Big Daddy Sinatra: There Was a Ruthless Man(22)

“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.”