Rooted (Pagano Family #3)(47)

He hadn’t been breathing.

Luckily, Luca was part of Quiet Cove’s volunteer search and rescue team, and he’d administered CPR immediately and had their father breathing before the ambulance could get there. Not conscious, but breathing.

There had been substantial damage to his heart, though, and he’d spent most of that day having open-heart surgery. He was now stable but still unconscious.

Rosa pulled up short as they arrived at the entrance to the waiting room. Carmen could see that it was full of family. There were a lot of Paganos. When they came together, they filled up a room.

“Wait.” Rosa pulled on Carmen’s hand, trying to bring her away from the door.

“What is it, hon?”

“I can’t. I’m not ready.”

John stepped up and brushed his hand down Rosa’s arm. “C’mon, Cookie. It’s just family. Everybody missed you.”

Her lip trembled. “What if…what if something happened since you came for us, though?”

“Carlo would have called. C’mon.” Carmen changed her hold on Rosa’s hand, linking their fingers. “We’ll go in together. Family is where we need to be, hon. Family is the most important thing we have.”

Rosa lifted sad, wet, red-rimmed eyes to her. She was exhausted. Carmen could relate. She hadn’t slept since the morning before, when she’d woken up alone in bed in Paris and lain there listening to Rosa and Eli love each other and eat Dutch babies—which, it turned out, were a kind of enormous pancake.

“Okay.”

Carmen held her hand, and John put his arm around her, and they went into the waiting room, where they were immediately swallowed up in family love. Everybody took their turn hugging them, both comfort and welcome home. Rosa fairly fell into Carlo’s arms, sobbing, and Carmen smiled sadly. Rosa had always had the kind of adoration for her eldest brother usually reserved for messiahs and rock stars. She watched as Carlo, whispering, “Shh, shh, shh. C’mon, Peanut, I got ya,” lifted Rosa off her feet and walked her to the only quiet corner of the room.

Carlo, John, and Luca all had some kind of goofy food nickname for Rosa. ‘Peanut,’ or ‘Cookie,’ or ‘Shortcake.’ Joey called her ‘Grossa’; they didn’t get along much.

Everybody called Carmen ‘Caramel,’ when they were feeling extra affectionate—which wasn’t often, thank God.

None of the brothers had nicknames, really, except some derivation of ‘brother’ or some shortening of their actual name. During Carmen’s angry feminist years in college, she’d tried to get the family to consider why the girls got food names. But they’d all thought she and her hairy pits were hilarious. Even her mother, still alive at the time, thought she was thinking too much about words meant in affection.

Eventually, she’d decided she agreed. She’d also started shaving again, because, hey—she liked men, and the men she was attracted to weren’t attracted to hairy women. And then she had settled in the Cove and taken her mother’s place. But she was still feminist.

And still angry.

She looked around and noticed a decided lack of women in the room. Only Manny, Luca’s wife, was there, sitting off by herself. She wasn’t good with crowds or with big shows of emotion, so Carmen just sent her a little smile when their eyes met. Manny was a good little chick. She worked hard to overcome the shit life had dumped on her head from the moment she’d taken her first breath.

“Where’s Sabina? And Adele?”

Luca answered. “Adele’s with Pop. Sabina has Trey at home. It’s the middle of the night, Carm.”

“Oh.” She had no idea what time it was; jetlag and time zones were f*cking with her circadian rhythm. “Right. Is that why the Uncles aren’t here? Because they should f*cking be here.”

“Yeah. They took Aunt Angie and Aunt Betty home. Nick is…doing what Nick does. I didn’t ask.”

“So tell me. What the f*ck is going on?”

“There’s a lot they won’t say. It’s what John and Manny and I got caught up in, though. I’m sure of that. Somebody making a play to take the Uncles down. Somebody who plays by different rules. Or no rules.”

“So why don’t they just crush the f*cker?”

“I don’t know, Carm. I’m not invited to sit in on their meetings. They’ve kept the family safe. It’s the business they’re going after, anyway. Pop took losing Norm hard. He blames himself, and he’s been off his game since. What happened to him was stress. But the family is safe.”

She shook her head. They weren’t safe. “It could have been you in that fire, Luc.”

“No. We’ve had people watching our backs. And since the fire, the Uncles have people watching the job sites, too. We’re still getting hurt, because they’re f*cking with suppliers and shit, but we’ll pull through it. The Uncles never lose. They’ll figure it out.”

She wasn’t sure she was as convinced as Luca sounded, but he’d been here all along, not gallivanting around Europe without a care in the world. Until now. “How is he?”

Luca shrugged, but his expression was pained. “Out, still. He might have been lying there on the floor for ten minutes before I got there. We tried to work out how long between when Adele said he left for the office and when I got there. It could have been ten minutes he was lying there. He still had his coffee and his lunchbox. He barely got in the door. If he stopped breathing right away, then…Jesus, Carm.”