Reno Gabrini: A Man in Full

by Mallory Monroe

  He opened his eyes again and turned onto his back. He could hear cartoons on the television up front, and was certain his youngest son was glued to that TV. He didn’t realize his oldest son was standing in the doorway of his massive bedroom, until he glanced that way.

  “You’re finally awake,” Jimmy said.

  “If you want to call it that,” Reno replied, pinching the bridge of his nose.

  “I’ve never known you to sleep this late.”

  “Late? What time is it?” Reno asked. He knew he had meetings, even though it was Saturday.

  “It’s only eight, Pop. Relax. But you’re usually up before the crack of dawn.”

  Reno smiled, ran his hand through his pile of messy brown hair. “Not today apparently.”

  “Is it because Mom’s not here?” Jimmy asked. “Or is it because she left while you guys were still mad at each other?”

  Reno wasn’t about to get into any discussion about his wife with his son. “How’s Dommi?”

  “Still sniffling, but he’s okay. Dommi!” Jimmy yelled toward the living room. “Daddy’s awake!”

  Reno and Jimmy both smiled when they heard little footsteps immediately hit the floor running. And when Dommi appeared at the door and saw that his father was indeed awake, he took off for the bed.

  “Daddy!” he screamed as he ran. He tended to run sideways, flapping one arm, which always made him appear just one whiff away from tumbling over. Although it made Trina nervous as hell, it cracked Reno up.

  When his son arrived at his bedside, Reno hoisted him up into his arms. “The champ is here,” he said adoringly, kissing and hugging his three-year-old.

  “You were sleep when I first came in your room,” Dommi said. “Jimmy said I had to be quiet.”

  “Jimmy was right. Always listen to your big brother.”

  Jimmy beamed when he heard his father say that.

  “Are you sick like me, Daddy?” Dommi asked. “Is that why I had to be quiet?”

  “He’s not sick,” Jimmy said. “He misses Mom.”

  Dommi’s handsome face frowned. “I miss her too,” he said, and Reno pulled him tighter into his arms. He was a small biracial child, with big blue eyes just like his father’s and a small, button nose just like Trina’s. His hair was curly like Jimmy’s, whose deceased mother was also African-American, but whereas Jimmy looked more black than white in his biracial appearance, Little Dommi looked the opposite: more white than black. But they both favored their handsome, Italian father.

  “Anyway,” Jimmy said, “want some breakfast?”

  Reno looked at his son. “You’re cooking?”

  “Hell no,” Jimmy said, prompting his dad to laugh. “But all those restaurants downstairs are.”

  “I’m not hungry,” Reno said.

  “I don’t get you. You get on Ma all the time about not eating, when you don’t eat properly either.”

  “Yeah but when I do eat I make up for lost time. Trina doesn’t.” A longing came over Reno at just the mention of her name.

  “Anyway, I’ll be downstairs on the basketball court,” Jimmy said. “You can send for me when you get ready to leave and I’ll get Dommi.”

  “Fran’s supposed to keep him for me today. Where’s Fran?”

  “I have no idea. I went to take him over to her apartment before I headed down to shoot hoops and she wasn’t home. Probably stayed out all night.”

  Reno shook his head.

  “I don’t mind watching him, Dad. But please don’t stay away all day and night like you normally do because I promised to take Melita shopping today.”

  “Why she can’t take her own self shopping?”

  Jimmy immediately regretted mentioning Melita’s name. “The point is,” he said, “I need you to get your son later today. Or call the nanny.”

  “I’ll be back in time,” Reno assured him.

  “Or I can always take him with me?”

  Reno looked at Jimmy. “Didn’t my wife make it clear to both of us that her baby is not to go outside under any circumstances yet?”

  Jimmy smiled. “Yes, sir, she made it clear.”

  “Then he’s not going out at all. Not even to the gym.” Then Reno waved his hand. “Just go on and shoot your hoops.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” Jimmy said with a smile.

  “But be in place later, James,” Reno warned. “I’ve got a meeting across town I can’t miss and Fran is too unreliable.”

  “I’ll be in place,” Jimmy said as he hurried off.

  Reno placed both hands around his son and kissed him on the lips. “So you miss mommy too, don’t you?” he asked him.

  “A lot,” Dommi said.

  “Did you talk to her this morning?”

  “Yes, sir. She called me on the telephone.”

  Reno hesitated. “Did she ask about Daddy?”

  Dommi thought about this. “She asked about me,” he said.

  Reno closed his eyes and laid his son’s head on his chest. Yeah, he thought, as he held Dommi, he missed mommy too. A lot.

  He fell asleep thinking about his wife. He thought about the way she laughed and the way she winked at him whenever she said something she thought was clever. He thought about her walk and her grace and her sophistication. He trembled at the thought that their marriage almost didn’t make it. And even now they still had their ups and downs. But she was his woman, and always would be, he thought, as he drifted in and out of consciousness. But then his cell phone began ringing, and any thoughts he had of resting a little longer, were dashed.

  He grabbed his phone off of the nightstand, knocking his Rolex to the floor as he did, but holding onto his son, who had fallen asleep on top of him. “Yeah?” he said into the phone.

  “Reno, it’s me,” Fran could be heard in the phone.

  He closed his eyes again. “What is it?” he asked her. “You were supposed to babysit this morning.”

  “Jimmy will do it.”

  “But I don’t want Jimmy doing it. He’s a young man with a life, and he needs to be out there living it.”

  “And what am I?” Fran asked in her thick Jersey accent. “Chop liver? I have a life too!”

  “What do you want, Fran?”

  “I need you to take care of him, Reno. You can’t let him get away with this.”

  Reno frowned. “What are you talking about? I can’t let who get away with what?”

  “Pac-Man! You can’t let him get away with this. He beat the shit out of me, Reno.”

  Reno’s heart pounded. He grabbed Dommi and sat up on the side of the bed. “He beat you?”

  “He nearly killed me, Reno,” Fran said, a cry now in her already whiny voice.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m in Crawley’s apartment. He’s one of Pac’s neighbors. They live in the same building. He rescued me, Reno. Pac would have killed me if he hadn’t rescued me. You can’t let him get away with this.”

  Reno ran his hand through his hair. He hated being put in the position of playing the thug. He hated it! But Fran was right. If this loser did indeed put his hands on her, there was no way Reno could let him get away with that.

  “I’ll need to find Jimmy first to get Dom. But give me the address,” he said, although he knew having some confrontation with Fran’s boyfriend was the last thing he wanted on his to do list too.

  Trina grabbed the high blood pressure medicine from off of the counter and made her way out of the drug store. When she looked across the sidewalk and saw Amos Cates stepping out of his truck, she smiled. They’d been friends since grade school.

  “Well if it isn’t the good doctor!”

  Amos turned just as he was buttoning his suit coat. And he smiled too. “Trina Hathaway in the flesh,” he said as she approached him. “I don’t believe it.”

  They gave each other a friendly hug. It had been years. So many years, she thought.

  “Let me get a look at you,” she said as she pulled back from their embrace.

  “Im
pressed?” he asked as he turned around in his ankle-length Gabardine overcoat, with his blue ascot around his neck, and his double-breasted suit underneath his coat. He was an attractive black man, tall and slender.

  “Not bad,” she said, nodding her head.

  “Not bad for the King of the Nerds, hun?”

  Trina smiled. “You remember that?”

  “Of course I remember it! I finally got up the courage to ask you out to the high school dance and you tell me, ‘you’re my friend, and you will be my friend for life, but I don’t date nerds.’”

  Trina laughed. “I didn’t say it like that.”

  “Oh yes you did! Then I said to you, ‘But I’m not a nerd.’ And you said, and I’ll never ever forget this: ‘Not a nerd? Get serious! You’re King of the Nerds.’”

  Trina shook her head, still laughing. “I was terrible,” she said.

  “Yes, you were,” Amos said, laughing too. “You’re the only human being who ever made me feel bad about being smart.”

  Trina looked at him. It felt like an indictment against her very character. She would never make someone feel that way. But apparently she had. “I am so sorry,” she said seriously.

  “Don’t be,” he said, touching her arm. “Please. You put me in my place. And now that I’m a doctor, it was exactly the place I needed to be put in.”

  Trina smiled again. “Yeah, I heard about your success. Dr. Amos Cates. It has a nice ring to it. But what I said to you in high school was still pretty awful.”

  “Ah, bunk!” Amos said dismissively. “It was the truth. You didn’t like nerds and you didn’t try to lead me on or use me to do your homework or anything like that.” Trina laughed. “You liked the bad boys and that was all there was to it. That was your place. And from what I hear about that husband of yours, it was a good place for you to end up.”

  Trina didn’t quite know what he meant by that, but she didn’t get into it. She knew the man she married. She didn’t need anybody to try and explain anything to her about Reno.

  He leaned against his big pickup truck. “I heard you were in town,” he said.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Word gets around in little Dale you know.”

  “You knew I was in town, but you didn’t bother to come and say hello?”

  “You weren’t exactly knocking down my office door, either now,” he said with a smile. “But no, I figured you wanted your space. Word on the street is that you were back because you needed some time away from your husband.”

  “What?” Trina asked, shocked that she should be in anybody’s conversation.

  “That’s what they do around here, Tree. They talk.”

  Trina shook her head. She couldn’t get away from rumors and innuendos even if she tried. “So Dale is your stop?” she asked him. “Little old Dale?”

  “It is,” Amos said easily. “And I’m glad about it too.”

  “But you were a surgeon in Chicago. What in the world possessed you to come back to Mississippi?”

  Although Amos took his time responding, Trina could tell he knew the answer without much thought at all. “I couldn’t find it there,” he said.

  She waited for clarification. He didn’t give it to her. “You couldn’t find what there?” she asked him.

  “Family. A sense of real community. I couldn’t find it in Chicago. I felt as if I was just a part of the rat race. I felt as if I was just another brother preaching that go-getter gospel as if going and getting it was the whole point.”

  He smiled, but Trina saw the weariness in his smile.

  “After I got it,” he continued, “after I achieved the lucrative private practice and the big house and the big car, after I had more women than I could ever manage, I looked around, Tree. And you know what I realized?”

  Trina was now staring at him. “What?” she asked him.

  “That I had everything any man in his right mind could ever want, but that I had absolutely nothing too. Absolutely nothing. And it shook me.”

  “So much so that you gave up the good life and went home?”

  “It didn’t happen overnight, don’t let me mislead you,” he said with a smile. “I thought about stopping the world and getting off for years, but I didn’t have the courage to get off. Then one day, after going to the office and seeing woman after woman with no real medical problems, but they just wanted to, as one woman put it bluntly, see my cuddly little face again, I’d had it. This wasn’t even cute anymore.”

  Trina laughed.

  “And it wasn’t their fault,” he went on, “it was mine. I encouraged their behavior, that was why they did it. But I couldn’t do it anymore, Tree. I became a doctor to help people. Not to entertain them. Not to be some eye candy for some rich old ladies with deep pocketbooks. But that was what my practice had degenerated to.”

  “You were their toy boy doctor,” Trina said with a smile.

  Amos laughed. “I wouldn’t go that far,” he said. “But yeah. I felt like a toy. But a toy of my own making.”

  Trina continued to stare at him. At least he was taking responsibility for his life crisis, she thought, although she still didn’t understand where he was coming from. It seemed to her he could have handled it where he was. He could have stopped being a flirt and started serving the poor and needy right there in Chicago. But he wasn’t her. He always danced to the beat of a different drummer than she ever did. Whereas she was the party girl who couldn’t wait to leave home, Amos was more steady as you go. She could see somebody like him returning to Dale.

  “At least you did it right,” he said when silence overtook them.

  Trina looked at him as if he had lost his mind. “I did it right?” she asked him. Are you for real, her expression seemed to say.

  “You married a very successful man. A man who owns the PaLargio, come on now, Tree. That’s doing something right. And you have a wonderful child---”

  “Two children,” Trina corrected him. “Jimmy isn’t my biological child, he’s my husband’s biological son, but he’s my child just as much as my baby is mine.”

  “That’s what I mean,” Amos said with a smile. “How many women would say that? If they didn’t birth the boy, the boy is not theirs in any way, shape, or form. But you stepped up to the plate. You always do. That’s what I mean when I say you did it right.”

  “I’m the girl who left home with Jeffrey Graham, remember? I’m the girl who fell for an abusive man who beat my ass and tried to turn me out as a prostitute. I’m the girl who struggled for years as a waitress in strip joints, and you say I did it right? No, Amos, I made my bed hard. I didn’t do shit right. You’re the one who did it right. Just because you’ve had a change of heart doesn’t mean you did anything wrong. You’re just coming back to yourself now. Everything is a matter of timing.”

  “You sound like your father,” Amos said, shaking his head. “Preach!” he added, and she laughed.

  “Anyway,” Trina said, “I’d better get this medication to my mother. She hasn’t taken it for three days, I just found out, so she needs it.”

  “All right. I’ll let you go. But good seeing you again, Tree.”

  “You too,” Trina said, walking away. “See you around.”

  “You’ll be at the church celebration this afternoon, I take it?”

  “A picnic in this cold weather,” Trina said, still finding that hard to believe.

  “It’s not a picnic, Tree. It’s a founder’s day celebration. It’s an annual church tradition. Didn’t you know that?”

  “Hell nall,” Trina said with a smile. “When I was younger, if my parents went right, I went left.” Amos laughed. “And I mean every time,” Trina added. “But yeah, I’ll be there.”

  “Then I’ll see you there,” Amos said as he watched her walk away. Then he shook away all of those fantasies he still had of being with her, and headed for the drugstore.

  FIFTEEN

  In the rundown tenement, Reno took the stairs two at a time. He wore a pair
of faded jeans and a sweatshirt, looking nothing like the hotel mogul he was known as. But he couldn’t get up those stairs fast enough. He was getting too old for this shit, and he knew it, but he couldn’t let that bastard get away with this.

  His sister Fran, with the bruises still fresh on her face, was hurrying behind him, as if she was going to make sure he didn’t let that bastard get away.

  But Reno wasn’t thinking about her. Because he knew her. Because he knew this could have all been avoided if she would just leave these bad boys alone. But oh no. Not Fran. Every relationship she ever had, including the one with her deceased husband, was contentious and abusive. And always with blowback that always blew back to Reno.

  The lowlifes who lived in the building were coming out of their own little apartments as Reno made his way up the stairs. They knew what was about to go down. They knew a man like Reno Gabrini wasn’t inside their establishment just for the hell of it. They knew what Pac-Man had done to his baby sister, and they knew Reno was out for blood.

  But not one of them was about to call the cops. Mainly because most of them were either wanted by the cops themselves, or should have been. Besides, they were looking forward to the show. Having an angry Reno Gabrini in their little bolt hole of a residence was a great treat for them. It was a hellava burden for Reno, but a treat for them.

  When Reno made it to the door at the top of the stairs, he didn’t knock or even bother to turn the knob. He busted the flimsy door open with his broad shoulder. He busted the door half off of its hinges. If you go in tough, you come out tough, was what his mob boss father had taught him. So he went in tough.

  As soon as the door flew open, he could see Pac-Man making a run for it toward his kitchen window. Reno made a run for it too, knocking over furniture as he ran, until he reached the window and grabbed the foolish kid. He slung him down from the window frame, then slammed his face down onto the kitchen table. And the beating commenced.