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Tess looked at Maggie with a tight smile. “Next time see if Frankie can pick up Granny B. Please.”
Granny B shot a look at Tess. “Mind your manners, missy. I’m not too old to take you over my knee.”
“Yeah, you are,” Tess said.
Frank almost laughed, except his mother would swat at him, so he kept his mouth shut. Tess glanced at him, but quickly averted her eyes. The frostiness told him all he needed to know about where he stood with his daughter. Far away. Perhaps even across the ocean.
“I get no respect, especially from her,” Granny B said, jabbing a finger at Tess, even as something in her dark eyes sparked with admiration. Granny B thought the sun rose and set with her Tess… not that she’d ever let on. Tough as a cornstalk and soft as a brick, Isabella Ullo hadn’t stayed long with a man who hit her or her son. She’d left Mick MacDougall two years after she’d married him, going to work at the Bon Sucre hotel, catering to the elite of society. She’d stayed for forty years before moving to a small retirement community in the Garden District.
Tess snorted. “You’re being difficult, Granny B, because you can. Ten minutes isn’t late.”
“Have you ever met Ira Messamer?” Granny B cracked lifting the lid on the sauce, smelling it critically. “Too much garlic, Maggie.”
“You know she can’t have garlic, Mom,” Tess said with an evil gleam in her eye, “for the same reason I have to carry around a silver stake and have her at the home before sunset.”
“Hah,” Granny B said, “I wouldn’t suck your blood if you paid me in cash. Probably half vodka anyway.”
The women all laughed, and Frank sank into the moment—typical teasing Sunday banter between the women in his family. How many more of these would he have? He wasn’t sure. The doctors had been blunt—his cancer would move fast. The chemo he’d start next week would only slow the inevitable—there was a sliver of a chance he’d survive longer than six months.
So he sat in the middle of his family stocking up the images in his mind, piling them into a suitcase in his memory, carefully arranging them so when the pain came, the sickness overwhelmed, he could unlock the sound of Max’s laughter, the curve of Maggie’s cheek, the way Joseph tried to count Tess’s freckles. Tears filled his eyes, and he quickly turned his head, refusing to sully even one second of this day.
He’d tell them about his cancer another day—a day that wasn’t about resurrection and new beginnings.
No, he wanted today full of sunshine… full of love.
And it might happen even if he’d invited Graham Naquin for coffee and dessert.
TESSSATATTHETABLEwith her family and tried to pretend this Easter Sunday was like every other one that had gone before—full of deviled eggs, impromptu egg hunt, and at least one chocolate bunny ear. She was pretty good at talking a niece or nephew into sharing.
But it wasn’t the same.
Anger and betrayal made her mother’s sauce taste of ashes. Hurt laced even the green-bean casserole bland Beth had thrown together… if such a thing were even possible. Not Beth’s being bland—which she probably couldn’t help, being married to Joseph—but the whole green-bean casserole tasting like tears.
Same old smiles, same old jokes, same old china filled with food Tess’s mother and sisters-in-law had slaved over. She should be enjoying the home-cooked meal rather than picking at the jicama-and-shrimp salad and poking at the ziti.
The frustration over what her father had done had stitched itself inside her and refused to be undone. Not that Tess wanted it undone. In one way she liked what the soreness gave her—a hunger she’d never had before, a need to prove herself. Even admitting she craved the challenge, however, Tess couldn’t erase the deep hurt at her father not believing in her. His failure to hand her the keys had knocked a hole in her she couldn’t see filling anytime soon.
“Cat got your tongue, Tess?” Michael asked, his dark eyes studying her over the frames of his glasses. Father Michael Ullo read people who didn’t want to be read—a talent he put to use often. In this case Tess knew her mother had told him what had happened. Michael knew why she was quieter than normal, but for some reason wouldn’t let her get away with it.
“Just enjoying Mom’s cooking as usual,” she said, chasing a noodle around her plate with her fork.
Michael took another sip of wine. “Yeah, I see. Ravenous, aren’t you?”
Tess tossed him the “shut the hell up” look. As usual, Michael ignored her. God forgive her, but Father Michael could be super annoying.
“Might as well get everything out in the air before dessert, Therese,” Frankie, Jr. said, taking a butter knife away from Max before he could saw a flower from the arrangement her mother had put together. “Kid table next year.”
“Me or Max?” Tess cracked.
“Both?” Frankie deadpanned.
“Let it drop before you ruin today, Frankie,” Tess said, watching her brothers exchange looks. They’d always treated her like their child rather than their sister. Tess had been the ultimate surprise to her aging mother and father, throwing off the whole balance of the family when she’d arrived nine years after Michael, the youngest brother.
“We can’t have every Sunday like this,” Joseph complained, giving Beth a knowing look. As a neurosurgeon, Joseph usually took a backseat to his brazen older brother who chewed up district attorneys every week as a highly sought-after defense attorney. Michael always held his own—the white collar did wonders for respect in their Irish Italian Catholic family.
Tess glared at her brothers, pissed they’d waited until everyone was held hostage by her mother’s red sauce to bring up the rift between her and her father. “We’re going to do this now?”
Frankie Jr. shrugged. “We’re all here.”
