Page 54 of Worth of Waste

I’m sorry. Don’t be angry. I’ll call soon. Something came up.

I love you. –Dino

It would have to be enough, even if it wasn’t what she would want.

Until he had something more concrete in his plans, Dino didn’t know what else to say. His whole life had just been moving from point A to point B without any real direction or reason, but now that he had reason, he still didn’t have much direction.

Things were still up in the air for him—and even for Karen and his son—where he was concerned. How long would he be free before the previously dropped charges were refiled and he once again found himself in the midst of a trial, and even lockup?

Was it fair of him to drag her though all that, simply because he was selfish and not ready to let go?

Dino knew the answer to his own question, but he wasn’t quite ready to answer it yet.

He grabbed the few things he had brought along and shoved them into his bag as he waited out the cab that had given him a half hour to forty-five minutes wait time. His white Bentley would be waiting for him in a storage locker, thanks to his brother putting it away for him while he was in prison. It wouldn’t take long for him to grab the keys to the locker and the car before heading over to his uncle’s place.

Dino dreaded that meeting.

He dreaded walking back into a life he had never once wanted.

It was only the quiet mumblings from the backroom that broke Dino from his inner thoughts. Not wanting his son to wake his mother, Dino grabbed one of the sippy cups full of milk from the fridge and the diaper bag out of the corner. He found a grinning, drooling Junior standing up in his portable playpen that doubled as a safe bed when needed. The baby smiled even wider at the sight of his father coming into the room—it damn near broke Dino’s heart.

“Hey, little man, come here and I’ll get you ready.”

Junior kicked and babbled on as Dino changed the boy’s sleeping outfit to something else, and got him into a clean diaper. He sucked happily on his sippy cup when Dino put him back into the playpen.

Having spent one night at Karen’s apartment, albeit on the couch, he found out that Junior would play happily in his bed for a while as long as he was dry, clean, and had some milk.

Still, he sat on the edge of the bed, letting his one-year-old chatter on.

He wanted to be a normal father.

He wanted to spend every morning with his son.

“Da,” J cooed, waving his cup high.

Dino smiled. “Yeah, little man. I’m your Da.”

Somehow, he was going to have to figure out a way to make all the things he wanted happen for him and Junior—for Karen, too.

Didn’t he deserve it?

Couldn’t he be happy?

Dino

“YOU should have woken me up,” Karen said on the other end of the phone.

Dino could still hear the anger in her tone, despite how hard she tried to hide it from him. “It was early—”

“Not that early, Dino.”

“I’ll make it up to you as soon as I can, but something came up. Junior was good until you woke up, right?”

“He was—nice touch with the T-shirt, by the way.”

Dino smiled at the amusement in Karen’s voice. He’d given Junior the shirt he’d worn the day before when the baby had cried as Dino tried to leave. For whatever reason, the boy had stopped, snuggled the shirt, and went back to playing with his toys in his portable playpen.

“He didn’t want me to go, either,” Dino admitted. “I thought it might help.”