Asking for Trouble - Leslie Kelly [90]
Four weeks later
I LOVE THE HOLIDAY SEASON. Right after Halloween rolls around, I start jonesing for turkey and pumpkin pie. I pull out my favorite winter clothes and love walking outside, feeling ice-cold air kiss my cheeks and seeing my breath dissipate in a mist just past my lips.
Thanksgiving with the Santori family is a huge affair. On every other Sunday, and every other holiday, the immediate family gathers at my parents’ house, the same one where I’d grown up. But on Thanksgiving, Mama and Pop invite all the relatives, not just the close ones. So they have the celebration at the restaurant, which is closed to the public that day.
Getting the meal ready falls, as usual, to the females, but at least Pop and Tony, who runs the restaurant now that our father is somewhat retired, are responsible for the turkey.
It smelled good, the odor permeating through the restaurant like a cloud of positive feelings and joy.
Only, I wasn’t feeling any of it. Sure, I was smelling it. But positive feelings and joy weren’t part of my repertoire. They hadn’t been since Halloween.
Driving off that mountain, watching Simon get smaller and smaller in my rearview mirror, had been the most difficult thing I’d ever done. More difficult by far than outrunning a psycho bitch with a gun.
Uh, the family still doesn’t know that part of the story. And I don’t plan on telling them.
They know I’m miserable, of course. That I’ve lost weight, that there are tire-size bags under my eyes with treads deeper than a Michelin. That I don’t laugh and seldom smile.
Every woman in the family knows I’m in love, and so does my brother Mark. He’s also the only one who knows who I’m in love with, and I’m inclined to keep it that way.
I just couldn’t believe Simon hadn’t gotten in touch with me. “You jerk,” I whispered under my breath as I sat in a booth in the back corner of the room, watching as the door opened again to let in another bunch of loud, laughing Santoris bearing food.
I knew we’d said goodbye. But when I made the choice to leave, rather than forcing Simon to admit what he felt about me—I felt sure it was only for a short time.
Simon had been through hell. If there was ever a man who needed to get his shit together and his head on straight, it was him. Having discovered that his uncle had been murdered—and that he himself had been targeted by the same group of killers—wouldn’t be easy to get over.
I’d needed to let him get over it. On his own terms. In his own time. “But I didn’t count on it taking so long,” I muttered as I reached for the big glass of wine I’d snagged from my father’s secret stash in the kitchen of the restaurant.
“Taking so long for what, honey?” someone said in a soft southern drawl.
Looking across the table, I saw my sister-in-law Rachel, who’d plopped down across from me. Her bright, blond hair was out of place in this sea of dark-haired Italians, but with her smile and her enormous heart, she fit right in. “I was talking to myself.”
“No kidding,” someone else said. “You been doin’ nothin’ else but mopin’ since you got home last month. When you going to get off your keister and do something about this guy who has you tied up in knots?”
No mistaking that voice, either. Gloria, Tony’s wife, had been a member of my family since I was a teenager. She was an inner-city girl, raised just as we had been by another big Italian crew a few blocks away from us. She was brash and bossy, confident and sexy. And she kept Tony on a tight leash, though she let him pretend he was in charge of their household.
My other brothers used to call Tony whipped. Until they got married. Now I’d say they’re all pretty much whipped. Ha.
I couldn’t even imagine the kind of woman it would take to calm wild-man Nick down though. Neither could anyone else, which was another reason everyone was anxious for him to finish his tour of duty and get home, safe and sound.
“So what are you going to do?” Gloria prodded, not taking my silence as a hint that I didn’t want to talk.
Nobody in my family takes hints very well.
“There’s nothing I can do.