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“No!” Prosper landed a hard hand down on the dining room table and glowered at the two women. “This is none of our fucking business. Girl got herself knocked up…”
“By one of your crew while she was on Saints property!!!” Dolly leaned in and narrowed her eyes at her brother-in-law.
“We don’t fucking know that the kid is Riker’s!” Prosper bellowed.
“We don’t know that it’s not!” Dolly bellowed back. “And when Gianni finds out his daughter is pregnant he is going to make her marry that …that …that odious Julian.”
“Odi…fucking who?” Prosper narrowed his eyes.
“Odious…it means the biggest ass-clown you can imagine, honey.” Pinky sighed. It didn’t look like her sister-in-law and her husband were going to reach an amicable conclusion any time soon. “I’m going to make some fresh coffee. Just give me a shout if you need help.”
“I will not need help.” Dolly assured her firmly.
“I wasn’t talking to you, sweetie.” Pinky replied. Then she gave Prosper a pointed look before she walked out the door.
Prosper watched his woman make her exit before he continued his rant. “Never heard of this guy Julian you’re talking about, but I’m sure he’s okay. Gianni’s not gonna pull any guy out of his asshole to marry his knocked- up daughter.”
“Gia has already turned down the man once, and without a husband and with a baby on the way Gianni is going to want her married. From what Gia tells me, this Julian is a ruthless man and would stop at nothing to marry his boss’s daughter. She would be miserable with him.” Dolly glared at Prosper. “And why do you find it necessary to be so vulgar all the time?”
“Oh,excuse me, I didn’t realize asshole is a word that you ain’t never heard before.” Prosper snorted. “And seems to me this young woman made her own damn bed when she lied down in it!” He finished off at a shout of air-splitting decibels.
“She didn’t get pregnant by herself, you pig-headed mule!” Dolly shrieked back.
Pinky was back in a flash. She leaned over the table in the space that separated her sister-in- law from her husband. Then she heaped a small plateful of Prosper’s favorite cookies in front of him. “Will you both please calm down? Dolly, Prosper is right in the sense that Gia should have thought about birth control before dipping into the reproductive pool, especially with a guy like Riker who’s gonna take every advantage.”
“Did you really just say that? You just set sisterhood back about a thousand years. Are you seriously placing the blame on the woman in this situation?” Dolly looked at Pinky incredulously.
“Having said that,” Pinky went on as if Dolly hadn’t spoken. Then she turned with a hand on her hip towards her husband.
“Gia went to Dolly for help, which means she went to us for help. You can look at it anyway you want to Prosper, but the fact is she’s in trouble. Plain and simple. The girl is scared and pregnant. She was raised with a family whose outdated principles and archaic sense of honor is going to place her in a position where she is going to have to marry a man she loathes. A man she has already rejected once — just to make sure that baby has a name.”
“That’s fucking ridiculous, nobody looks at it that way anymore.” Prosper said as he took a giant bite into a cookie and leaned back in his chair.
The change in his demeanor was immediate, and Dolly wondered for the hundredth time if the cookies Pinky made for Prosper contained more than sugar, butter, and eggs.
Dolly sighed. “Please, Prosper, can you at least talk to Riker and see what he has to say? That’s all I’m asking, is for you to open a doorway for a conversation between them. Gia will take it from there.”
“Son of a bitch.” Prosper muttered as he looked at the two women and knew he was defeated. “Yeah, I’ll talk to him.”
Riker slowly opened his eyes. The strong glare of the rising sun streamed through the threadbare, dingy curtains and shot through his aching head. The bright rays threatened to combust his brains into a flaming ball of fire. His entire throbbed with a hangover to end all hangovers. The inside of his mouth tasted like an ashtray full of cigarette butts soaked in cheap tequila. When Riker swallowed back the vile taste of his own saliva, his stomach put him on notice. It grumbled out a warning for him to spit that shit out before it brought up all the nasty stuff that he had shoved down the night before.
The night before.
When the soft rumble of a snore sounded out beside him, Riker turned his head to the source. He winced as the muscles knotted in the back of his neck and his temple throbbed out in protest. Riker’s eyes narrowed to slits as pain stabbed through his pupils. He was lying on a lumpy couch in a room that hadn’t seen a good cleaning in…well…ever. On the floor next to him, a woman was sprawled out on a dirty mattress.
Her name was…Janine…or Julia…or Jackie…or Jillian…or who the fuck knew and what the hell did it matter? He had met her in a bar just over the state line, where he had stopped to grab a beer and wash the road dirt down. The place was run of the mill, but it had an authentic Wurlitzer playing out some laid back country music. The lighting was low, and beer was specially priced two for one— served ice cold and with about ten varieties on tap. It had been a hell of a good time…slow and easy until…shit…one look at the swollen, cut and tender knuckles on his hands told the story for him. The specifics of this latest brawl, of course, would be different but the end result was always the same. Riker had a few brews, then someone said the wrong thing and before he knew it, chairs and fists were flying.
There was a junkyard dog living inside Riker’s head who just loved to fight and fuck. Most times he could keep that hound on a leash but when he drank, that leash vanished along with reasonable thought and prudent action. Riker figured that if he didn’t stop the adolescent bullshit soon, he would either wind up dead or end up killing someone else.
When the bitch drooling and snoring beside him let out a long, gassy fart, Riker felt a heave rise from his very unhappy gut. He belched up a mouth full of something that tasted like rotten eggs. Gingerly Riker rolled off the broken couch, onto his knees and immediately felt a sharp pain. He had the vague recollection of kicking a steel stool across the floor of the bar. It had quickly become air-borne and had landed hard against the mirrored wall. If Riker remembered right, the sprinkler alarm had gone off and had caused a wet web of confusion. That’s when the chick who he had been feeling up in a corner booth…Janine…yeah, that was her name…grabbed his hand and pulled him out the door. He had stuffed her into the club utility van and was just sober enough to get them to the shit hole apartment she called home. Once there, they had consumed a fifth of tequila and several lines of premium coke before he passed out on the couch. Yeah, it was all coming back to him now. Bitch couldn’t afford a goddamn box spring or even a cheap set of sheets for the filthy mattress, but expensive booze and cocaine, that she had plenty of.
A round of vicious cramps hit Riker like a freight train and this time he couldn’t keep the puke from rising into his mouth. He crashed through the door to the small bathroom across the hall. Riker barely had time to lift the seat before he vomited some greenish-yellowish chunks into the already urine filled bowl. He reached for the handle of the toilet and pushed hard, only to find the bowl filling with water but no accompanying draining sound. Riker watched on in horror as the piss and the vomit began to rise until it reached the rim of the bowl. Another quarter inch and the whole mess would over- flow out onto the floor and Riker was too cramped up to move.
This was a new low…even for him.
At the last second there was a loud sucking noise and a small whirlpool formed. Slowly, but surely, the whole putrid, disgusting mess swirled down the toilet.
Thank god.
