1
Freddie
“Daddy, I’m bored!”I barely heard Sophia’s whine over the clatter of pans hitting the floor. I let out a heavy sigh because this was the hundredth time my little girl had wandered into the kitchen since we got here this morning. Most days, she stayed with Mama, but I’d stupidly thought I could juggle keeping an eye on her with trying to get everything ready. Today, we were hosting our most important gathering since Papa turned the restaurant over to us boys and I was distracted thinking about about who would be walking through the doors later today.
I yanked the apron over my head and steered her back to Frankie’s office. The room had been transformed into a makeshift daycare, complete with toys, coloring books, the iPad, and even a DVD player with Sophia’s entire collection. There was no shortage of things to do, which meant she was having one of her needy days today.
My heart broke and I felt like the world’s worst father for getting irritated with her. The past few months had been rough and no amount of reassurance convinced her everyone she loved wouldn’t disappear if we weren’t right there with her. That shit tended to happen when the woman who gave birth to a kid took off, claiming she needed to “find herself.”
“Sweetie, if you can sit back here through one movie, I’ll come and get you when I’m ready to put out the cookies,” I bargained with her. By now, Mama, Enzo, and Matteo should be on their way to the church, Tony and Frankie should have the dining room set up, and I was the one woefully behind thanks to the constant interruptions. “If you want, I’ll ask Uncle Tony to come back and watch the movie with you.”
“But I wanna watchPeter Panand he says I watch it too much,” she complained. Tony was right; there was no reason all of us should have every line of that movie memorized, but we did because it was the movie Sophia watched it almost daily and none of us were man enough to tell her no. I avoided it whenever possible, even if that meant resorting to bribery, because just hearing the title of the movie felt like the captain’s hook was twisting around in my chest, directly through my heart.
“I bet he’ll be okay with it today,” I promised her, already trying to figure out how to bribe him into taking kid duty for an hour while I tried to get back on track.
“Okay Daddy.” She followed me to the DVD player and watched as I loaded the disc. After I hit play, she wrapped her arms around my leg and held me tightly. “I don’t want you to go back to work.”
I scooped her into my arms and held her close. God, I hated this for her. I swallowed down the lump in my throat. “I know sweetie, but after today you’ll go back to Nonna’s house when I’m working. That way you don’t have to sit back here all alone.”
“But I like being by you,” she whined. “When I’m at Nonna’s, she won’t let me see you.”
“That’s because she knows I’m trying to get my work done as fast as possible so I can race back to pick you up,” I reminded her. “Now, you watch your movie and I’m going to tell Uncle Tony you’re waiting for him.”
“And you’ll give him cookies for us to share?” She bounced on the balls of her feet, rapidly blinking her big brown eyes. The girl had perfected the art of emotional manipulation.
“I’ll see if I have enough,” I conceded.
“There are always enough cookies to share.” I shouldn’t have mentioned the damn cookies. Now, she was fixated.
“But these are cookies for the Agnelli family. They’re not our cookies,” I explained. Just saying their last name caused a heaviness in my chest. Our families had always been close. Peter, being the only boy out of four children, had been easily accepted into the fold of the Marino boys.
But something changed nearly a decade ago, and I was the only person who could pinpoint the exact moment Peter started pulling away from everyone. It’d been eight years since he’d packed up his car and turned his back on the family that needed him.
“Daddy, did you hear me?” Sophia asked, tugging at the leg of my chef pants. I shook my head, regretting that I’d allowed my mind to wander down memory lane.
“I’m sorry sweetie, I was thinking about everything I still have to get done in the kitchen,”
I lied. Even if she was a decade or two older, I wouldn’t have told her what I’d actually been thinking about.
“You should let me help. Nonna says I’m a good helper in the kitchen and then I wouldn’t be soooooooo bored.” I picked Sophia up and deposited her on the couch with her blankie and the stuffed sheep she’d gotten for her fifth birthday from her favorite cousin. It didn’t matter that Ryan was heronlycousin, she always made sure everyone knew he was her favorite.
“When I have something I need help with, I promise you’ll be the first person I ask,” I told her, quickly adding, “As long as it doesn’t involve knives or the oven.”
“Because I’m too little to use sharp things,” she said, satisfied for at least a minute that I would let her help at some point.
“That’s right, Squirt. Now, are you going to be okay back here until Uncle Tony can come and sit with you?”
“Yep. I’m good. You should go back to work now,” she directed me, as if I hadn’t spent the entire morning trying to do exactly that. “And I hate Squirt. Uncle Tony and Uncle Enzo call me Tinkerbell. I wanna be your Tinkerbell, too.”
Another twist of the hook. Fuck, it was going to be a long day. I wanted to tell her Tinkerbell was the one name I’d never call her, but she seemed so genuine in her request I couldn’t refuse her outright. “I’ll do my best.”
A little over two hours later, Matteo walked into the kitchen still dressed in the suit and tie he’d worn to the funeral. His eyes darted around, trying to take in everything that needed to be done. This was going to be a disaster. As much as I loved Matteo, he tended to be spastic when he was stressed out and escorting Mama to her best friend’s funeral couldn’t have been easy.
“Teo, I need you to go out and light the Sternos under all the chafing dishes,” I instructed him, handing a lighter across the pass-through. I didn’t have the time or the energy to keep him on task, but today wasnotthe day for him to lose his shit. As soon as I saw Frankie, I’d give him a list andhecould be our baby brother’s keeper.
“Freddie, Mama wants you to come out and pay your respects to Silvio and the kids.”The kids, not the girls.That meant Peter had graced the family with his presence at his Mama’s funeral.The lost boy comes home...
“No matter what happened between you and Peter, you need to remember he’s mourning the loss of his mother,” Tony lectured me as I followed him through to the bar, where the family was neatly lined up accepting condolences from everyone who’d come. At one end of the line was Silvio, the stocky man I’d always been uneasy around because of his backward thinking and misogynistic beliefs.
