There was an eerie silence in the room. Charles didn’t know how to respond. It wasn’t as if he could wave a wand and her past could be erased. If that were the case, he’d be waving all kinds of wanes at himself. “Econolodge,” he finally said.
Jenay looked at him. Where did that come from? “Excuse me?”
“Go with the Econolodge offer. At least you’ll be a manager there. Motel 6 is only offering you assistant manager. Go with the Econolodge offer.”
Jenay smiled. “I’ll see,” she said.
She was no pushover, which he liked. But they both knew he was lingering. It was long past time for him to go.
He finally stood up. “I’d better go,” he said, and placed his hands in his pockets. Lingering again. “You take care of yourself, Jenay.”
She nodded. “You too, Charlie.”
“Do you need me to drop you off somewhere?”
“No, no thank-you, I’m fine. One of my friends will pick me up. But thanks.”
He wanted to kiss her, and hold her, but what the hell would that prove? But as he turned to leave, he turned back around. Lingering yet again. He couldn’t just leave! “Jenay, maybe we can . . .” Even he had to pull himself back.
“Take care, Charlie,” she said.
But he couldn’t say goodbye. He couldn’t just say goodbye. “Maybe we can get together again sometime,” he said, and suddenly felt as if he was suspended on a hook.
Jenay looked at him. A part of her wished he meant it. He was that straightforward kind of man she would have liked to get to know better. But she had to face the truth. Even if he did want to see her again, it would more than likely be more about seeing her body again than seeing her. And if sex, albeit great sex, was all there was to their relationship, who needed it? She could get sex anywhere. “What good would come of it?” she asked him.
He knew it too. It was a question he definitely couldn’t answer.
“Have a nice day, Charlie,” she said.
Charles actually felt relieved. She got him off the hook. “You too,” he said, and meant it. And then he stopped such fanciful thoughts, and left.
Jenay would have liked a kiss goodbye, and to feel his big, warm arms around her again. And that magical penis of his. She would give a lot to feel that inside of her again. But she was glad he didn’t go there. They had a night. A wonderful night. Nothing more. Nothing less. Get over it, Jenay!
And she did.
She got out of bed, and hopped into the shower.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Seven Weeks Later
They never come alone. Charles stood at the window inside his downtown office and watched Joe Mason and his small son get out of his Mercedes and walk across the sidewalk. A Mercedes, Charles thought. He didn’t pay his mortgage, but he paid that car note. And that was find by Charles. But why did they always run to him when the mortgage was due?
His desk intercom buzzed, as he knew it would, and his secretary announced that Mr. Mason was there to see him.
He told her to send him in, and then he unbuttoned his suit coat, and sat behind his desk. Like the coward Charles took him for, Mason pushed his innocent child out front, as he walked in.
Once the two men spoke, Charles motioned for Mason and son to take a seat.
“You remember my boy, don’t you, Big Daddy?” Mason was smiling when he said that, as if a man like Charles would be swayed by such buttery.
“Yes,” Charles said.
“Say hello to Big Daddy, Mikey,” Mason ordered his son.
“Hey, Big Daddy,” the boy said in a way that reminded him of his own baby boy.
“Still doing good in school?” Charles asked.
“Yes, sir,” the boy replied.
“Keep it up,” Charles said. Then buzzed for his secretary. “I want you to go in the lobby with Miss Mary, while your father and I handle some business.”
Mason’s smile left. He couldn’t take away his trump card. “I thought he’d stay, and sit in on it.”
Charles’s voice remained measured and clear. “He’s not sitting in,” he said, as his office door opened and Mary Stalworth, his secretary for over a decade, walked in.
“Yes, sir?”
“Take this young man in the lobby with you, Mary. I need to talk with his father.”
“Yes, sir.” Then she smiled. “Come on, son. Daddy won’t be long.”
The boy looked at his father, but then followed Mary.
When the door was closed, Charles leaned back. “What can I do for you, Joe?” he asked.
“You’re taking my house,” Mason said.
“You didn’t pay your mortgage. For the past five months.”
“It’s been hard finding work. This economy’s a mess. Clinton and his thug administration has this country going to hell in a hand basket!”
“But back to your foreclosure,” Charles said. “That’s what you need to worry about. Not the government.”
“I have six children, Big Daddy,” Mason said, remembering his own woes. “And you know Agnes is not in the best of health. They said she could lose a leg if those clots don’t stop. And my oldest girl’s back home.”
Charles didn’t respond to that. What could he say? He never said life was easy. His wasn’t a bed of roses either. And he didn’t see what any of it had to do with the fact that he didn’t pay that mortgage for the past five months.
“I have a lot going on,” Mason said. “You can’t take my house!”
“It’s not your house. It’s the bank’s house until you pay for it. You stopped paying for it, Joe.”
“Because I took a hard hit! Don’t you understand that? I sell feed. Because of Clinton, business has been lousy lately. Nobody trust what he’s doing with our country! This country is going to hell---”
“In a hand basket,” Charles finished for him. “I heard already. But I’m also sure President Clinton has nothing to do with why you haven’t paid that mortgage. Or why Jerichodians aren’t buying more feed. Maybe, and I’m shooting in the dark here, but maybe they aren’t buying more feed because three other feed stores have opened in town in the past year and you’re no longer the only game in town. And you never cut your costs and adjusted your lavish lifestyle to fit that reality. Maybe that has more to do with your business woes than President Clinton. What do you think?”
Asshole right, Mason thought as he stared at Big Daddy Sinatra. Big Daddy his foot! Everybody told him he was wasting his time. Everybody told him Big Daddy thought mercy was a hospital and kindness was a horse. He didn’t have a clue what either was, and Mason was wasting his time if he thought he’d get either from a man like that.
“What can I do to make this right?” Mason asked. “Can I get the loan restructured?”
“It was restructured eight months ago. And you paid for a couple months. Then you stopped again. Loan restructuring is out.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?” Mason asked with desperation in his voice.
“Sell that Mercedes, catch up your mortgage, and restructure your high-flying lifestyle to reflect the realities on the ground. That’s a start.”
Charles grabbed a pad and pen and began writing down a name and number. “Call Ed, the manager at my dealership. He’ll give you top dollar for that car and pay off the remaining balance. It should be enough for you to catch up the loan.”
“You’ll allow that? You’ll pull the foreclosure?”
“You have until five pm today before that loan becomes due in full, as you already understood in the countless warning letters you’ve received. You sell that car or you don’t sell that car, payment in full on that house will become due by five pm today. If you catch up before then, it will be pulled. If you don’t, it won’t. No ands, ifs, or buts about it.”
Mason wasn’t satisfied. “I love my car,” he said. “Why should I have to sell it?”
“Don’t sell it,” Charles suggested. “Live in it. You and Agnes and all of the children.”
Mason looked
at Charles with an angry glare. “Have you no pity for your fellow man? What good is my old house to you? The last thing you need is more property in this town!”
“So what are you saying? Because I don’t need your home, you shouldn’t have to pay for it?”
“You should forgive the back debt, and restructure that loan again. That’s how you help people. That’s how you can help me.”
“I’m not a social worker. I’m not in business to help people. I’m in business to make money.”
“So finally we hear the truth!” Mason proclaimed as if he had just unearthed something major. “The truth has come to light! That’s all it’s about for you. Money.”
Charles didn’t respond to that because there was nothing to respond to. Of course he was in business to make money!
“At least the truth is out,” Mason continued. “At least now I know that all of those horror stories I heard about you have been confirmed. It’s all about money with you. Not love. Not compassion. Money.”
“You own a feed store?” Charles asked calmly.
“You know I do,” Mason responded.
“If I go into your store to make a purchase, do you expect me to pay you with money? Or will love and compassion do the trick?”
Mason stared at Charles. “That’s not the same thing, and you know it!”
“How much of your inventory,” Charles continued, “do you give away for free? How much love and compassion do you show to these struggling families around here and let them go into your store and have the run of the place? And when it’s time for them to pay, do you simply forgive the debt with love and compassion?”
Mason stood up. “I will not be insulted this way,” he said. “It’s not the same and you know it! I’m leaving,” he said, and he turned to leave. Then he turned back, grabbed that name and number Charles had written on a pad on his desk, and left.
Charles leaned back and ran his hands across his face. He needed a break. A nice break away from this madness. But it didn’t happen. He didn’t even get a chance to so much as reflect on Joe Mason’s hypocrisy before his cell phone buzzed. It was Tony. They had a problem.
Charles sped his Jaguar through the streets of Jericho as if there was no speed limit, negotiating turns along the mountainous roads like a downhill racer, until the final turn turned into the driveway of Donald Sinatra’s suburban home: a wedding gift from his father. And it was his father who got out of the Jaguar and walked steadily across the lawn to the front door. His next-oldest son Tony, who had phoned him with the news, opened the door.
“You got here fast enough,” he said as he opened it. “A plane could not have gotten you here faster.”
“Where are they?” Charles asked as he entered the home.
“She’s in the bathroom. I made Donnie go in the guestroom.”
Charles walked swiftly down the narrow hallway that led to the bathroom, with Tony closing the door and following close behind.
When they entered the sizeable bathroom, they saw a blond-haired young man sitting on the side of the tub, with Donald’s pregnant wife Susan standing over him. She had a compress in her hands and was nursing the young man’s numerous facial bruises. He had been in a fight, it was obvious to Charles, and had lost. They both looked at Charles when he walked in.
“It wasn’t my fault, Big Daddy,” Susan quickly said.
“That’s what you heard?” Charles asked her. “That’s not what I heard.”
“But it’s not the truth!” Susan insisted. “Donnie beat up Paul for no reason. I begged him to stop, but he wouldn’t. He could have killed him, Big Daddy!”
Charles ignored her histrionics. “What was he doing here?” he asked her.
Susan and the bruised man exchanged a glance. “He was visiting me,” she ultimately said. “But Donnie came home and took it the wrong way.”
“You and Blondie here,” Tony pointed out, “were in the bedroom. In fact, you were in the bed. I don’t know what way you expected him to take it.”
“Paul wasn’t feeling well, and I let him lie down. That’s all I did. He came over to say hi, and then he started feeling really bad. I didn’t know what else to do, so I let him lie down.”
She had one of those grating voices that annoyed the shit out of Charles. But he maintained his cool. He never wasted his energy on idiocy, and he wasn’t about to start now.
“I wasn’t in that bed with him,” Susan continued her nerve-grating tirade. “I was just sitting there talking to him. We were talking. I was just sitting on that bed, that’s all I was doing. I was sitting. But Donnie took it the wrong way! I was just sitting.”
Charles knew exactly what kind of sitting she was doing, and it was more on that man’s face than on any bed, but that was what happened when children played grown-up games. He moved over to the young man who, like Susan and Donald, weren’t even twenty yet. The young man flinched when Charles reached for his chin, but then he relaxed as Charles lifted the chin to check out the extent of his bruises. They were extensive, and bad.
“Call Dr. Dross,” he said to Tony.
But Susan found the mere suggestion abominable. “Call a doctor?” she asked, with incredulousness in her voice. “He doesn’t need a doctor to come here. Look at him! Look at what Donnie did to him! He needs to go to the hospital!”
Charles looked at her with an undeniably icy gaze. “You’re going to the hospital,” he said to her, “if you don’t shut the fuck up.”
Susan knew her father-in-law. Although she’d never, not ever seen him lose his temper, she’d seen him lose his cool. And it was never in his actions, but in his look alone. Once, when Donald didn’t heed that warning, he nearly knocked Donald through a wall. She immediately stepped slightly away from Charles, and she did shut up.
Charles looked at Tony again. “Call Dr. Dross,” he said again. “Tell him to get here now. And remind his ass that I’m not paying him to run his mouth.”
“Yes, sir,” Tony said, as he pulled out his cell phone and left the room to do his father’s bidding.
“You should have seen Donnie, Big Daddy,” Susan continued, and Charles looked at her. She was one of those pretty young thangs that boys went nuts over, only to discover later, after falling hard for her ass, that she, too, knew that she was a pretty young thang, and she knew that boys went nuts over her. And after marriage, she wasn’t about to give up so much attention and adulation from all of those boys, for the attention and adulation of just one boy. Charles knew her type well. His ex-wife: exhibit number one.
“He wouldn’t listen to a word I had to say,” Susan kept talking. Kept grating on Charles’s nerves. “I told him everything isn’t what it seems sometimes. I told him that. But he wouldn’t listen to me. I told him---”
“You told him to don’t believe his lying eyes, right? You told him to ignore the real in front of him, and embrace the unreal. Right?” Then Charles’s already hard looked turned deadly. “Get the fuck out of my face,” he said to his daughter-in-law.
Paul, understanding the man’s temperament even if Susan didn’t, managed to fight through his considerable pain, and pull her away from Charles. Charles knew then that he was just as smitten with her as Donald was.
He left the two fools and went to find the third fool, Donald, his youngest son. Just as Tony had said, Donald was in the guest bedroom, sitting on the side of the bed. When Charles saw him sitting there with his hands between his thighs and his blonde hair matted against his forehead, he didn’t see a hard-working married man with a child on the way. He saw a child. His child. His one son, besides Robert, he worried about the most.
When Donald looked up and saw his father, that worried look in his deep blue eyes turned to tears. “Dad,” he said as if he was voicing his pain, and then he ran to his father. Charles opened his arms, and he fell into his father’s arms.
He was sobbing. Charles could feel emotion welling up within him as he listened to his son’s wails. And he didn’t interrupt him. He let
him get it all out.
It took several minutes, but Donald did eventually stop sobbing and moved out of his father’s embrace, wiping his eyes as he did. Charles didn’t speak. He didn’t see the point of repeating the obvious. He waited until his son did so.
“We haven’t been married two months,” he said, “and already she’s cheating. And that’s what happened, Dad. I caught her in bed with that man. If Tony hadn’t come home with me, and hadn’t been here, I would have . . . I could have killed that guy!”
“You know him?”
“Yeah, I know him. He’s Paul Lungren. He was her boyfriend before she met me. And she swore it was over, Dad. She swore up and down it was over. I wouldn’t have been with her if I would have known she still wanted him!”
The first order of business when that baby arrived, Charles now knew, was to make his son get a paternity test.
“She had other boyfriends before me, and I didn’t worry about them. But this guy kept coming around. All the time. I never liked it and she knew it! I told him to stay away from my house, and I told her to stop letting him come over, but she didn’t listen to me, Dad. She never listens to me!”
Charles could hold back no longer. “What did you expect?” he asked.
Donald looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“You married the trick, Donald. You married the girl most likely to fuck, and now you want to pretend she’s somebody else. Well she’s not. She’s exactly who you married.”
Those should have been fighting words for Donald, but they weren’t. Because he knew his father spoke the truth. “She’s pregnant,” he said. “And it’s my baby.”
“You hope,” Charles said.
But Donald gave his father a firm gaze. “It’s my baby,” he said.
Charles didn’t respond. Because it didn’t matter what Donald said. Baby pop out, a paternity test was going to be ordered.
“You taught me,” Donald continued, “that even if I messed up, I had to do the right thing.”
Big Daddy Sinatra: There Was a Ruthless Man (The Sinatras of Jericho County Book 1) Page 6
