Chapter Sixteen
Max
I slide into the backseat of the SUV. It smells like leather and expensive cologne. My nose scrunches up and I fight a flinch as the door closes behind me.
I can feel Cal’s eyes on me from where he sits in the seat next to me, but I focus intently on buckling up, narrating each movement in my head, pretending the buckle is so very interesting; I must give it my full attention.
Once buckled, the window and door are also very intriguing, so I must examine them.
Two more doors shut and the two burly men are now in the front. I feel a hand on top of mine. I look over and realize my knuckles are white from where my fingers grip the armrest.
I watch his fingers run gently across the tops of my knuckles. His hand dwarfs mine, reminding me what it felt like when he held me up under the thighs and carried me across campus.
Safe. It’s Cal.
His hand disappears and he clears his throat. “We can stop at the house, then we need to go to my place.”
The man driving nods. He has dark, slicked back hair and his face looks rough, both with age and something else I can’t place. I catch his eyes in the rearview mirror, and they crinkle deeply at the edges as he smiles at me.
“You gonna introduce us to your friend, boss?”
His accent is thick, but his tone is almost jolly. The guy next to him groans and scrubs his hand down his face.
He is younger than the driver but still looks to be in his thirties. His hair is lighter and he shakes his head with a sigh.
“What friend?” is Cal’s ice-cold response. “I only see the both of you and me in this car. What about you, Gio, you see anyone else in this car?”
“Nope,” the younger man agrees. “That’s all I see, too, boss.”
The air seems to go cold as both men straighten, all joking sucked from the cab.
My throat bobs with a hard swallow and I blink, trying to stop my eyes from widening.
Cal alluding to me being off limits as a subject of discussion doesn’t stop the discussion between the two men at the front, though. I listen as they discuss lunch plans, arguing over what restaurant has better pasta while Cal stares out his own window as we drive.
Unsure if regret is swimming in my stomach or their discussion has just made me hungry, I look down at my lap. Cal has been gone for years. But he also wasn’t gone, because he was at Ellison. And when he wasn’t at Ellison, he was here—in Providence.
“Stay in the car,” Cal says as the SUV pulls through iron gates up to a house that is warm, large and looks like something out of a movie about people who have family dinners that last four to six hours.
“With two strangers? No.”
He turns to look at me and I’m already unbuckling.
“No offense,” I say, leaning forward slightly toward the two men in the front, “to either of you fine gentlemen.”
The older one in the driver’s seat makes a sound that might be a laugh. The younger one keeps his eyes forward.
Cal looks at the ceiling of the car. He takes a breath that a person takes when they are collecting significant patience.
“Cal.”
Another breath. “Fine.” He opens his door and circles to mine to open it. “But remember—”
I step out and he shuts the car door behind me. “No names, I know, I remember, it was very clear in the car there that I’m invisible.”
“No names,” he says it again quietly, just for me, as we walk up the front path. His hand finds the small of my back, his fingertips pressing softly in a way that feels natural now as he steers me gently toward the door. “And stay close to me.”
“Is there danger behind this fancy, suburban door, Cal?”
The door opens before we reach it.
The woman standing in the doorway is in her mid-fifties, with dark hair pulled up high on her head, and Cal’s exact smile and the golden-green eyes that I have apparently been drooling over for nine years. She’s wearing an apron. It has flour on it.
She sees Cal and her hands fly to her face.
“Calogero—” the unfamiliar word comes out like a prayer and a scolding simultaneously.
She steps forward and takes his face in both her hands, pulling him in the doorway and looking at him the way mothers look at children they have been worrying about.
“You didn’t tell me you were coming! I would have made lunch.
You look thin. Are you eating? You’re not eating.
You never eat when you’re away, I can tell every single time—”
Then she sees me.
Her hands drop from his face.
Her eyes go very wide and I stop one step into the threshold.
And then she makes a sound that I can only describe as the sound of a woman whose prayers have been answered in a way she didn’t expect but absolutely accepts. Something between a sob and a shriek.
“Oh—” She steps around Cal entirely; she even makes a show of pushing him out of the way as if he has ceased to exist. “Oh, look at you!”
Her hands find my face the way they just found his, warm and certain, and she looks at me with so much careful attention I feel my cheeks heat.
“She’s beautiful, Calogero, my God—” she says it over her shoulder at him without looking away from me. “Is this why you never come home? You’ve been hiding her from me? How could you, Calogero, how could you?”
“Mamma—”
“Come, come, I’m making coffee, you’ll have coffee—” Her arm loops around my waist tightly, and she walks me deeper into the house with the confidence of a woman who has never once been told no and doesn’t intend to start.
“I’m Carmela—oh, I’m just so happy to meet you, you’re gorgeous! She’s gorgeous, Calogero.”
“It’s so nice to meet you, I’m Max—”
I hear Cal make a sound behind me. I look back. He has both hands up by his face and he’s looking at the ceiling like he’s asking a god for extra patience.
“Already forgetting the rules, Max,” he says quietly, almost to himself.
I make a face at him. He shakes his head. I mouth, sorry, and he just puts his hands in his pockets, shaking his head and follows us into a kitchen.
The kitchen smells like coffee, and something baking and it has that lived in feeling, while also being jaw-dropping. The counters, the appliances, it’s a chef’s dream.
Cal’s mother has already deposited me at a large kitchen island and is moving between the espresso machine and the stove like she has been feeding people her whole life and enjoys every second of it.
“We don’t have time for—” Cal starts.
“You have time for coffee,” his mother says, in a tone that is not a suggestion, with a look towards him that doesn’t open it up for discussion.
But Cal persists, “Ma, I just need to grab something from Nico in the office, and then we have to—”
She turns from the stove and looks at him. One look. The look that absolutely transcends language and culture, and the fact that her eldest son apparently runs a criminal enterprise… because he stops talking immediately.
“The first time,” she says, pointing a wooden spoon in his direction, taking a slow step towards him, “in forever—my whole life—you bring a woman to this house. And you want to be here for five minutes? Madonna mia1, Calogero Renzetti, you will be the death of me, I swear it—”
I press my lips together very hard.
Calogero Renzetti.
Not Callan. Not Reed.
I look at the countertop. I am not smiling. I am absolutely not enjoying her scolding of him.
Okay, I’m completely enjoying this.
Cal sighs the sigh of a man who has already lost a battle and pulls out a stool at the island next to me, sitting down with his elbows on the counter and his head in his hands for just a moment before he looks up.
“Fine,” he says, and holds up one finger. “Coffee. One coffee.”
“Espresso,” his mother corrects, satisfied, turning back to a little metal teapot-like espresso maker on the stove.
A bright voice floats in from somewhere deeper in the house.
“Is that the other brother? The one we hear about but never see? Could he actually exist?”
Footsteps. Then a girl appears in the kitchen doorway, maybe in her early twenties, dark hair slicked back in a bun, wearing a sweatshirt that says something I can’t read from here.
She sees Cal and her face does the exact thing his mother’s did, except with significantly more theatrical flair. Then she sees me.
She stops in her tracks.
Her arm shoots out behind her, blocking another girl with similar features from entering. They both pause and their eyes go wide while their lips pull into smiles.
“Sophia.” Her voice drops to a stage whisper.
“Stop. We mustn’t startle him.” She speaks the way a nature documentarian speaks about something rare and potentially dangerous in the wild.
“The eldest brother has returned to his natural habitat and he has brought—” she leans sideways to look around Cal at me, and her eyes go wide.
“Oh. Oh.” She straightens back up dramatically. “He has brought a beautiful stranger.”
“Maggie, I swear to God—” Cal starts and his face has darkened, he doesn’t look in their direction.
“Don’t move!” Maggie whisper-yells. “Don’t make any sudden movements, he spooks easily—”
The girl behind her—younger and shorter, with the same dark hair and a phone in her hand—pushes past the outstretched arm.
“Oh, stop it.” She looks at me with a bright, open smile.
“Hi. I’m Sophia, the youngest sister.” She makes a face at Cal.
“He’s had that face for thirty-one years of his life, it only looks threatening, but we know better, he’s a big, soft teddy bear—”
Cal is on his feet before she can get another word out.
He grabs Sophia first, wrapping an arm around her head and pressing a kiss into her hair while she shrieks and tries to escape.
Then Maggie, who gives into it more graciously.
He holds them both for a moment, and I watch his face do a thing—a thing where all the tension goes somewhere else for a second and he’s just a brother who missed his sisters.
“Since we’re apparently doing introductions,” he says with a frown at me for my earlier slip up, releasing them and gesturing between me and the chaos. “Maggie. Sophia.” He looks at me. “Max.”
“Max,” Maggie repeats, and smiles, giddy. She tilts her head at me. “Are you the reason he’s been too busy to come home for months?”
“Maggie,” Cal’s voice warns.
“I’m just asking—”
“Maggie.”
Sophia has climbed onto the stool on the other side of me with the ease of someone who has been doing exactly this since childhood. She looks at me with her chin in her hand and a wide smile on her face.
“He never brings anyone home,” she says conversationally. “Like, ever. In the history of him existing as a person, this has not happened.”
“Sophia.” Cal again, with slightly less patience.
“So, I just want to say—” Sophia continues, unperturbed, “that statistically, when someone who has never once brought a person home finally does, it usually means—”
“Don’t,” Cal warns again, leaning forward on his stool to try and make eye contact with Sophia.
“—they’ve already decided,” Sophia finishes, placing both her fists under her chin and batting her eyelashes. “So. When’s the wedding?”
The kitchen goes silent.
My face does something that I have no control over as I feel the heat start at my neck.
Cal chokes on the coffee his mother had just handed him.
Maggie dissolves. She folds over the counter, shoulders shaking, the laugh completely silent which somehow makes it worse.
“Sophia!” Cal’s mother’s wooden spoon makes contact with Sophia’s shoulder with a soft, dull thud. “Basta2, you’ll scare the poor girl away before she’s even finished her espresso.”
Sophia is still laughing, rubbing her shoulder, completely unrepentant. “I’m just trying to understand—”
“You’re being a menace,” Cal says, but I can tell the corner of his mouth is trying not to lift as he takes in my expression. He’s close enough that his arm is against mine, and he’s not moving it.
His mother sets a coffee in front of me. It’s small and dark and smells extraordinary.
“Drink,” she says. “It’s my special recipe. You look like you need it.”
I pick it up. I drink. It tastes like chocolate and warmth and it’s perfect.
Cal is looking out the window at the back of the property. There’s a smaller building out there—a guest house or office, separate from the main house, with double doors facing the yard. I’ve noticed him looking at it twice already.
Maggie notices too.
“Go,” she says, nodding toward the back. “We won’t kidnap her.” A beat. “Probably.”
Cal looks at me.
I nod. I’m okay. The coffee is extraordinary and his mother is already asking me how long I’ve known him, and his sisters are still arguing about whether Sophia’s comment was appropriate and I am, against all available evidence, completely fine.
He squeezes my thigh with one hand under the counter where no one can see it. And heat rises into my cheeks again. The way this feels right; feels normal.
He looks so calm, so happy here, despite his sister’s barbs. His hand slides away and he stands. He walks around the island slowly, kisses Carmela on the cheek and says something to her in Italian that makes his mother scoff while waving a kitchen towel at him.
And the smile he gives me before he walks out the back door with a coffee in one hand makes my heart skip a beat.
1. Madonna mia — "my madonna," used in exclamation like 'oh my god'
2. Basta — Stop