Miracle (The Pagano Family Book 6) by Susan Fanetti Page B

equipment to feed her could be done there, and so that her own hygiene needs could be addressed. She couldn’t use the toilet or take a bath or shower, but those who tended her could do their work conveniently.
     
    It was a big house, with six bedrooms and three bathrooms in addition to that half bath, so there had been plenty of room to make Tina’s mother as comfortable as she could be in the life she had left. But it wasn’t much of a life.
     
    On Sundays, when they had no nursing service scheduled and the market was closed, their father went to Mass at Christ the King, just as the family always had. Matt and Angie went, too, but they came from their own homes and met up at the church—and Angie usually sat just behind Nick Pagano rather than with his family.
     
    Tina stayed home with their mother and watched a Mass on television, broadcast from a church in New York. Father Mike came from Christ the King once a week to sit with their mother and pray.
     
    She couldn’t receive communion because she couldn’t swallow and took all her nourishment through a gastrostomy tube or an IV. The host couldn’t be converted for her tube. Though she’d never been able to describe her feelings about this, Tina’s mother was devout, and Tina knew that it caused her pain.
     
    For her own part, Tina was Catholic the way she was Italian. She didn’t think it was possible not to be. She didn’t know if it was the same way with other religions, but the Protestants she knew—those few who expressed any religious leaning—seemed to think of religion as a thing they did . Catholic was a thing Tina was , and every Catholic she knew felt the same. It was a culture. It was nearly an ethnicity. It was where you came from and, whether you were devout or lapsed, whether you embraced it or rejected it, it shaped you. You couldn’t avoid it. You could stop practicing Catholicism, but you could never stop being Catholic.
     
    Tina wasn’t devout. She spent too much time mad at God to be devout. She believed, but her faith was perhaps a bit shaky. She’d lost the faith in God’s ‘mysterious ways,’ that ‘everything happened for a reason,’ when her mother collapsed in the market and had been left with this faint impression of a life. What reason could there possibly be, what good thing could possibly come, from torturing a good, warm, loving, devout woman this way?
     
    It didn’t seem like God was paying much attention, frankly. Best case. Worst case was that He was a cruel jerk, a kid pulling wings from flies. The story of Job seemed to offer evidence for the worst case. That thought made Tina feel sad and lost, so she didn’t think it much. She simply let herself be Catholic because she didn’t know how else to be.
     
    She sat with her mother every Sunday and watched Mass, and every day, she read to her the day’s passage from her Catholic devotional.
     
    On this day, she’d done the same, but with the delightful bonus of texting with Joey while he was at Mass, which happened at the same time at Christ the King and on television. Her mother noticed that her attention was more on her phone than on the TV, but she didn’t seem to mind. Maybe it was Tina’s smile that made it okay.
     
    Because Tina was certainly smiling. If her tea with Joey had been a great date, their pizza had been her best date. And then he’d texted her to make sure she’d gotten home okay, and when she’d texted him that morning, he’d sent one right back to her. No stupid games, no ‘should I or shouldn’t I,’ no trying to act like it meant less than it did.
     
    They’d had playful banter going about the Mass; then she’d taken a big risk, saying she wanted another pizza and another kiss, and she felt a little ill waiting for him to reply. It had taken him longer to come back than it had before, and she’d felt a little more sick.
     
    Then he’d texted Even if it’s not COR, you can have both. Gotta go. Got caught. And everything