blocking Will’s view.
“Come on. We’re all waiting on you.”
“Sorry. Just trying to decide which shirt to wear.”
Will looked at him like he’d lost his mind.
“Which shirt? Dad, this is vacation. Who cares which shirt?”
“You’re right. Who cares?”
Castle turned his back on Will for a second and pushed the suitcase—the journal now underneath it—up against the wall, making a mental note to come back later, to finish his thoughts and then hide it somewhere safe.
He slipped on his shirt then, and smiled.
“Let’s go,” he said, and led Will out the bungalow door, in the direction of the dinner festivities which, judging from the chorus of voices he could hear in the distance, were already in full swing—his father’s, loudest among them.
“You’ll forgive us, but we started without you,” Frank Sr. said as the two of them found seats: Will next to his mother, Frank on the opposite side of the table, alongside his cousin Tommy Castiglione, a dentist from New Jersey.
“I’ll have to catch up then.” Frank leaned across the table and poured himself a hefty shot of dark island rum. It went down smooth and easy—he raised his empty glass to Maria, who smiled, and poured himself a second, smaller drink.
They clinked glasses across the table.
“Hey. So what’s this about London I hear?” Tommy Castiglione asked.
Frank told him about the new post—the truth. It felt downright weird not to have to invent a cover story, but there was nothing covert about what he was going to be doing in London.
Tommy listened, and then told him he ought to think about having Will’s molars capped, a process that took him several minutes to explain and several more minutes for Frank to understand. In between, Mrs. Gutierrez, who had cooked for the Castle family the last time they were here, whom Frank’s father had hired a year in advance to cook this dinner, served the first course—her famous black bean soup. Which took quite a while to serve, as there were twenty-nine people to be fed.
By the time the soup bowls had come and gone, so had Frank’s second drink. Maria poured him another.
He looked across the table at her and pretended to frown.
“Are you trying to get me drunk, lady?”
She pretended to be shocked.
Right then, the meat pies came out, and the buzz of conversation, at least for a moment, died down.
As Mrs. Gutierrez and her husband cleared the small plates and made ready to serve the main course, Frank Sr. banged on his glass and stood.
“Quiet! Hey, everyone—quiet down a second, will you?”
A few people looked up.
Frank Sr. cleared his throat. “I just want to say—”
“You just want to say you’re drunk!” Betty Castle shouted at her husband. Laughter exploded around the tables— Frank realized his mother was right. His dad’s face was a little flushed—more than a little, in fact. Always a telltale sign.
What was more interesting to Frank was that his mom was clearly in her cups as well. That almost never happened.
He looked across the table at Maria and smiled.
At that second, he realized that despite the number of drinks he’d had—a number he’d completely lost track of— he was stone cold sober. And despite the smell of the
He reached across the table and held out his hand.
Maria took it and squeezed tight.
Frank Sr. was still talking.
“But seriously, folks—I’ve always wanted to say that, but seriously, folks—this is the first family reunion we have had in five years, and that’s too long. We don’t see each other like this often enough.”
There were murmurs of assent around the table.
“Here, here,” someone said, and raised a glass, and that set off a fresh round of toasts and drinking.
Frank Sr. waited until it had subsided before continuing.
“Look at us,” he said. “Italian Castigliones, Irish McCareys—”
“And Castles! Don’t forget the Castles!” Will shouted, standing up and raising his own glass, which was full of Coke. At least Frank hoped it was Coke—his son might have been growing up fast, but he was still too young to handle the rum this island produced.
“Of course I won’t forget the Castles,” Frank Sr. shouted back. “That’s my point, exactly. Those two sides of the family, when you put them together . . . you get a boy like my grandson here. You get the future.”
“To the future!” someone said, and Frank Sr. nodded and raised his own glass then. “To the future!”
There was more drinking then. Frank Castle Sr. made another toast, two actually, one to Dublin, one to Rome. Somewhere in the middle of all that, Mrs. Gutierrez and her husband started coming around with plates piled high with meat, and vegetables, and more
Frank caught Maria’s eye and smiled. She smiled back.
He pushed his plate away and stood.
“Excuse me,” he said to no one in particular, and walked off toward the beach.
Not more than thirty seconds later, Maria came up alongside him and slipped her hand in his.
“Your mom said she’d put Will to bed.”
“I think it might end up being the other way around, don’t you think?”
Maria giggled. “Maybe.”
She ran ahead of him and did a cartwheel in the sand. Frank ran up behind her and swept her up in his arms.
They kissed, long and passionately.
Castle broke the embrace—Maria buried her head in his chest. He smelled her hair—a sweet, clean smell, just a hint of perfume, and thought about the cigarettes he’d had to smoke when he was Otto Krieg. Unfiltered Gauloises, strong and pungent, an odor that had seemed to penetrate not just every article of clothing he’d worn but every pore of his body, so that when he’d lie down to sleep at night, it was the last thing he smelled, and when he woke up in the morning, it was the first thing he tasted. He’d thought he’d never be rid of the smell; it had been on him on the plane back to Washington, on the drive to his house, that first night he’d spent with Maria. Now he realized he hadn’t sensed it in days.
“Frank? What is it? What’s wrong?”
Castle looked down and saw concern on his wife’s face.
“I can’t believe I’m here. That I could ever be so lucky. There were times, Maria, I’ve got to tell you—”
“Frank. Don’t.”
He shook his head. “I want my son to know me. Christ, I want to know my son.”
“I think you’re doing just fine now. I’ve never seen him as happy as he was this afternoon, when the two of you were diving.”
“But I’ve lost so much time. With both of you. And I’m really sorry—”
“Stop.” She put a finger to his lips. “I married you. I knew what I was doing. And I’d do it again. You and I . . . we’re not lucky. We’re blessed.”
“I know. I know we are. It’s just—”
This time, to shut him up, Maria kissed him. A long slow kiss that he felt all the way down to the core of his being, a kiss that smoldered as she pressed every inch of her body up against his, that had Frank Castle thinking just how goddamn lucky he was to have a wife who was not only smart, and generous, and kind, and a good mother, but one helluva—
