CHAPTER TWO

Later that morning the front door opened and closed but Trina, reading the text messages on her phone, and Carmine, eating his bowl of cereal, didn’t bother to look up. Mother and son were in their penthouse apartment on the top floor of the PaLargio Hotel and Casino on the Vegas Strip, seated in the kitchen at their center island, not worried in the least that someone had unceremoniously entered their home. Because of the fortified security Reno kept in place. Because nobody could possibly pass that level of security unless they had every right to be there.

It turned out to be Jimmy Gabrini and his daughter Madison, who were paying them an early morning visit. They had every right to be there. “Hey Glam-ma.”

Trina looked up from her phone when she heard Madison’s voice. When she saw her gorgeous step-granddaughter, along with her handsome stepson, she smiled. “Hey Maddie! Hello Jim. Don’t you two look like America the Beautiful.” Jimmy wore his Armani suit, and Madison wore Prada head to toe. “You two look like you just stepped off of a magazine cover.”

Carmine looked at his mother’s wild hair and the shorts and halter top she had on. “Whereas you,” he said without so much as a smirk on his face.

Madison and Jimmy laughed. Trina took her hand and squashed it in her young son’s face. “Don’t you start, Carmine. It’s too damn early. I haven’t gone to bed since we got back from Black Friday.”

“Pop told me you guys were going to Target like six this morning,” Jimmy said. “I said they what ?”

“Don’t you start either. I’m not bougie.”

Jimmy didn’t say she was, but he knew when to hold’em with his mother.

But Carmine didn’t know when to fold or hold when it came to his mother. “She’s the only person in America who doesn’t believe she’s bougie,” he said to his stepbrother.

“Will you shut it?” Trina said. “Your ass in enough trouble already.”

“What kind of trouble?” Jimmy asked as he walked behind the center island to pour himself a cup of coffee.

“Carmine beat a man up in Target,” Madison said as she hurried over where Trina was seated on the opposite side of the island and gave her a hug. Then she moved over to Carmine. “Hey buddy,” she said as she sat on the stool beside him. “How’s it going cuz?”

Carmine rolled his eyes. “How many times do I have to tell you that I’m not your cousin, Madison? I’m your uncle. Jimmy is my stepbrother. That makes me your uncle. Your step-uncle to be precise.”

“How can you be my uncle at all when I’m way older than you? Why you’re just a baby compared to me.”

Jimmy laughed as Carmine gave Madison that look of frustration whenever somebody called him a baby. He wasn’t a baby. He wasn’t even a preteen anymore. But Madison knew how to push his buttons.

Trina reached out her half-empty coffee cup to Jimmy and he filled it again. “What brings you guys over here so early?” she asked him.

“Pop wanted to see Maddie before she started her first day at work.”

Trina smiled and looked at her granddaughter. “Work? You’ve got a job?”

“Ma! I told you,” Jimmy said.

“You told me what?”

“That Maddie would be working with me at the office. With Uncle Tommy’s blessing, of course.” Jimmy was in charge of all west coast operations for Tommy Gabrini’s corporation. “She’ll start off as one of my assistants for now, and then we’ll see how it goes from there.”

“Excited?”

“More nervous,” said Maddie as she took Carmine’s spoon and ate a spoonful of his cereal. Carmine looked at her like she had some nerve. “Daddy can be hard when it comes to getting that work done.”

“He’s supposed to be hard,” said Trina. “That’s why Uncle Tommy keeps giving him more and more responsibilities. And don’t expect him to show you any favors either.”

“ She already know ,” sang Jimmy like Big Freedia as he sipped his cup of coffee.

Trina stared at Jimmy with a smile on her face. She remembered when Reno found out he had a son from a woman he once fooled around with back in the day, and she remembered when Jimmy first came to live with them. He was a scared teenager then. But now, in his fancy suit and with his daughter as his protégé, he looked like the epitome of success. Everybody thought Dommi would be the breakout star of the family. Turned out to be Jimmy. And although he was Trina’s stepson, most assumed him to be her biological son because he was an interracial kid like her and Reno’s kids. “How’s Oprah?” she asked him.

Jimmy hunched his shoulders. Trina knew what that meant. “Oh Jimmy, not you too! What happened?”

“Nothing happened. She said I work too much. What I’m supposed to do about that? Yes, I work too much. I work for Uncle Tommy, who demands you work too much. What did she expect?”

“She expected you to give her some of that time you give Uncle Tommy,” said Madison.

Jimmy pointed a finger at his daughter. “You stay out of this,” he said firmly.

Madison took another spoonful of Carmine’s cereal.

“Check you out,” Carmine said. “I didn’t know I was sharing.”

“But you’re a genius.”

“I have a genius IQ, yes, I do. But what does that have to do with this?”

“You said you didn’t know you were sharing.”

“I didn’t.”

“But I thought geniuses knew everything,” said Madison. “That’s why they’re geniuses.”

Jimmy laughed. Carmine slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand. The stupidity of his family astounded him still.

“Where’s the Christmas tree, Ma?” Madison asked.

Trina did a wave of the hand.

“Why is it that my grandparents are always the last one to put up a tree? The PaLargio has that ninety-foot tree for all the world to see and is decorated to the hilt, and all you have to do is snap your fingers and an army will be up here to decorate the penthouse too. But you guys won’t even do that. You guys won’t even put up a simple Christmas tree for Christmas.”

“Maybe because a Christmas tree has nothing to do with Christmas,” said Carmine.

“Don’t start,” said Trina again, giving him the evil eye.

“I know I disappointed you at that store, but that doesn’t negate the fact that what I said is true. We’re celebrating the birth of the Savior of the world. The Creator of the entire universe. What does a Christmas tree have to do with that?”

“It’s a goodwill gesture,” said Madison.

“Don’t get him going, Maddie,” said Trina. “Just don’t.” Then the front door opened again.

When Reno entered the kitchen area, Madison hopped off of the stool and ran to him. Reno smiled and pulled her into his arms. “That’s my baby!” he said to his granddaughter. “Look at you,” he added as he pulled her back to get a good look at her. “With your gorgeous self. First day, hun?”

“Yes sir.”

“Nervous?”

“Yes sir.”

Reno laughed. “Don’t be. You’re knock it out of the park like you always do.”

“Carmy knocked it out of the park too,” said Madison with a grin.

Carmine rolled his eyes. “Thanks a lot, Maddie.”

“What’s this?” Reno asked, looking around, but mainly at Trina.

But Jimmy noticed how his stepmother had tensed up as soon as Reno entered the kitchen. She couldn’t hardly look at him.

Reno knew why she was upset, so he looked at Madison instead. “What are you talking about?” he asked her. “What did Carmy do?”

“Early this morning at that Black Friday deal at Target,” said Madison, “Carmine beat up a grown man for pushing Glam-ma down.”

Reno hated that Glam-ma shit, but he was more concerned about what else she said. “Somebody pushed my wife?” He looked at Trina. “Who pushed you?”

“A hundred people, Reno. It was Black Friday.”

“I told you not to go to that shit. Didn’t I tell you that?”

“That’s what you focus on? The fact that I, a grown woman, did what she wanted to do? That’s the takeaway?”

“Hell yeah that’s the takeaway! What else is it supposed to be?”

“Maybe the fact that your son beat down a man so badly that he was bleeding.”

“The man that pushed you down?”

“That’s the only one I touched,” said Carmine, knowing his father all too well.

And he was right. Reno was baffled. “A man pushed his mother. What did you think he was gonna do? Congratulate him? Ignore him? He’d better kick his ass.”

“You know what, “Trina said, beside herself. “You are such a role model. You are such a great human being.”

Reno knew a put down when he heard it. “Kiss my great ass,” he shot back at her.

Trina turned back to drinking her coffee. “Whatever Reno.”

Reno was too tired to argue. Besides, just looking at Trina in her short shorts that revealed her gorgeous legs, and her halter top that revealed the contours of her large breasts, made him horny as hell. Nobody turned him on like her. “Let’s go, Tree.”

Trina looked at him as if he was out of his mind. “Go where?”

“Come upstairs with me.”

Everybody in that room knew what that meant. Madison and Carmine wanted to barf. Jimmy smiled.

Trina frowned. “I’m not going anywhere with you. I’m drinking my coffee.”

“I said come upstairs with me.”

“And I said I’m drinking my coffee.”

Reno glared at his wife. “And your ass wonders why I . . .”

Although he didn’t finish that sentence, Trina’s heart dropped anyway, because she knew what he would have said had he finished. But she maintained her composure. “Why you what?” she asked him, staring angrily at him. She needed him to just say it once and for all. “My ass wonders why you what, Reno?”

But Reno continued to glare at her, and then he went upstairs.

Jimmy, Carmine, and Madison looked at Trina. Because they knew what Reno wanted to say, just like she knew it too. But Trina was a rock of stubbornness when she wanted to be. She got up, walked around the island and tossed the remainder of her coffee down the drain. But instead of going upstairs the way Reno had ordered her to, and the way everybody in that kitchen expected her to, she poured herself another cup of coffee and went and sat back down.

Nobody noticed but Jimmy when her big, hazel eyes glanced over at him in so much pain that it broke his heart. But she said nothing as she sipped repeatedly from her coffee mug as if she was drowning herself in it. And it tore at Jimmy.

Why did the men in the family behave the way they did toward their women? All of them were men of a particular age, although the Gabrini men claimed to still be in their late thirties/early forties, and Mick and Big Daddy Sinatra still claimed to be in their late forties. But in Jimmy’s eyes, no matter what their ages, they all behaved like spoiled brats!

Trina didn’t go upstairs. But he did.

He hurried up that staircase two steps at a time until he was opening the double doors of his parents’ bedroom and hurrying up to his father.

Reno turned when he saw his oldest child bum-rushing him. His suit coat and tie were off, and he was tossing his phone and keys out of his pockets and onto the nightstand when he saw his son.

“What’s wrong with you, Pop?” Jimmy said angrily to his father.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Reno shot back with a frown, looking him up and down, his hard blue eyes so intense that when most people came at him they cowered when they looked into those eyes. “Carmine was defending his mother’s honor. What I look like jumping on his case for doing what he was supposed to do?”

“Not Carmine.” Jimmy was looking squarely into his father’s hard eyes as if they didn’t intimidate him in the least. If anything, he came harder for Reno. “Why you keep hurting her like that?”

Reno frowned again. “What are you talking? Who am I hurting?”

“Ma! You know who. You’re the one was out all night, but you come at her like she’s the one out of line. You’re out of line, Pop. You’re out of line!”

Reno rarely saw his usually chill son so animated, and it did throw him off his game, but not by much. “Keep your ass out of my business. That’s what you’re going to do.”

“But why would you tell her because she won’t jump at your commands that she’s the reason you run around with all these women?”

Reno frowned. “What women I’m running around with? I never said I was running around with any women.”

“That’s what you intimated, Pop, and you know it.”

Reno let out a frustrated exhale, his eyes betraying his inner irritation at always being so badly misunderstood. He moved up to his son, causing Jimmy to take a step back because he knew his father was capable of knocking him through a wall. But Reno kept coming until there was no daylight between them. And he pointed his finger against the side of Jimmy’s face. “Stay the fuck out of my business,” he said so firmly that it had a chilling effect on Jimmy. Then he took both of his hands and pushed Jimmy away from him. “Now get your ass downstairs and worry about yourself.”

Jimmy looked at his father with so much rage in his eyes that it made Reno blink. Then Jimmy pointed at him too. “One day she’s going to leave you, and leave you for good this time. And when that happens, don’t you dare come running to me like you always do when you mess up. Because you’ve been warned.” He looked at his father as the rage in his eyes had quickly turned to hurt and sadness. He loved both his parents with an undying love, and they both knew it. “You’ve been warned,” he said again to his father, and then he left the room.

Reno placed his hands on both sides of his head and squeezed his eyes shut. He felt as if his life was spiraling. It was Christmas time. The best time of the year for him. But business was out of hand. Customers were complaining up the gazoo about shit that wasn’t even worth mentioning. Trina was always angry with him. His children were always looking at him as if he was purposely breaking their mother’s heart left and right when her heart was the last one on earth he’d break. It was Christmas alright. But where was the peace on earth and good will toward men? Where was the joy? He flung his shirt and t-shirt over his head and then balled them up and threw them across the room. He felt under attack, and he hated the feeling.