She turned her head to his. With a little, hesitant smile, she said, “This is a surprising morning. But yes, I think I would like to look at that again.”
“I love you, Misby.” He kissed her shoulder again and took a banana to his precious, precocious child.
~oOo~
Bina was taking Trey to preschool and then opening the yarn shop for Andi. Carlo and Peter had a lunch meeting at Connelly—they’d won that job, and Carlo was already, in the short time since they’d gotten the news, fighting the desire to let the work consume him. This was huge. This was why he’d become an architect. He was making something unique, something that would change the Providence skyline. And he was doing it for a man with vision, to whom Carlo could speak and be understood. This job would make his career. And Peter’s. It would make their little company something to notice.
Bina and Trey would keep him grounded, he knew, but still, some part of his brain was constantly, constantly seeing, making the new building.
Peter and Carlo were doing okay. The friendship wasn’t quite as it had been, but the business stuff had worked itself out. Carlo thought that his working much more often away from the office helped with that. Peter had free rein to do his thing, schmooze away, without his scowling presence. And when the meeting or the lunch was important enough to need the ‘talent,’ then Carlo went in.
They had yet to need to attend an evening function, but one was coming up. Connelly was planning a big do for the announcement of the winner and reveal of the preliminary design.
Bina had paled at the news, and upon seeing her face, Carlo, disappointed though he was, told her she needn’t attend. But she’d said that was silly, of course she’d go with him. She would be proud to be with him. He loved her for that, as well as for a million other reasons. They both knew that cameras would flash like crazy to see James Auberon’s widow on the arm of Carlo Pagano Jr., of those Paganos. Rumors had been flying for months, since Auberon’s ‘shocking and untimely’ death. So it would be a test of them both. But it was also the first time he’d ever had even a glimmer of interest or excitement about a formal event. Leading Sabina on his arm? That was worth wearing the monkey suit and fake-smiling through a night.
Carlo stopped at the hospital on the way out of town. Joey was…different, now. Though Jenny’s bullet had hit the right side of his chest and gone wide of his heart, and missed his lungs, too, it had sliced through a major artery. By the time they’d gotten him to St. Gabriel’s, he’d lost a great deal of blood and gone into shock. Function in his lungs and brain had been compromised, and apparently there was a hard limit to how much of that lost function he’d recover.
His injuries seemed to be manifesting in a chronic shortness of breath and in drastically slower speech. More than simply slow—it seemed not always to occur to him that he should speak—like it took him an extra beat or two to recognize that someone had asked him a question, and then another beat or two to formulate a response, which itself came in a slow, sometimes stuttering delivery, as if he were searching for every word. They’d unwired his jaw the night of the shooting—he’d been due to have it done a couple of days after that, anyway, and they’d needed to intubate him. He’d been much quieter than normal for weeks before that, but this, the way he used words now, was disconcerting, to say the least.
His doctors suggested that he probably would regain some breath as he healed, but that his speech patterns would likely always be different in this way. They called it ‘aphasia.’ His intelligence hadn’t been affected, but the connections in his brain that helped him put thought into word were now faulty. There was some therapy they were doing, but no one had held out hope that Joey would ever be what he’d been.
It was difficult for Carlo to think about Joey—hyper, goofy Joey, always quick with a joke or an asinine comment, always on the make in one way or another—as the same person as this slow, quiet, gasping young man with his forehead always creased.
Jenny had done this, too. And so had Carlo himself. He knew blame rested on Jenny’s dead shoulders, but he felt the weight of guilt and regret on his. He had been hard on Joey in the weeks before the shooting. He had thought too little of his baby brother.
He’d be discharged soon, and he was coming back to the house. It would be months before he could live on his own. He wasn’t so disabled that he couldn’t take care of himself eventually, but he was weak and uncertain. Carlo was going to talk to Natalie after the Connelly meeting, and see if she would consider coming to Quiet Cove to work for the family—or, if not (and he didn’t think she would; she was a nanny, not a nurse), if she could recommend someone who could help him.