Emerald Windows (5 page)
Tears rolled down her temples and soaked the roots of her hair. Why did some things change so much, when other things— things like memories and heartaches and humiliations—never changed at all? It all boiled down to those stubborn feelings…and Nick Marcello.
She turned onto her stomach and fluffed the pillow, then buried her face in it.
It was out of the question, of course, to take the job he’d offered. She would have to tell him no, because she couldn’t stand the looks on her parents’ faces or the pain on her sister’s. It was too much for one person to endure, yet she had carried the burden of a hateful town for seven long years. She’d simply carry it seven more…or however long it took for the feelings to fade. And someday they would, she was certain, if she fought them hard enough and stayed far enough away.
T
HE DARKNESS FILLED
N
ICK’S OLD
Buick like a comfortable scent. Yes, it was an ugly old clunker, but he needed an everyday car—it would be foolish to subject the valuable Duesenberg parked in his garage to the wear-and-tear of daily traffic.
He felt more lonely tonight than he had in some time, and he found that fact disturbing. Wasn’t his aloneness one of the most valuable assets in his life? Wasn’t it something he cherished?
Tonight the solitude was a plague, and the loneliness was a punishment. For what, he wasn’t sure.
His headlights swept across his front lawn as Nick approached. Behind the house, he could see moonlight playing off the surface of the canal that threaded behind his pier, a parking lot of sorts for the boats his neighbors kept there. On any other night, his artist’s eye would have recorded the gentle scene, and he might have rushed into his studio, leaving the house dark, and captured the picture from the massive window that looked out over the
water. The power of light in the darkness had always fascinated him. Tonight it only made him feel more alone.
Some unconscious decision compelled him to drive on when he reached his driveway, and without a second thought, he headed back out of his neighborhood. He needed someone to talk to tonight.
Moments later, he idled in the driveway of an older two-story home, full of light spilling out from the first floor and dim night-lights lending faint hues to the windows of the rooms upstairs.
“Nick? What are you doing here?” a woman’s voice from the open garage called out into the darkness. “I’ll never get the kids to bed now!”
Nick grinned as the woman came out of the garage, hoisting a curly-haired baby on one hip and carrying a basket of laundry on the other. “How’s it going, Anna?”
“Not too bad,” she said, the sound of the washing machine in the garage muffling her words.
Nick took the baby and pressed a kiss on her fat cheek. She beamed up at him. “What’s this kid doing up so late?”
“She’s spoiled rotten, that’s what,” Anna said, as if that answered the question. “Controls the whole house. Me, Ma, Vin-nie, everybody.”
Nick carried the baby into the house, and at the sight of him, his mother got off the couch, worry animating her face. “Nicky! What’s the matter? You never come over here this late!”
“Uncle Nicky!” Two of the children flung themselves at him, and he greeted them each by turning them upside down, then blowing on their stomachs until they squealed with laughter. Then he planted a kiss on his mother’s cheek and offered a wave to his brother-in-law, who sat at the dining room table with a calculator and a stack of bills.
“Nothing’s the matter, Ma. Can’t a guy come by to see how his ma’s doing once in a while?”
“Well, that’s nice,” his mother said. “Come watch Bogart with me. I have popcorn.”
“Bogart?” he asked. “I will, Ma. But first I need to talk to Sonny. Where is he?”
“In his room over the garage,” Anna said, flopping the baby down on the floor and beginning to change her diaper. “Nineteen-year-olds hang out with their family as little as possible.”
“He’s working on some project for his shop class at Vo-Tech,” Vinnie said. “Kid’s great with his hands.”
“I think I’ll go up and say hello,” Nick said, then turned back to his mother. “Here’s lookin’ at you, Kid.”
“Wrong movie,” his mother said. “Hurry back.”
Nick left the house through the back door and climbed the stairs to the garage apartment Sonny had moved into when the baby—number four in his sister’s family—was born. He knocked on the door and heard something in the room fall. Then, in a voice a little too loud, Sonny called, “Just a minute!”
“Hey, Sonny,” Nick said through the door. “What are you doing in there? You hiding a girl or something?”
The door opened, and his nephew, every bit as tall as Nick and with the same black hair, faced him with a mischievous grin. “Picasso!” he said, waving Nick into a room that looked as if it had been ransacked by a gang of thieves. “I thought you were Pop.”
“So you had to hide the evidence before you could open the door?” Nick asked, looking around for a sign of the culprit. “Where is she?”
Sonny laughed and cleared off a chair for Nick to sit down. “No, I was just working on something. A…project for school.”
“Oh, yeah?” Nick asked, still suspicious. The strong scent of oil paints wafted through the air, and he saw a palette lying on a table, blotted with various colors of fresh paint. “I didn’t know they did home projects in electrician school.”
Still wearing a wry smile, Sonny straddled a chair backward and propped his hands on the back. He evaluated Nick with a critical eye, then sighed. “If I tell you something, do you promise you won’t tell nobody? Pop would bust a gut, and Grandma would fake a heart attack or something. Ma would just martyr up like Joan of Arc.”
Nick laughed. “Come on, I can’t stand the suspense.”
Sonny took a deep breath, apparently struggling with some monumental confession. “Well, I’ve been, sort of…playing around with paints and stuff.”
The confession was uttered with as much shame and guilt as if he’d admitted to a drug addiction. “You mean, you’ve been painting? Like I do?”
Sonny stood up, running his fingers, blotched with dried paint, through his hair. “Yeah, just like you, Picasso. Only not as good. Not anywhere near as good.”
A glint of pleasure and surprise illuminated Nick’s eyes, and he sat up straighter and scanned the room. “Well, let me see.”
“No, I can’t,” Sonny said, suddenly wilting. “It’s pretty terrible, really.”
“Sonny, let me see,” Nick told him. “I’m not a critic.”
A self-conscious smile tugged at Sonny’s lips, and he crossed his arms and stared at Nick for a long moment. Finally, he went to his bed, got down on one knee and pulled a wet canvas out from under it, along with the collapsible easel he’d hidden there. Mechanically, he set it up.
In vivid color, Sonny had captured the house he lived in, stroking its character and history in every line and hue, from the crooked mailbox on the front corner to the laundry line strung up on the side. His chin propped on two fingers, Nick studied the painting with a lump of emotion in his throat, then turned back to his nephew. “Why didn’t you tell me you could do this?”
Sonny gave a half laugh. “Guess I thought if I didn’t tell nobody, I’d get tired of it after a while and lose interest. No harm done.”
Nick knew that feeling. “It doesn’t go away, though, does it?”
Sonny sank back down to his chair. “Pop thinks I’m gonna finish Vo-Tech and keep working with him as an electrician. His pride’s all caught up in it. I don’t really have a choice, you know?”
“No,” Nick said. “I
don’t
know. Everybody has choices.”
“Aw, man, that’s easy for you to say. You’re already doing it. Nobody’s ridin’ you about it.”
Nick’s laughter came as a surprise to them both, for nothing about the subject was funny. “You think my pop liked what I did? When I went to college to study art, he swore I was just loafing. I was supposed to work in the shoe store with him. The family business. He was going to rename it Marcello and Son Shoes, just for me. To this day Ma says she’s glad he didn’t live to see what I’ve done with my life. Like I’ve gone to work for the Mob or something.”
“No,” Sonny said with a wicked grin. “In this family, that would be a lot more respectable than being an artist.”
“You’re right.” Nick looked back at the painting, wondering at the raw talent smoldering just below his nephew’s tough-guy façade. “Look, have you had lessons or anything? Any kind of training?”
“Just what I learn from books,” Sonny said. “But what I wouldn’t give to learn more.” His eyes lit up, as if sharing his secret with Nick had set him free, and he’d just discovered the power to ask for help. “Nick, you could teach me, couldn’t you? I mean, you were a teacher.”
“You got it,” Nick said without hesitation. “Only problem is, I’m about to be working long hours for a while at the church. But if you want, you can use my studio anytime you want. I’ll give you a key.”
“You mean it?” Sonny asked, his eyes as wide as a kid’s half his age.
“Yeah. And the reason I came up is to ask you if you’d want to work with me this summer on the windows. If Brooke agrees to work with me, she and I are needed for the most complicated part of designing. There’re a lot of things that we need help with.”
Sonny’s eyes sparkled with surprise and a touch of amusement. “Brooke? Not the one…”
Nick swallowed and held out a hand to stem Sonny’s question. “She’s an artist too, Sonny. The best I’ve run across in stained glass. It’s strictly business.”
“I know. I didn’t mean nothin’.” Sonny’s voice faded, and he dropped his gaze to the floor. “Stained glass,” he whispered with
awe. “Man, if you think you can use me, I’ll be there. Pop’ll kill me if I quit helpin’ him in the afternoons, but I could help at night until school’s out. But I’ll never convince him to let me do it in the summer. He was counting on my working full-time for him.”
“Try,” Nick said with a grin. “Maybe he’ll change his mind. Now, you get back to work on that. I have to go watch Bogart with Ma.”
Sonny smiled with a new sparkle of excitement in his eyes that Nick hadn’t seen before. “Thanks, Picasso. If Pop says yes, I won’t let you down.”
“Yeah, well,” Nick muttered as he started out the door. “You’re not the one I’m worried about.”
I
T WAS EARLY MORNING WHEN
Brooke loaded her suitcase into her car and left the house without saying goodbye. A strange feeling of déjà vu crept over her, but she told herself there was no other way.
She drove through a takeout window at a fast-food restaurant and got a cup of coffee. Staring out the window, she sat in her car to sip it until the cup was empty. She had to tell Nick. She couldn’t just leave town without thanking him for the job offer. She had to tell him why she couldn’t take it.
With dread, she cranked her car and headed toward St. Mary’s.
When she pulled into the back parking lot of the decrepit building, his Buick was already there, along with several pickup trucks, a cement truck, and various other commercial vehicles, indicating that the renovation was already underway. Gathering all her courage, she got out of the car and slid her hands into the pockets of her jeans.
She stepped into the church and saw the activity already beginning. Men were up on ladders, removing the old windows and replacing them with boards covered with plastic in case of rain. Others were stripping the walls, while still others worked on pulling up the old flooring. It would have been exciting had Brooke been a part of it all.
Brooke stepped over some thick electrical cords and around some machinery and headed for the office behind the sanctuary. The light was on, and she knew that he would be there, waiting for her to bring him an answer…expecting it to be the one he wanted. Dragging in a shaky breath, she forced herself to step through the doorway.
Nick looked up. “Brooke, you’re early.” His voice, once again, held a tentative note, as though he held back for fear of frightening her away. She hated seeming so fragile.
His eyes swept her baggy T-shirt and old jeans, then rose back to her hair, long and neglectfully straight. “And you’re dressed for a hard day’s work,” he said. “Does that mean you’ve decided to—?”