When she smiled she lit up the world almost as brightly as her mother. But when she was at rest, she seemed near tears. He felt a powerful urge, even stronger than he felt for the others, to gather her up and shelter her.
Elisa truly was vulnerable. She struggled with anxiety and depression to the extent that she’d been on medications and in therapy since tenth grade. She felt everything as a crisis, and they’d worked hard to help her find a safe path in a difficult world. But to Nick, Lia sometimes seemed even more in need, like she was hiding it and therefore left to feel it alone.
He leaned against the jamb as it occurred to him that it was more than the tilt of her eyes provoking that feeling in him. Was that not what he and Beverly had spoken of this evening? Lia was struggling.
But she’d been doing it alone. Not making a fuss. Being their good girl.
Fuck. Well, fuck.
He brought her door quietly closed, went down the hall, peeked in on Carina, who was zonked out on her belly with her pillow halfway over her head. Hurricane Carina. He could hear her earbuds from the door, so he went in, picked his way around the mess of her room, and plucked them gently from her perfect ears. She moaned and shoved her head the rest of the way under the pillow.
Nick made his way back to the hall and closed her door. Ren was sleeping away tonight, so Nick passed his door and headed to the end of the hall and the room he shared with his wife.
Beverly was asleep, too, curled on her side, her back to his side of the bed. Going into their bathroom first, he filled a glass from the tap and swallowed down the last of his day’s ration of pills—he would suffer the effects of the shooting for the rest of his life—and brushed his teeth.
Back at the bed, he stripped and slid under the covers, tucking himself close behind his wife.
She purred softly and shifted, fitting her body where it belonged with his. He nuzzled his face in the soft skin at the crook of her neck and breathed in the sweet of her.
More than twenty years. He was approaching seventy, and she was past fifty. They both looked their age, he thought. He felt older. But the feel of her still thrilled him as much as ever.
Beverly was his sun—the center of his universe, the light of his life. He’d been in his mid-forties when she’d first shone on him. Before then, he’d never thought to have anything like such a family. He was a hard, cold man, he prided himself on it, and he hadn’t seen any softness in himself that could yield to this kind of love.
But Beverly had found him, turned her light on him, and given him all this. This perfect, wonderful chaos of a family. Beautiful wife, beautiful children, beautiful love.
All he’d wanted since was to protect them.
But he’d failed so many times.
~ 6 ~
Alex woke to the best smell in the world: bacon.
Oh, and biscuits! And coffee, too, of course. If he knew his mother—and who knew her better?—there would be eggs as well. Sunnyside up, baby.
He lay in his childhood bed and crossed his arms under his head for a minute, just to take in the orgasmic pleasure of all those aromas promising a big Saturday morning breakfast.
Alex still lived with his mother when he wasn’t living in the Providence apartment on his Lia-lurking gig. He hadn’t found a good reason to move out yet, and his mother liked having him around. Saturday morning breakfasts had been one of their things when he was a kid, but since he’d been grown, they’d sort of fallen out of the habit. There were a lot of Friday nights he was out late on Pagano business—or just out enjoying being a young man with a Pagano rep—and a lot of Saturday mornings he spent sleeping past breakfast the morning after.
Saturdays were her busiest days in the salon down cellar, so after he’d made more habit of sleeping through breakfast than eating it, she’d taken to opening earlier and offering more appointments.
He hadn’t expected to be awakened this morning to so many savory, nostalgic scents and memories.
Mango, his mother’s obese ginger cat, jumped onto his bed and climbed onto his chest, purring and making biscuits at once, sinking rhythmic claws into his bare skin.