Rooted (Pagano Family #3)(10)
The mysterious and alluring Carmen had caught his interest.
Maybe when he took a run later, he’d head in that direction.
oOo
After the boys left for their sightseeing extravaganza, promising to let him know when they were on their way to the Louvre, Theo sat down to his Mac and got to work. He was supposed to be writing the follow-up to Orchids in Autumn. That was what the grant was for. He’d had no intention of writing a follow-up to that book until he’d been handed a big, fat check and eight months in Paris to do so.
Paris—because he and Maggie had honeymooned here long ago. He was supposed to be writing the story of the beginning of the great love for which he’d already written a story of the end.
Not exactly a topic that encouraged one to get on with one’s life.
Except, conversely, maybe perversely, it had. Reliving that part of his life with Maggie, muted though it was by the watercolor effect of time on memory, had brought a new kind of closure. He’d set lived grief aside years ago, but he’d done so by putting most of his wife away in a box in the back of the coat closet of his mind. Preparing to write this new memoir, he’d had to take the box out, sit down in the hallway with it in his lap, and go through the memories. He’d discovered that they were only moments to enjoy, not pains to be feared. Like the round jasper he wore, remembering Maggie now had no edges that might reopen fresh scars.
He wanted to see Carmen. Maybe that was nothing. Maybe last night was about the wine, and she was in fact a bitch. Or just not interested. But he hadn’t enjoyed a woman’s company like that in years.
Closing his laptop, he checked the ornate clock on the ornate mantle. Just past noon. He’d get in a run, and possibly…accidentally…trot by a certain apartment building across the street from Café Aphrodite—just to see—then come home to shower and meet up with his boys.
3
When Carmen got back to the apartment with coffee and pastries from the shop around the corner, Rosa was actually out of bed and in the shower. And before nine o’clock in the morning, no less.
She was even singing—though Carmen had no idea what song it was. Rosa’s taste in music, as in so many other things, tended to be of-the-moment. Her own taste was more of the Liz Phair, Ani DiFranco variety. Rosa called it bitchy music for bitches. Carmen couldn’t exactly deny it. If a woman who didn’t take shit she didn’t deserve was a bitch, then get her the club t-shirt.
Smiling as she listened to her baby sister’s tuneful voice belt out some pop ditty, she went into the kitchen and laid breakfast out on a hand-painted stoneware plate. She selected a chocolate croissant for herself, set it on a napkin, and took it and her coffee out to the balcony, where there was a little round table and a couple of chairs, and Carmen could watch the street start its weekday.
There was quite a bit of traffic on the street and sidewalk as people headed toward the Metro or their own transportation. A delivery truck parked in the side alley immediately across the street, and two workers from the flower shop there worked speedily to set up the sidewalk offerings of fresh-cut blooms. Carmen watched with keen interest; plants were her thing. Not cut flowers, she found cut flowers a little sad—to kill a living thing in order to appreciate its beauty seemed, at least, counterproductive, if not macabre. And yet, she couldn’t deny that the cut blooms being arrayed in huge bunches at the front of the shop stunned with vivid, vibrant color.
Carmen had more or less fallen into her career. She’d been an avid gardener since she was a little girl, when her mother had given her a tiny pair of rubber boots and a set of equally small, pink-trimmed gardening tools and led her out to ‘help’ in the garden on Caravel Road. When she’d gotten older, she’d spent as much time as she’d been allowed on job sites with her father and brothers. The affinity and knowledge for landscape design had been nurtured in those ways, but she’d never thought to make a career out of it until her mother got sick, and Carmen’s life had reverted to the size of Quiet Cove.
She was twenty-four when her mother died. For the next few years, all of her attention had been devoted to Joey and Rosa, the siblings who’d still been children. Their father’s grief had turned him inside out and made him useless at home, so Carmen and Carlo had taken over. But only Carmen had given up everything to do so. And even after their father had picked up the parental reins again, he’d needed Carmen close to help him.
When she had been able to think about her own life plans at all again, she had a philosophy degree and no related work experience years after college. Not that there was much one could do with a B.A. in philosophy, anyway. But she’d been helping people—friends, neighbors, even her father, on smaller jobs—design their green spaces for years, for free. So she started charging for it, asking people to get the word out.
Ten years later, Carmen Pagano Outdoor Design was a respected, well-established company, with a work range of about a hundred miles from the Cove.
Since her mother’s death, her entire life had had a range of about a hundred miles from the Cove. And once upon a time, she’d thought she’d live in Europe and travel to a new place in the world at least once a year.
She watched as the workers filled the shelves on the other side of the flower shop door with potted plants—lavender, hibiscus, orchids.