“I love you,” she whispers against my mouth.
“I love you too.”
And I know, if my life ended in this moment, there is nothing more I would’ve wanted. I have the dream. A good family. A good woman and more love than one person could ever possibly deserve.
EPILOGUE
FRANCO
“Ma.”I lift my face toward the ceiling and take a deep breath.
The woman has been relentless lately. Not completely different from how she normally is, but she’s been outdoing herself.
“The baby needs all the things,” she explains to me.
“I think we have all the things,” I tell her, waving my arms around the construction zone that will become the nursery.
Ma shakes her head and hooks her hand in the crook of my arm. “Franco, you have no idea how many things it requires to raise a child.”
I peer down at her as she surveys her work, buying everything she can get her hands on—or at least it seems like it. “Did I have seventeen baby blankets?”
She glances up, her lips pursed. “I had more.”
I shake my head, not believing a word of what she’s saying. “No, you didn’t.”
“Uh, yeah, I did.”
“If I had three baby blankets, I’d be shocked.”
Pops walks into the nursery and whistles. “Someone’s credit card is screaming,” he teases, thinking I bought all this shit.
“Yeah, yours,” I snap.
His eyes widen. “Lucia,” he says, his voice filled with disbelief and warning. “You didn’t do all this.”
Her hand tightens on my arm, and her eyes narrow. If I were younger, that look would’ve had me quaking in my boots. “Mario, don’t start with me. This is our first grandchild.”
“That you know of,” I grumble. We’ve all assumed Benny has at least one out there in the world since the guy sticks his dick in everything.
“Hush,” she tells me in that mom tone. “You want our first grandchild to have the best of everything, right?”
Pops walks around the room, running his finger down the stack of blankets I’d just been complaining about. “Finer things, yes. All the things…no.”
“There’s still more to get,” she tells him, ignoring his concerns, like she often does. “The baby will want for nothing.”
“Literally,” Pops adds. “But Lucia, darling, you need to stop. Wait until he or she is here. Babies grow. Their needs change as they get older. Save a little buying power for that time.”
“I’ll get more,” she tells him.
We know she isn’t going to listen. He’s wasting his breath trying to rein in her spending. By the time the baby is born, I’ll be shocked if he or she will even be able to fit in the room with all the things my mother drops off every few days.
“Pops, how many baby blankets did I have?”
He looks at me funny. “What do you mean?”
“Did I have five, six, or three? You know, this,” I say, holding up a stack of perfectly folded fabric.
His gaze drops to the pile, and his eyebrows knit together. “How many are there?”
