you mad at me?”
“I guess that depends on what you have to say.”
“I…” Her face paled, and she faltered, then visibly squared her shoulders. “There’s a lot of stuff I’m freaked out about. I’ve been trying to figure out why you’ve got me so spun, but this morning I decided that it doesn’t matter.
You
matter. I love you.” A blush filled in her cheeks, and she dropped her eyes. “That’s what I have to say. I love you. So I’m just gonna jump here. Please don’t hurt me. Please don’t let me crash in a heap at the bottom.”
For a second, John was too stunned to react. What he’d expected her to say and what she had in fact said were universes apart, and he had to force his brain to make a U-turn. He felt a little queasy with the shift.
“John?” her voice was low, her tone pleading, and John shook free of his shock.
“I won’t hurt you. I thought we were already at the bottom together.”
“I guess I was still holding on to the edge. Now I’m gonna try to let go.”
“I love you. I’ll catch you.” He took her face in his hands and kissed her. She closed her arms around his waist and kissed him right back.
He walked her backward a few steps until he had her against the door. The sound and feel of the impact told him at once that somebody was right on the other side of the door, listening in, and he knew exactly who it was. He leaned away from Katrynn and said, “Fuck off, Joe!”
Joey’s answering chortle proved the point.