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Tony shook his head disapprovingly. “Now we must wait and see.”
Wait and see.Well, that just blows.
“Need some help?” he asked, nodding to the candy bar that wouldn’t budge.
“It is hanging on the edge right there.” Tony’s glare was usually quite persuasive but the recalcitrant Kit Kat gamely withstood Il Duce’s pressure.
“You don’t eat candy. What’s going on?”
“Your aunt is a sugar fiend.” His uncle shrugged in that lazy Continental way of his. “Not unlike your father. He had quite the sweet tooth.”
Tad felt a smile tugging at his lips. “Junior Mints were his weakness. He said it was the best thing about going to the movies.”
A couple of moments ticked by, not uncomfortably. Tad could feel a space opening up in the air around him, a welcoming gap he could step through to a place where everything wasn’t quite so skewed.
“I went to the cemetery last week,” Tony said. “There were fresh white roses. Your mother’s favorite.”
Tad had driven out there the day after he sobered up. Rosehill Cemetery was just a few miles as the crow flies, but he had never seen the appeal in fixating on a slash of earth and a lump of stone. Better to internalize the pain and fixate on their memory.
“I hadn’t been there since the funeral,” Tad said. “Seemed it was time.”
“That day was hard for everyone.” Tony met Tad’s gaze, his blue eyes tinged with regret and distant memory. “I didn’t make it easier.”
“Easy would have been worse. I needed it to be hard.”
The truth of that carved out a cavity in his chest. He had needed it to be hard because that was the only way he could get through it. Tony’s disapprobation had hurt but it had worked to keep his guilt tangible, just the way Tad liked it.
His uncle let go of a world-weary sigh. Tad would have sworn the old man was carrying Jesus’s cross on the way to Calvary.
“I was never so glad as the day Cara called to tell me you had come to visit her in New York after all that time away. I should have come to see you but I thought you would not want people to crowd you.”
This was the first he’d heard that Cara had called home or that Tony had known.
Though to be fair, after numbing his brain dead with drugs, drink, and pussy halfway around the world, he didn’t remember much from that trip.
“I was only there a couple of days before heading out to Italy. Seeing you might have sent me back to Asia.” Instantly he regretted his flippancy. “Sorry, bad joke.”
Tony looked thoughtful. “I should have apologized to you properly for how I acted. Two years later you were home, back where you belonged, working at DeLuca’s. Not in the kitchen like I hoped, but I expected that would come. I thought that was enough. We have never needed a lot of words.”
“I would have liked to hear them all the same,” Tad said around the lump in his throat. “I didn’t drive the car or run that light but I’m the reason they were out that night. I know what I did was wrong but damn, I needed you to tell me that, even as fucked up as I was, you still saw me as family. As a DeLuca.”
Tony’s eyes flashed. “That has never been in question. It was an accident. I was wrong to react the way I did and even more wrong not to put things straight between us.”
Tad fought to get a leash on his emotions.Thwack.He gave the vending machine a slap, drawing a curious look from some punk ass kid off in the corner.
“Taddeo, tell me you have not imagined you were not a part of this family…” He trailed off, focusing once more on that freakin’ Kit Kat bar. Seemed it was much easier for them both to look elsewhere.
“I don’t know. I hated myself, Tony, and maybe it was easier for me to think you were still bitter. Every time you looked at me, I saw Dad. I saw his disappointment, I saw his dreams for me go up in flames and the life he wouldn’t have. And every time I looked at you, I remembered that I was closer to you than my own father and that just made me feel a different level of guilt. In the kitchen, you and Vivi taught me everything, and when you barely spoke to me when I came home, it cracked me in half.”
Aw, crap, the old man looked like he was going to cry and if he lost it, Tad knew he might not be far behind. It had been a shitty week.
Tony drew a deep breath that seemed to stave off the threatened waterworks. “You had changed, Taddeo. You were so closed off and I thought you needed more time. When I asked you to cook with me, you refused. One year turned into two and…” He waved his hand to fill in the rest.
Something loosened in Tad’s chest, a rigidity turning wobbly and warm. Could he really have forgotten that Tony made overtures of peace all those years ago? Every time Tony had spoken to him, Tad had braced himself for a lecture, built a wall to shut it out before it found traction. He didn’t want to cook and whenever Tony mentioned it, Tad took it as a veiled criticism of Tad’s choices. Just another example of letting down Vivi.
Memory could be selectively cruel, especially when you’re so determined to play the martyr. Vivi had always told him he wanted too deeply, felt too acutely, loved too much. Of course he was going to give this martyr business 110 percent.
Your heart may break many times, Taddeo, but when you find the right one…it will beperfetto.
