Natalia asked hopefully.
Adelia laughed. Natalia would eat pizza three times a day if she were allowed to.
“Yes, pizza,” she confirmed.
“Not here, though,” Tomas pleaded, wrinkling his nose in distaste.
“No, not here. The dishes aren’t unpacked,” she said. “We’ll go to Rosalina’s. I’ll call your uncle Elliott and see if he and Aunt Karen would like to join us with Daisy, Mack and the baby.”
This last was offered especially for Selena, who adored her uncle and who’d become especially close to his adopted daughter, Daisy. Adelia might not intend to keep Ernesto away from his children, but Elliott was the male role model she really wanted in their lives. Her younger brother was loving, rock solid and dependable. She’d be proud to see Tomas grow up to be just like him. And she desperately hoped her girls would eventually find men like him, too.
Once the decision to divorce had been made, Elliott had overcome all his own strong objections to offer her the support she’d desperately needed. She owed Karen for bringing him—and even her mother—around. Her own sisters continued to treat her as if she’d committed a mortal sin.
The prospect of pizza at Rosalina’s with Uncle Elliott and his family wiped away the last of the tears, and Adelia took a truly relieved breath for what seemed like the first time all day. Her family was going to be all right. There might be a few bumps along the way, thanks to her determination to shed any of her own ties to Ernesto, but they would settle into this new house.
And, she concluded with new resolve, they would turn it into a real home, one filled with love and respect, something that had been in short supply with her ex-husband.
* * *
Gabe Franklin had claimed a booth in the back corner of Rosalina’s for the fourth night in a row. Back in Serenity for less than a week and living at the Serenity Inn, he’d figured this was better than the bar across town for a man who’d determined to sober up and live life on the straight and narrow. That was the whole point of coming home, after all, to prove he’d changed and deserved a second chance. Once he’d accomplished that and made peace with his past, well, he’d decide whether to move on yet again. He wasn’t sure he was the kind of man who’d ever put down roots.
Thank heaven for his cousin, Mitch Franklin, who’d offered him a job starting on Monday without a moment’s hesitation. Recently remarried, Mitch claimed he needed a partner who knew construction so he could focus on his new family. He’d taken on a second family just as he’d started developing a series of dilapidated properties on Main Street in an attempt to revitalize downtown Serenity.
Gabe had listened in astonishment to Mitch’s ambitious plans as he’d laid them out. Despite his cousin’s enthusiasm, Gabe wasn’t convinced revitalization was possible in an economy still struggling to rebound, but he was more than willing to jump in and give it a shot. Maybe there would be something cathartic about giving those old storefronts the same kind of second chance he was hoping to grab for himself.
“You’re turning into a real regular in here,” his waitress, a middle-aged woman who’d introduced herself a few nights ago as Debbie, said. “Are you new in town?”
“Not exactly,” he said, returning her smile but adding no details. “I’ll have—”
“A large diet soda and a large pepperoni pizza,” she filled in before he could complete his order.
Gabe winced. “I’m obviously in a rut.”
“That’s okay. Most of our regulars order the same thing every time,” she said. “And I pay attention. Friendly service and a good memory get me bigger tips.”
“I’ll remember that,” he said, then sat back and looked around the restaurant while waiting for his food.
Suddenly he sat up a little straighter as a dark-haired woman came in with four children. Even though she looked a little harried and a whole lot weary, she was stunning with her olive complexion and high cheekbones. She was also vaguely familiar, though he couldn’t put a name to the face.
There hadn’t been a lot of Mexican-American families in Serenity back when he’d lived here as a kid, though there had been plenty of transient farmworkers during the summer months. For a minute he cursed the way he’d blown off school way more often than he should have. Surely if he’d gone regularly, this woman would have been on his radar. If there had been declared majors in high school, his would have been girls. He’d studied them the way the academic overachievers had absorbed the information in textbooks.
Instead, he’d been kicked out midway through his junior year for one too many fights, every one of them justified to his juvenile way of thinking. He’d eventually wised up and gotten his GED. He’d even attended college for a couple of years, but that had been later, when he’d stopped hating the world for the way it had treated his troubled single mom and started putting the pieces of his life back together.
He watched now as the intriguing woman asked for several tables to be pushed together. He noted with disappointment when a man with two children came in to join them. So, he thought, she was married with six kids. An unfamiliar twinge of envy left him feeling vaguely unsettled. Since when had he been interested in having a family of any size? Still, he couldn’t seem to tear his gaze away from the picture of domestic bliss they presented. The teasing and laughter seemed to settle in his heart and make it just a little lighter.
When his waitress returned with his drink, he nodded in the woman’s direction. “Quite a family,” he commented. “I can’t imagine having six kids. They look like quite a handful.”
Debbie laughed. “Oh, they’re a handful, all right, but they’re not all Adelia’s. That’s her brother, Elliott Cruz, who just came in with two of his. He has a baby, too, but I guess she was getting a cold, so his wife stayed home with her.”
Gabe hid a grin. Thank heaven for chatty waitresses and a town known for gossiping. It hadn’t been so great when he was a boy and his promiscuous mother had been the talk of the town, but now he could appreciate it.
“Where’s her husband?”
The waitress leaned down and confided, “Sadly, not in hell where he belongs. The man cheated on her repeatedly and the whole town knew about it. She finally kicked his sorry butt to the curb. Too bad the whole town couldn’t follow suit and divorce him.” She flushed, and her expression immediately filled with guilt. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that, but Adelia’s a great woman and she didn’t deserve the way Ernesto Hernandez treated her.”
Gabe nodded. “Sounds like a real gem,” he said.
In fact, he sounded like a lot of the men who’d passed through his mom’s life over the years. Gabe felt a sudden surge of empathy for Adelia. And he liked the fact that his waitress was firmly in her corner. He suspected the rest of the town was, too, just the way they’d always stood up for the wronged wives when his mom had been the other woman in way too many relationships.
Funny what a few years could do to give a man a new perspective. Back then all he’d cared about was the gossip, the taunts he’d suffered at school and his mom’s tears each time the relationships inevitably ended. He’d witnessed her hope whenever a new man came into her life and then the slow realization that this time would be no different. His heart had broken almost as many times as hers.
Still,
