Footsteps(9)

Knowing that Elsa wouldn’t quiet until she’d been freed from the car and could run off to greet the family, and not in the mood to shout over her din, Carlo only met his son’s eyes in the rearview mirror and smiled. Trey grinned back, his bright, almost triangular smile so like his mother’s it caused conflict in his father’s heart.





Jenny had been gone nine months, since the night after Trey’s third birthday party. And Carlo had found the place in his anger and betrayal where love and loss had been killed. That was a good place, a place from which he could move forward. Now he waited for the day when he could look at his beautiful, adored child and see only Trey and not the woman who’d given him nearly every physical feature—blond hair, green eyes, that angular smile. Trey was Jenny’s doppelganger.





Shortly after she’d run off, Joey had made a crack about whether Trey might not be Carlo’s. He’d meant it as a joke, a stupid joke, Joey’s specialty, but Carlo had broken his nose for him nevertheless.





Trey was his. He knew that was true. Jenny had been twined around him when Trey was conceived and born. Whatever had happened later, during that time, there had been no room for anyone but them. So Carlo knew that Trey was his.





He also knew that even if there had been the remotest chance that he was wrong, he was still right. They shared more than a name, whether they looked alike or not. That child in the back seat was his. Period.





He pulled up to his family home, behind John’s pickup, Elsa by now so excited that she was almost bouncing on the seat next to Trey, turning back and forth from the window to his booster seat, licking him and then hurrying back to shove her head out the window and bark at the people on the walk—Rosa, Joey, and John. The gleeful dance of her hundred-and-fifty-pound body had Carlo’s Porsche Macan rocking back and forth. He parked and let her out first. She bounded onto the walk, and Joey patted his chest, inviting her to jump up on him—which she did. On her hind legs, she was nose to nose with his six-foot-tall brother.





Joey took it as his special mission in life to see to it that everyone misbehaved as much as he did.





As soon as Trey was released from his booster and had his feet on the ground, he ran over to his uncles and aunt. Elsa had moved on to cuddles from Rosa, the youngest sibling, and Joey dropped to a squat to accept into his arms the tornado that was Trey.





“Hey, Three-peat! How’s it hangin’?”





Trey looked down and around at himself. “How’s what hangin’, Uncle Joey?”





“Joey.” Carlo raised his voice just enough to catch his brother’s attention. When he had it, he shook his head, and Joey grinned with faux innocence. He looked back at his nephew with the same puckish smirk.





“The sun in the sky, little bro. The sun in the sky.”





“The sun doesn’t hang. That’s silly. It’s faaaaaaar away in space.” He raised his hands high over his head. “It’s a star that comes out in the daytime.”





“Well, you’re smarter than me, that’s for sure. Wanna go in and see Pop-Pop?”





“Yeah! And sharks! Will you show me sharks?”





Joey looked up at Carlo and gave him a Who me? shrug. Yeah. Great.





“We’ll have to see if we can find one.” Then he picked Trey up and carried him up the steps and into the house.





As Carlo opened the hatch to grab their bags, Rosa and John both came back. Rosa, twenty years old and the pampered baby princess of the family, wrapped her arms around his waist. He turned and hugged her back, leaning down to kiss her temple. “Hi, there. You good?” She’d had a big, angsty breakup a month or so ago and had almost bailed on her spring semester at Brown.





“Yeah, I’m okay.” She stepped out of their embrace and raked her long hair back from her head. Rosa was always doing something funky to the color of her naturally dark hair. Now it had heavy blonde highlights, sort of the color of honey. “Might not go back to the dorm in the fall, though.”





Their father had not brooked any discussion of Rosa going to college far from home, so she was at Brown, barely an hour’s drive from this house. She was the only of the brood to have attended college after their mother died—only Carlo and Carmen, the eldest, had attended before that—and their father couldn’t stand the thought of his baby being far away. With the allied efforts of her siblings, she’d wrested from him the concession that she could live on campus. Giving up that concession, Carlo thought, would quickly be something she’d regret.