CHAPTER TWENTY

The next night in the massive game room inside his home, Mick sat on the sofa watching Duke and Jackie go hard at the ping-pong table. With his legs folded as he was casually dressed in a pullover sweater and blue jeans, he watched Duke take a ten-point lead over his twin sister, but Jackie was rallying. That ten-point lead dwindled to four. But Mick wanted Duke to win. Because if he lost it would have meant that he eased up, got cocky, figured he had it in the bag when he didn't have shit in shit. He was staring intensely at his son.

Duke and Jackie knew it too. Every time they took peeps at their father, they saw him staring unyieldingly at Duke. That was why Duke was sweating bullets as he played. He knew he couldn't lose with his father watching him. To his dad, it would be more than just losing a game. It would be losing a game to a girl. Losing a game when he should have won. Losing a game when he was Mick Sinatra's son and no son of Mick the Tick's lost at anything.

That was why Jackie knew she could rally, but she couldn't overtake her beloved brother. She could easily beat him: she always bested Duke at every game they played. But not in front of their dad.

Roz entered the game room decked down, the twins noticed, in a bodycon dress that highlighted every curve of her magnificent physique, and Christian Louboutin boots that were made for marching. With a jacket over her arm and round shades over her eyes, she looked like a movie star to her children.

When Mick saw her, his dick immediately went hard.

"Where are you headed, Ma?" Duke asked after glancing over at her as he and Jackie continued to battle it out.

"I'm going out," Roz said as she began putting on gloves. Mick said nothing.

Then Roz looked around the room. "Where's Big Daddy?"

"He went back to Jericho," Duke said.

"I thought he wasn't going back until tomorrow."

"He said he needed to get back to Auntie Jenay. She's in the hospital again. Donny says he never leaves her side for too long whenever she's hospitalized."

Roz nodded. "Now that's what I call a great man. A man that loves his children and his wife and takes time out for them even though he's got a lot going on. That's why all his children turned out the way they did. He raised them right."

Duke and Jackie glanced over at their father, who remained motionless. But the twins knew he was a neglectful father to their older siblings before their mother made him shape up and fly right by the time they were born.

"We could learn a lot from Big Daddy," Roz added.

But just as she said those words, she looked at her children and realized what was happening. They kept taking peeps at Mick. And Duke looked terrified of losing in front of his father, while Jackie looked as if she was holding back her best game to protect her brother. All because of that stern eye of Mick. And Roz didn't like it. He wasn't going to turn their children into robots like him. Over her dead body!

"Why are you two playing like you're in a death match? Stop it. Just stop. Put those paddles down right now and look at me."

They both feared their mother almost as much as they feared their father and they put down their paddles and looked at her.

"It's not a competition, you hear me? You're taking the fun out of a game. And that's all this is: a game. And guess what you do with a game? You play it. You don't become it. You play. So stop treating it as if it's a life or death situation that you have to win." Then she looked at Jackie. "Or lose," she added. "All you have to do when you play a game is have fun. You hear me?"

"Yes, ma'am," they said almost in unison.

"When you pick back up those paddles just play. Don't keep score, just play."

The twins glanced at their father, but a relief came over both of them when they got permission from their mother to have fun. And that was what they did. They stopped keeping score, although they knew their father still would, and they began to just play the game and enjoy playing it the way they did when they weren't under their father's gaze.

"That's better," Roz said, and then she turned to leave.

"Where are you going?" Mick asked her.

Roz looked at him. She slid her shades down her nose so that he could see her eyes. "I said I was going out." Then she waited, daring him to ask her out where. She dared him to question her the way he refused to let her question his movements.

But oddly enough, a little tinge of hurt came over her when he didn't bother asking where. "Don't wait up," she said, and walked out of the game room.

The twins quickly glanced at their father. They knew he loved their mother, just as they knew he loved them, but it was always some kind of wall that he constructed himself that kept him from showing how he truly felt the way a normal person would. He just continued to sit there.

Several minutes later, after Roz was long since gone, they watched their father get up. But he didn't go after their mother. He went upstairs.

But what the twins didn't know was that he didn't go upstairs out of indifference. He went upstairs and made a call to the detail chief assigned to his wife.