I can’t breathe,” Alex groaned. “I swear you weigh fifty pounds.” With a quick scratch behind the old cat’s ears, he hefted him off the bed and got up to enjoy a Saturday morning at home.
~oOo~
As soon as he came into the room, his mother grinned and broke three eggs into the hot bacon grease in the skillet. His stomach did a little happy dance.
It smelled even better right up close. All his senses came alive with the certainty of home. As long as he lived, this right here would be his ideal feeling of home. His mamma, making him a favorite meal in this kitchen, with its weird old wallpaper covered in little drawings of daffodils and copper pots and pans. Fresh autumn sun streaming through the leaded-glass windows that were her favorite feature of their little house.
“Mornin’, Ma. You takin’ the day off?”
“Mornin’, spawn.” She tipped her round cheek up, and he kissed it. “Nope, got a full schedule, but my first appointment cancelled last minute, so I decided to make my boy a good meal.”
Alex poured himself a mug of coffee. “And your boy loves you for it.”
“The stomach is the way to every man’s heart, after all.”
“That’s what they say.” Taking his coffee to the table, he asked, “You got anything you need me to do today?”
“You got the day off?”
“Far as I know, yeah. Tomorrow, too.”
“Oh, son of mine, you might come to regret sharing such compromising information. I am going to make you a list.”
Alex laughed and leaned back in his chair. “You don’t scare me, Ma. Do your worst.”
~oOo~
Her list wasn’t so bad. She wanted him to rake the leaves and do a last mow of the lawn, put up the storm windows upstairs, change the air filter, oil a few squeaks and tighten a few shakes.
He liked yard work, so he started with the leaves and the lawn. It was a good day, September right on the cusp on October, with a brisk touch of autumn in the air but not too much breeze to make raking leaves annoying.
Other neighbors had similar plans for the day, and he waved at the next-door dads on both sides as they worked in their yards, too.
Damn, Alex really needed this time away. He hadn’t realized how tense he’d been since last weekend until he’d finally relaxed.
That realization brought the previous weekend back to the forefront and almost lost him this needed calm. Shit, Lia had almost been raped on his watch. The don’s daughter had almost been raped. On his watch.
Before that got hold of him, he shoved it aside. Just like Lia apparently had. The whole past week, she’d been normal, he thought. Acting like everything was okay. Not rattled at all.
On the other hand, he’d been beset with anxieties about what could have happened—if the little blonde had distracted him and he’d missed Crenville taking the vial from his pocket, or if there had been somebody else waiting for a chance to hurt her while Alex was dealing with Crenville, or a hundred other ifs. Each thought that he’d done everything right had come with a partner of what could have gone wrong.
Yeah, he really needed this weekend away. Spending it on mundane household chores was like therapy.
One of those mundane chores was the loose downspout, and he was up on the ladder, replacing a some rusted screws and metal straps, when his phone vibrated in his pocket.
He hooked his arm around the ladder and pulled the phone out. The name on the screen was TC.
Tony Cioccolanti. His capo.
Which suggested he wouldn’t be finishing his mother’s honey-do list after all. So much for therapy.
“Yeah, Tony,” he answered. “What’s up?”
“Need you at PBS in twenty. My office,” Tony said.
“There trouble?” It was a dumb thing to ask; there was no chance Tony would say anything about Pagano work on this phone.
“Twenty minutes.”
The call went dead.
Alex risked a couple minutes to finish this one job and then worked his way down the ladder.
~oOo~
There was a shift working the warehouse today, so the parking lot at Pagano Brothers Shipping was about a third full or so, mainly in the back. Tony was the scheduler for his day job, so his office was in the warehouse. Alex parked in back and swung up into one of the trucking bays to enter the warehouse.
Most of the guys did that—it was just cooler than going up the steps and through the boring old regular door.