Rooted (Pagano Family #3)(21)

But she couldn’t. The answer—that the intensity between them was making her anxious—would only open more questions. So she said simply, “I don’t know. It feels like a bad idea.”

“Not to me.” He brought his mouth down close to hers, within millimeters. “It feels like a very good idea to me.”

She wanted to kiss him. She’d barely have to move at all to make that happen. Instead, she shook her head. “No, Theo. This is the time to stop this.”

A heavy sigh, his breath caressing her face, and then he took a step back. “Will you let me have your phone for a sec?”

“What?”

He held his hand out. “I’ll give you my number. Then it’s up to you whether we see each other again.”

Failing to see the flaw in that idea, she handed him her phone, and he keyed his number into her contacts. He handed it back to her, then leaned in and kissed her cheek, a lingering brush of his lips over her skin.

“Au revoir, beautiful girl.” With that, he walked to the elevator.

She closed the door. His scent and touch filled her still.



oOo



The copper pot was nowhere near enough.

About an hour after Theo and his sons had left, while Carmen was sitting on the balcony stewing about the curse of discontent that seemed to follow her f*cking everywhere for f*cking ever, Rosa moaned loudly—really it was more of a scream—and Carmen jumped up and went to her. She found her on the floor of the bedroom, having already made a mess in and around the pot. Now she was trying to work her way to the bathroom.

Banana daiquiri and Jell-O shots, combined with whatever food had remained of Rosa’s dinner, made a particularly noxious concoction. Ugh. But Carmen picked Rosa up and led her to the bathroom. She held her hair while she puked some more. Then she sat on the marble floor, with Rosa’s head in her lap, stroking her hair and comforting her as she cried.

As predicted.

“I suck. I suck, I suck, I suck,” Rosa wailed.

“You don’t suck, sissy. You’re beautiful and smart. You just got drunk.”

“No—you think I suck. You think…you think I’m imm’chure and vasc…vasu…vac-u-ous. That’s what you said.”

Yes, she was immature. But no, in fact, Carmen did not think Rosa was vacuous. She thought she played vacuous. She scoured her brain, trying to think when she would have said that to her face. Shit, maybe she’d overheard something. Carmen had a tendency to rant. She might have said something along those lines to Luca or Carlo, maybe.

“You’re not vacuous, Rosie. You can’t graduate cum laude from Brown and be vacuous.”

Their bizarre discussion was interrupted by more tropical-flavored puking, and when Rosa resumed her pity party, she had moved on slightly.

“And now Eli thinks I suck, too, because I suck. And he’s so pretty and nice. And pretty. And nice.”

“You met him a few hours ago, sis. Even if he does think you suck, it doesn’t change your life at all.”

She cried harder, wrapping her arms around Carmen’s thigh. “You don’t know. You don’t know. Nobody knows.”

Feeling sad and guilty, Carmen cradled her sister close, pressed her lips to her hair, and held her.



oOo



Rosa finally emptied her belly around three-thirty and was able to keep some water down. Carmen got her back into bed and tucked her in. Then she stretched out on the comfy sofa with her tablet. Instead of taking on Infinite Jest at this ungodly hour, she opened Orchids in Autumn and scrolled through the passages she’d highlighted when she’d first read the book.

It is said that time heals all wounds. That is a lie. Time hardens wounds, leaves scars—flesh without feeling. Thick. Numb.

I treasure every moment that Maggie lingered with us, her bad days as well as her good, even the days toward the end when she was erratic and confused, when that confusion made her cruel. But sometimes I wish that it had been a bus or a train, even a gun, that had so changed our lives. Something quick, sudden, without time to prepare. Because there’s never time to prepare. There is no preparing. There is only time.

Loving someone for a generation is a way of being in the world that becomes comfortable, like a piece of clothing or jewelry worn every day—a watch. Something you think about when you need it, something you expect always to feel the presence of in some way only apparent by its absence. Losing Maggie was like losing my watch. I keep checking my heart and finding it bare. And I have no way left of marking the passage of my time.

Several other, similar passages were highlighted as well. She remembered that the title had come from a scene at the end of Maggie’s days, when Theo, Eli, and Jordan had gone on a mission to fill her room with her favorite flower, a mission made more difficult because she’d loved spring-blooming orchids but had died in October. They’d succeeded, and Maggie had died in a room teeming with her favorite, white and purple flowers. The title had nothing to do with time, other than it was the end of Maggie’s.

But Carmen had never before noticed how often the theme of time arose in Theo’s memoir, and she’d never thought about why those passages resonated with her enough to mark them. She knew that she’d loved the book because his musings on grief had spoken to how she’d felt when her mother was dying. Losing a spouse was different, she was sure, from losing a parent. But as personal and particular as Theo’s experience was, Carmen recognized herself in it. And, if her annotations were to be trusted, time seemed to be the pivot of her recognition. She wondered why.