No Place Like Home Read Online Free PDF Page A

who’d bought them a very nice house in University Park, and he was crazy about her. But he was also insane for my pies.
    “Well, you’d be handy enough around the house—” something I desperately needed in the old farmhouse “—but you’d be back to being poor.”
    He inhaled the scent from the still warm pie. “It would be worth it.”
    It’s a cliché to say that Italian men have a flirting disease. It’s also, to some degree, true. I’d probably be disappointed if he didn’t find some way to appreciate me every day.
    He pushed open the door and let me go ahead, laughing when I had to squeeze close. I pretended to be scandalized. “You should be ashamed of yourself, young man.”
    “I am, I tell you. Every single time.”
    So I was laughing and playing word games with the married bartender when I came in and saw my dad sitting there at the table with my grandmother, listening to everything we said.
    He’s a good-looking man, my father, even now, just past sixty. His hair had silvered a little, and he combed it straight back from his forehead, which showed off his hawkish, gorgeous nose. As usual, he was wearing a clean, starched shirt with a collar, this one in blues and tiny threads of yellow, tucked into a crisp pair of gabardine trousers. His shoes had a shine. His nails were neatly trimmed. He’s natty, is Romeo. Probably where Jasmine gets it.
    When he saw me, he didn’t give me any long, meaningful look or anything. Just stood up, picked up the papers he’d been going over with Nana Lucy, and walked off. Like I was invisible.
    So maybe I was wrong. He would never acknowledge me again. He really meant it when he said I was dead to him for the rest of my life.
    Beside me, Lorenzo said, “Don’t take it like that, babe.”
    Right. Easier said than done. I wondered suddenly if Jasmine had already told my father about Shane ending up in jail, but realized it didn’t matter. It wasn’t as if it would make any difference, one way or the other.
    Stung, I rushed through my business, stopped for a minute to kiss my nana’s white head and agreed to bring Shane and Michael to dinner on Sunday, and got out of there as fast as I could. The whole time, my cheeks felt hot and I could feel the sympathy of the waitresses and even some of the early customers. I hate it when they feel sorry for me, and it made me want to do something dramatic, like scream an epithet at my father’s stiff back, which is something I would have done in my youth.
    Twenty years had given me the wisdom to know it wouldn’t change anything. He’d still ignore me. I’d look like more of a floozy than ever, and not one pair of sympathetic eyes would be fooled into thinking I didn’t care.

    Back at the farm, I rousted Shane out of bed and put him to the most miserable tasks I could come up with: scrubbing both bathrooms, the kitchen floor, and even—I have to admit I assigned it with a certain glee—the baseboards. It was a task Sylvia had tackled every third Saturday of the month, and it had not been done once since we arrived. They were the old style of baseboards, six inches of carved wood, and required a tremendous amount of elbow grease. It would take him hours to take a rag and Liquid Gold to every single one in the house.
    Michael was up, a good sign, and sitting on the screened porch. “Hey, good looking,” I said, kissing his head and covertly checking for fever with my hand. He didn’t like being fussed over, and it killed him to have to be so dependent, so he wouldn’t always say when he was feeling bad. “Did you eat?”
    “Yeah, Shane made me breakfast.”
    “Well, I brought you a treat for later, then.” I settled in a chair opposite and held out my prize, a filled éclair from a bakery he liked. “Ta da!”
    He grinned at me, those deep eyes flashing mischief the way they’d always done. “A woman after my own heart.” He took it out and started nibbling it. Savoring it. “So what happened with Da Kid? I