Reno Gabrini: A Man in Full (12 page)

NINE

She came out of the mall walking with purpose.  Reno was leaned against his Porsche watching her.  He didn’t take his eyes off of her.  He was amazed how clearly he remembered her, every inch of her, as he watched her.

Her vehicle, a black Land Rover, was parked three cars beyond his.  She had to walk pass his car to get to hers.  Which was how he set it up when his people tracked her down.

She slowed her walk when she saw him standing there, but she didn’t stop.  She couldn’t give herself away that easily.  He looked so gorgeous, she thought, in his form-fitting Canali suit, a suit that highlighted his powerful biceps.  He wore shades, had his arms folded, and his legs crossed at the ankle as if those expensive Battistoni dress shoes he wore didn’t mean shit to him.   But that was Reno.  He was every bit the unpretentious hunk he used to be.

But if he thought she was going to roll over and play dead just because he was there to confront her, he had another thought coming.

“Mr. Gabrini, hi,” she said cheerfully as she was about to walk on by.  “Nice to see you again.”

Reno, however, didn’t crack a smile.  “Come here,” he said with his usual swagger.

Melita hesitated as if she had options to consider when they both knew she didn’t, and then she walked up to him.  “Yes, may I help you?” she asked.

“You can begin by cutting the bullshit,” Reno said. 

There was a pause, but her cheerful expression remained unchanged.  “I didn’t realize I had any bullshit to cut.”

“What do you want with my son?”

Another pause.  She had forgotten about Reno’s hard-charging style.  “Jimmy and I have known each other---”

“What do you want with my son?” Reno asked again.   “I don’t want to hear any history.  I don’t want to hear any lies.  What do you want with my son?”

Melita exhaled.  “I like him.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I love him, whether you believe it or not.”

“I don’t believe it.  What else you got?”

“Now look, Reno, you aren’t going to stand up here and dictate to me---”

“Why are you with Jimmy?”

Melita hesitated again.  “I love him,” she said again.

Reno knew this was a waste of time.  She wasn’t going to level with him.  At least not yet.  He moved up closer to her. 

Melita felt his closeness.  She remembered how he used to feel.  Especially when he was deep inside of her.  But Reno looked so filled with hatred for her that it angered her.

“I don’ know what this is about,” he said.  “I don’t know that yet.  But I do know you’re up to something.  And you can play your games.  You can have all kinds of tricks up your sleeve.  But not with my son.  You hear me?  He’s my son!  That kid you’re playing with is my boy.  And if anything happens to James Maxwell Gabrini, you’ll hear from me.  I promise you.”

Melita smiled, although her heart was pounding.   “You promised you wouldn’t break my heart once upon a time too.  You didn’t keep that promise either.  So who gives a shit about your promises?” 

“I give a shit.  And you have some nerve, lady.  You dumped me for that loser you fell in love with, and you’re talking to me about a heartbreak?  Get the fuck out of my face!”

“Your son is a grown man,” Melita said, attempting to stay in control.  “He can make his own choices.  And he chose me.”

“Because he didn’t know a damn thing about you!”

“He didn’t know you had me, you mean?  You don’t know what he knows,” she said and then smiled.  “Maybe he just don’t give a damn, Reno.  Maybe you’re not as everything to him as you think you are.”  Then her smile left.  “You think it’s your world and everybody’s just visiting, don’t you?  You think everything always has to be about you.  What I have with Jimmy has nothing to do with you.  Nothing!  We never even discussed you!”  Then a flash of anger crossed her face.  “You took my heart.  One day, somebody’s going to take yours.”

“You won’t be taking him,” Reno shot back.

She frowned.  “Just leave us alone,” she said, and then kept on walking to her car.

Reno watched her as she walked away.  Fine as wine was how he used to describe her.  And now the same woman that dumped him; the same woman he once worked extra hard to get wanted him to believe that Jimmy was this random kid she plucked out of the blue.  She wanted him to believe that her attraction to Jimmy was as real as rain was wet.  But he didn’t believe it.  Not any of it.  Something more was at work here.  He could feel it in his bones.

The day after his encounter with Melita, Reno stood at the floor-to-ceiling window inside his thirtieth floor office and looked out at the energy of Vegas around him.  This was his town.  One paper dubbed him the King of Vegas once.  But he wondered sometimes if he even had a clue.

The intercom buzzed and Reno walked over to his desk.  His son was there to see him, his assistant said.  Reno gave clearance and then walked back to the window. 

The door to his office opened and Jimmy entered slowly.  He walked even slower toward his father’s huge desk.  “They said you wanted to see me,” he said.

Reno didn’t turn around. 

Jimmy waited for him to respond, but nothing came.  Which didn’t help Jimmy’s mood at all.  He still had a chip on his shoulder.  He still had the look of a man who didn’t want to be there.  But he knew it was nothing more than his wounded pride, and he also knew he had to get over it.  He was inwardly pleased his father had reached out to him.  After what happened to them at that restaurant, his fear was that Reno would never want to have anything more to do with him.

He walked over to the window and stood beside his father.  Then he looked at him.  He wanted to apologize, but that wounded pride got in the way again.  So he remained defensive.  “What do you want, Pop?” he asked him.

Reno looked at Jimmy, and his heart swelled with love for his son.  So much love that he feared he would get all emotional.  So he looked back out of the window.  “We need to talk,” he said.

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

“There’s plenty to talk about.”

“Not if it’s about my woman there isn’t.”

Reno gave a kind of weary smile.  “Your woman?” he asked.  Then he shook his head.  “Melita’s nobody’s woman, Jimmy,” he said to him pointblank, and then looked at him.  “And especially not yours.”

“Why, Pop?  Because she used to be yours?”

Reno’s heart dropped.  He stared at his son.  “Who told you that?”

“She told me that.”

Reno frowned.  “And you’re still with her ass?”

“I just found out yesterday.  She told me after you cornered her in that parking lot.  She said she forgot ever knowing you until you reminded her in that parking lot.”

“And you believe her?”

Jimmy frowned.  “I just found out yesterday,” he said.  “Now it doesn’t matter.  It can’t matter!  I love her now.”

Reno shook his head.  “A woman like that doesn’t fall in love, Jimmy.”

“Yeah, I know.  A woman like Melita couldn’t possibly be in love with a man like me.  They only fall for rich, tough guys like you.  They could never love me.  Is that how it goes?”

“I’m not talking about any random woman, Jimmy Mack!  I’m talking about Mel.  And that woman, I’m telling you, is not the kind of woman a man falls in love with.”

“Why, Pop?  Since you’re such an expert on
Mel
, as you call her.  Tell me why?”

“She’s a user,” Reno said.

Jimmy stared at him.  Then he looked out of the window.  “Every girl I’ve ever had, maybe even every friend I’ve ever had, always ends up using me.  Every one of them.  So that’s nothing new to me.  But not Lita.  Melita isn’t using me.  She’s different.”

“Oh, Jimmy!”

“Don’t
oh, Jimmy
me!  She’s different!  And I’m not some wild-eyed kid blindly in love, either.  But she loves me.  No, she doesn’t love me the way Ma loves you.  Nobody will ever love me like that.  But she loves me better than anybody else has, which isn’t saying a lot, but it’s saying something.”

Reno’s heart dropped through his shoe.  His face was a mask of anguish.  “Son, you don’t have to settle like that, what are you talking?  You’re a smart, sweet, handsome young man!  Women would give their right arm to have somebody like you!”

“Oh, yeah?  Then where are all of these right arms?  Nobody’s lifted a finger to have me!  Nobody’s lifted a thumb to have a relationship with me because they wanted me.  They wanted me to get close to you, oh, yeah.   They’d give more than a right arm for that.  But just to be with me?  Get real, Pop.  Nobody gives a shit about me.”

Reno was offended.  “What’s that supposed to mean?  Nobody gives a shit about you?  So what am I?  You think I don’t care?  You think I don’t love you?  That Tree don’t?  That Dommi and Fran don’t?”

“I thought we were talking about females.”

Reno grabbed Jimmy by one arm and turned him so that they were eyeball to eyeball.  “You listen to me, young man,” Reno said.  “I love you with all of my heart.  You hear me?  Don’t you ever think I don’t love you with everything within me.  Because I do.  You aren’t on anybody’s begging list.  You are not so starved for affection that you have to settle for users.  You don’t.  You have my undying love and the undying love of your family.  And you have youth.  You can wait until the right one comes along, Jimmy.  The way I did.”

But Jimmy still couldn’t dump Melita.  It wasn’t that simple.  “I love my family, too, Pop.  I’m not saying you guys aren’t great.  You are.  But. . . I love Melita now.  I can’t just dump her like that.  I love her.”

Reno hated to go there, but he had to make it plain to Jimmy.  “So that’s how you settle?  Instead of waiting for a good girl to come along, the way I did, you go and fall for a whore?”

Jimmy looked at his father with pure anger in his eyes.  “A whore?” he asked.  “You’re calling her a whore?  You of all people?  There’s not a corner in Vegas I haven’t been on where some female hasn’t been talking about how she had sex with you before and how good it was, and many of them claim you’re still having sex with them!”

“That’s a
got
damn lie!” Reno blared.

“But that’s what they’re saying, Pop!  And Ma’s hearing all of that too.  How do you think she feels?  People call Ma a fool just like you’re calling me.  She’s the fool of fools for staying with Reno, that’s how one woman put it.  They’re out there calling your wife all kinds of nasty names because of your whoring around.  And you have the nerve to criticize Lita?  Dump your own garbage before you try to dump mine!”

Then Jimmy began heading for the exit.  He could hardly contain his fire.  But when he made it to the door, and was about to open it, he looked back at his father.  He was standing there, like some old man.  Jimmy could tell his words had shaken him to his core.  The idea that his less than stellar reputation was hurting Trina was something he had to know, but probably never really dealt with.  Now Jimmy had put it all out in the open.  Which wasn’t Jimmy’s intention.  He would never intentionally hurt his father. He just wanted him to see how hypocritical he could be sometimes!

Jimmy hesitated, but then he walked back over to the window just as his father was looking up at him.  When he saw that pain in his father’s eyes, he hurried to him and threw his arms around him.  He pulled him tightly into his arms. 

Reno held onto Jimmy with closed eyes and a humbled heart.  The last person on the face of this earth he would ever want to hurt was Trina.  But Jimmy was right.  His reputation was hurting her as if that reputation itself was a knife or a gun.  And Reno knew there was nothing he could do about it.  He closed his eyes even tighter as his son held him.  He couldn’t bear the thought of hurting any member of his family, not any of them.  But especially not Tree.

The next morning, Melita and Jimmy sat at her kitchen table quietly drinking coffee.  Jimmy was swiping through his smartphone text messages, but Melita was sipping coffee, taking slow drags on her cigarette, and staring at him.

“Anything interesting?” she finally asked him.

“Just guys talking about the game last night,” he replied.

“Basketball?”

“You know it.”

“Which team?”

“Miami Heat.  LeBron scored fifty.”

“Damn,” Melita said as she tapped the ash of her cigarette onto her saucer. 

Although Jimmy smiled, he kept reading his messages. She waited longer, then spoke again.  “So,” she said, getting to the meat of the matter, “did you see your father yesterday?”

“I saw him,” Jimmy replied without looking up.  “He sent for me.”

This interested her.  “What did he want?”

“Just to talk,” he said with a hunch of his shoulders.  “Nothing really.”

Melita wanted to clobber him. “What do you mean, ‘nothing really?’  It had to be something really after what happened at that restaurant the other night.  After how he came at me in that parking lot the other day.”

Jimmy finally looked up.  Melita was struck by how much he sometimes, like now, resembled his father.  “I mean, he wanted to talk.  He didn’t want us to stay in a bad place.  We’re close and he wanted us to stay that way.  And we will stay that way,” Jimmy said as if he was serving notice to her, although he didn’t mean any disrespect.

Melita took it as total disrespect, but she dismissed it too.  She had bigger fish to fry.  “Did he mention me?” she asked him.

“He talked about you being with me, junk like that, sure.”

“Did he mention the fact that I used to be with him?”

“I didn’t give him a chance to mention it.  I told him we already discussed that.”

Melita waited for him to say more.  Like his father, he was a contemplative kind of man and he was thinking now, as if he was reliving some scene.  “Bottom line is,” he said, “he’s concerned about me.”

“Because you’re with me?”

Jimmy nodded.  “Yeah.  He doesn’t hold you in very high regard, to be honest with you.”

The feeling was mutual, but Melita didn’t go there.  “He thinks I’m too old for you,” she lied.  “I’m sure that’s what it is.”

Jimmy looked at her.  “What happened between you two?” he asked her.