Not that he’d minded the result.
As Carlo helped his enthusiastic son out of his car seat, a voice called to him from the site. “Hey, Carlo!”
Recognizing the voice, Carlo rolled his eyes, set his son down, turned and closed the door. “Vince.”
Vince Abandonato was a cousin, their mother’s nephew. He was also basically a shithead. Too much of a loser in life not to be harmless, he’d been the kind of kid who hung out all night at the mini-mart with a couple similarly uninspiring cohorts. Raised on the shore but had never learned to swim, much less surf, he simply never got anything done. But he had a chip on his shoulder about it, as if he hadn’t been given his due, and that was why success had eluded him. So he was a loser and an asshole. As a favor to his dead wife’s sister, Carlo Sr. had put him on a crew as a gopher right out of high school, and he’d sort of accidentally worked himself up to drywaller, a job at which he’d been good enough to keep. He was doing okay, as far as Carlo knew.
He was in the Pagano sibling shithouse, though, because at the most recent Christmas party, he’d made a very heavy pass at Rosa—more than a pass, in fact. His first cousin. And the Pagano baby. Luca and Carlo had had to pull him off her. Then all the Pagano boys had taken him outside and beaten the shit out of him in the snowy back yard, while Dean Martin and Doris Day sang about how cold it was outside. When they’d sent him off, bloody and limping, they’d gone back inside to find that their father had seen the whole thing. He’d nodded, once, and turned away, his arm around Rosa.
Why he had not fired Vince was beyond Carlo, but here Vince was, hailing him like they were buds.
“How you doin’, man?” Vince looked down at Trey. “Hey, little guy! You good?”
“Yes I am. We came to see Pop-Pop.”
Carlo nodded and put his hand on Trey’s hardhat. “Yeah, we did. Let’s go find him.”
From behind him, Vince called out, “You ever gonna let up on me?”
“No.” He answered without turning back. He put his own hardhat on as they entered the job site, going into the main house to look first.
Carlo had started working for his father while he was in high school. He still loved job sites—the smells of sawn wood, poured concrete, drywall, spackle, paint, the sounds of tools and machinery, the shouts and calls of workers, all of it made him feel at home. He’d enjoyed the work, too, for the most part. What he’d hated was building to plans he could tell were flawed or substandard. It had made him feel compromised and indignant. He could see the flaws—he could read a blueprint almost from the first time he’d ever seen one, and he could read between its lines. He could see the finished, three-dimensional building on the page. And he was usually disappointed.
Now, he designed buildings that didn’t disappoint him. And he got on the job site and out of the office, away from boardrooms, as often as he could.
He heard his father before he saw him—in the kitchen of the main house, arguing with Luca, voices raised. Carlo grabbed Trey’s hand and held him back. Before he called out, he heard enough to know that they’d already learned that they’d lost the bid Luca had talked to him about, the one he’d thought their father had underbid. Carlo Sr. was on the warpath.
Great timing for a visit, then.
He wanted to hear more, because he was worried about his father. It wasn’t like him to shave a bid too close. He protected his company, and he protected his workers. The company had never struggled to win bids, often over lower bids. Their reputation for high quality work, on time and on budget, had always given them an edge. Even during the really hard years of the recent housing crash, Carlo Sr. had kept things moving—slowly, yes. Painfully. But he’d gotten everyone through, and that was because he’d never cut things too close. So why had he tried now?
With Trey here, though, he couldn’t let the argument go on. So he called out, “Pop? You around?”
A sharp silence chopped off the quarrel, then Luca yelled, “Kitchen!”
Carlo smiled down at Trey, who’d heard enough that his little brow had wrinkled. “I bet Pop-Pop’s hungry, huh?”
“Yes but we didn’t bring a sabbitch for Uncle Luca.”
“Well, I bet he has his own sandwich.”
“Okay, if he won’t be mad like Pop-Pop is mad.”
Dammit. “Pop-Pop isn’t mad, and Uncle Luca won’t be, either. You know sometimes we get excited and talk too loud. It’s okay. Come on.” Hating the way Trey had suddenly become reluctant, his head down, Carlo led him to the large kitchen, which was nearly complete.