Rooted (Pagano Family #3)(82)

This was why staying in Quiet Cove was right.

Afterward, Luca got a text from Manny, letting him know she was home from spending the day in Providence with her folks. It wasn’t long thereafter that he wanted to head home. Carmen teased him gently about being whipped, but he only grinned. He wasn’t whipped. He was in love. Manny was his home.

As he was putting on his coat, and John, recently single again and in no hurry to go, was rooting around in her refrigerator, Carmen’s phone rang. It was Adele. She answered with a smile—their father’s sixty-sixth birthday was coming up, the first since he and Adele had been married, and since his heart attack and near-death. Adele wanted to celebrate and was planning a party. Carmen expected the call to be related to those plans.

“Hey, Adele. What’s up?”

“Carmen, I need you. Your father needs you. Can you come? And your brothers. Nobody’s home next door. Carlo’s phone went to voice mail. I don’t know what to do.”

“Carlo and Sabina took the boys to see Natalie, Adele. What’s wrong?” At her words, Luca, who had been in mid-wave and on his way out the door, and John, whose head had been deep in her refrigerator, both locked on her. It’s Pop, she mouthed.

“Oh, honey. He’s so upset. I don’t know…I can’t…”

“Adele! Jesus motherf*cking Christ! What happened?!”

“It’s Lorrie. Ben just called. Somebody shot Lorrie. Carmen…he’s dead.”



oOo



Carmen, Luca, and John went straight to their father, and then they took him and Adele to Uncle Ben’s house, where the family was congregating. Uncle Ben and Aunt Angie lived on the highest point of Quiet Cove, in an area officially called Quiet Bluff but known by townies as Greenback Hill, because it was where all the money went to live. All the houses on that one cul de sac at the top of the hill had panoramic views of the ocean, but were far enough removed from the beach not to be disturbed by the regular folk.

As usual in the evening, the house was fully lit, so that it glowed almost like a lighthouse on the top of the hill. In fact, when all five of the houses here were illuminated, the light seemed to be nearly as bright as the beacon from the actual Quiet Cove lighthouse. It couldn’t be, not really, but more than one night sailor had said that Greenback Hill was the first thing that told them they were in sight of home.

Even with the bright lights, though, on this night the house seemed somber. The long drive was full of cars and SUVs, most of them black. Mourners from the Uncles’ blood family and their other ‘family’ had all gathered together to give comfort and pay respect.

Uncle Lorrie, who lived elsewhere in town, had been shot on his front lawn, coming back from walking Aunt Betty’s two Yorkies. He enjoyed an evening walk every night after dinner. He had a guard with him, as always; the guard, Freddy, was dead, too. Aunt Betty had found them, the dogs yapping wildly, bound by their little pink leashes to the body of her husband.

Carlo and Sabina had planned to spend the night in Providence but came home, straight to Uncle Ben’s. Trey had fallen asleep shortly after he’d arrived and was now ensconced in a guestroom, oblivious to the pall in the house. Carmen called Rosa, and she and Eli, with farther to travel, would come for the funeral. Uncle Ben’s daughters and their families, who were all scattered around the country and rarely came back to Rhode Island, would be arriving for the funeral as well.

So odd, how the shrinking of a family through loss was the one thing—more even than the growing of family through weddings and births—that would draw a whole family together.

Carmen thought about calling Theo, but realized that there was no reason to tell him. He had never met Uncle Lorrie, and Carmen had no right to seek comfort from him for herself. If it was comfort that she needed. She loved Uncle Lorrie, but in a detached way, without real resonance. Her memories of him as a younger man were tinged with an edge of discomfort; she remembered bursts of temper that had ruined family gatherings. But that had changed as he aged, and for years, he’d been simply a nice old man she saw on Sundays, mostly. A nice old man with a wide, cold streak right through his heart. He had been the Pagano Brothers first enforcer, a role he’d passed down to his son, Nick.

Her distress was for her father, really, who was taking the loss hard. He sat in Aunt Angie’s little sitting room with Adele and Aunt Betty, Lorrie’s widow, cradling his sister-in-law in his arms. Aunt Betty was flaccid and silent, allowing Carlo Sr. to rock her and Adele to pat her leg. She looked like a woman who needed a good, hard cry but had been refusing herself the release. She looked like a woman soon to blow. Carmen’s father didn’t look much better. She wanted to comfort him, but he looked brittle enough to break, so when she checked in on them, she held his eyes for a moment and tried to send him her love that way. He gave her a small smile and a short nod. With that reassurance that he would be okay, she left him and looked for somewhere else to be.

After meeting his obligations as host and member—leader—of the family, Uncle Ben, looking haggard, retired to his study with Nick and various business associates. The doors closed, and the tone in the rest of the house got marginally lighter. The dangerous men had locked themselves away.

Carmen’s brothers and the less significant men of the Uncles’ business filled the living room, looking uncomfortable in Aunt Angie’s fussy, professionally-decorated taste. Carmen wanted to be there, with them, but she knew the men who were not her brothers would be silenced, if not scandalized, to have a woman in their midst. They were not enlightened souls. So she went back to the kitchen—an even more aggressively opulent room, full of carved wood and pearl grey marble. The women—wives, girlfriends, family—bustled about, doing what women were supposed to do. They prepared food, they fussed over Little Ben, and they tsked about the loss and the horror of it.