Footsteps Read Online Free PDF Page A

specialty, but Carlo had broken his
nose for him nevertheless.
     
    Trey was his. He knew that was true. Jenny
had been twined around him when Trey was conceived and born.
Whatever had happened later, during that time, there had been no
room for anyone but them. So Carlo knew that Trey was his.
     
    He also knew that even if there had been the
remotest chance that he was wrong, he was still right. They shared
more than a name, whether they looked alike or not. That child in
the back seat was his. Period.
     
    He pulled up to his family home, behind
John’s pickup, Elsa by now so excited that she was almost bouncing
on the seat next to Trey, turning back and forth from the window to
his booster seat, licking him and then hurrying back to shove her
head out the window and bark at the people on the walk—Rosa, Joey,
and John. The gleeful dance of her hundred-and-fifty-pound body had
Carlo’s Porsche Macan rocking back and forth. He parked and let her
out first. She bounded onto the walk, and Joey patted his chest,
inviting her to jump up on him—which she did. On her hind legs, she
was nose to nose with his six-foot-tall brother.
     
    Joey took it as his special mission in life
to see to it that everyone misbehaved as much as he did.
     
    As soon as Trey was released from his
booster and had his feet on the ground, he ran over to his uncles
and aunt. Elsa had moved on to cuddles from Rosa, the youngest
sibling, and Joey dropped to a squat to accept into his arms the
tornado that was Trey.
     
    “Hey, Three-peat! How’s it hangin’?”
     
    Trey looked down and around at himself.
“How’s what hangin’, Uncle Joey?”
     
    “Joey.” Carlo raised his voice just enough
to catch his brother’s attention. When he had it, he shook his
head, and Joey grinned with faux innocence. He looked back at his
nephew with the same puckish smirk.
     
    “The sun in the sky, little bro. The sun in
the sky.”
     
    “The sun doesn’t hang. That’s silly. It’s
faaaaaaar away in space.” He raised his hands high over his head.
“It’s a star that comes out in the daytime.”
     
    “Well, you’re smarter than me, that’s for
sure. Wanna go in and see Pop-Pop?”
     
    “Yeah! And sharks! Will you show me
sharks?”
     
    Joey looked up at Carlo and gave him a Who me? shrug. Yeah. Great.
     
    “We’ll have to see if we can find one.” Then
he picked Trey up and carried him up the steps and into the
house.
     
    As Carlo opened the hatch to grab their
bags, Rosa and John both came back. Rosa, twenty years old and the
pampered baby princess of the family, wrapped her arms around his
waist. He turned and hugged her back, leaning down to kiss her
temple. “Hi, there. You good?” She’d had a big, angsty breakup a
month or so ago and had almost bailed on her spring semester at
Brown.
     
    “Yeah, I’m okay.” She stepped out of their
embrace and raked her long hair back from her head. Rosa was always
doing something funky to the color of her naturally dark hair. Now
it had heavy blonde highlights, sort of the color of honey. “Might
not go back to the dorm in the fall, though.”
     
    Their father had not brooked any discussion
of Rosa going to college far from home, so she was at Brown, barely
an hour’s drive from this house. She was the only of the brood to
have attended college after their mother died—only Carlo and
Carmen, the eldest, had attended before that—and their father
couldn’t stand the thought of his baby being far away. With the
allied efforts of her siblings, she’d wrested from him the
concession that she could live on campus. Giving up that
concession, Carlo thought, would quickly be something she’d
regret.
     
    Carlo was seventeen years older than Rosa.
She’d been only nine when their mother died, and their father had
been a different man since. It would not be a stretch to say that
during those first years after their mother’s death, Carlo had
developed feelings for his baby sister that were