Page 16 of Trina Gabrini: Bring Him Back Home to Me

“I’m going to talk to him.”

“But?”

“But he always comes at me with that Florence Nightingale nonsense just because I like to knit. As if Florence Nightingale, a nurse by the way, was the queen of knitting. It does something to me every time Daddy goes there. I tell him constantly I’m not a nurse, as she was, and that knitting and crocheting have absolutely nothing to do with her. But he doesn’t listen.”

“But you can’t let him keep getting away with disrespecting you, Carmine. You get in everybody else’s face when they don’t treat you right. But you let Daddy get away with everything.”

Carmine knew it was true. He always invited his father to his events, but he rarely ever showed up. His mother showed up for everything, but his father treated him differently. As if because he was a certified genius he didn’t feel the way everybody else felt, when he felt more than all of them combined.

But during this birthday, he decided to do it differently. Instead of inviting everybody in his massive family circle, only to get can’t make it pronouncements from all of them, he decided to invite only his parents, his half-brother Jimmy, his sister Sophia and brother Dommi, his cousin Lucky Gabrini, and his friends. That was it.

His mother and siblings showed up, and Lucky showed up, but none of his friends did. Not one of them. And his father didn’t bother to show up either. And when he did get home, something like two in the morning, he woke Carmine up and gave him a hundred-dollar bill. As if money was the answer when it wasn’t even the question to Carmine.

Sophia looked over at her baby brother. “Talk to Daddy, Carmine. He won’t know how you truly feel if you never tell him.”

BAM!

It was such a powerful hit that Sophia found her car suddenly spinning as if they were on a crazy ride that had both of them jerking around and around.

“What’s happening?” Carmine cried out.

“I don’t know!” Sophia cried out too as she tried to regain control of her steering wheel.

But that initial hit by that minivan caused her to spin into an SUV that slammed them again, causing them to spin once again, only this time they ended up facing in the wrong direction. And that was when they saw a Mack truck coming straight for them in what was certain to be a head-on collision. Sophia was so stunned that before she could do anything, Carmine grabbed the wheel, Sophia hit the gas, and Carmine slung that Lexus as hard as he could toward the side of the road. And it worked. The truck missed them by inches.

But the car behind that truck was coming full steam ahead, too, and it swerved when it saw the truck swerving. Only the car swerved right toward them and hit them too.

Carmine was screaming for their mother.

Sophia was screaming for their father.

But neither parent heard either one of them, nor could they help them, as their car began flipping.

And when it finally landed on all four wheels with a hard thump that caused two tires to deflate, all of their screams were caught up into a silence that was eerie to even the random motorists who hopped out of their vehicles and ran to their aid.

But the driver of that big, gray Infiniti SUV wasn’t one of the motorists. He was much further back, but still close enough to offer assistance. But the driver, instead, slowly but deliberately drove away.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Jimmy sped his Maserati into the ER parking lot, hopped out, and ran into the hospital. He had to ask two different nurses, both of whom seemed more interested in flirting with the handsome young black man in the expensive suit than giving him information. But he finally arrived at the room. He flung the door open and hurried inside.

He saw his stepmother standing at his baby brother’s bedside, but he was shocked to see his kid sister standing at Carmine’s bedside too. “I thought Ma said you were driving,” he said to her.

“I was,” Sophia responded. “But it was Carmine that saved our lives. We would have been roadkill if that Mack truck would have hit us.”

“A truck?” Jimmy’s heart dropped. “You’re okay?”

“Praise God, not a scratch on her,” Trina said as she put her arm around her daughter.

“Praise God!” Jimmy said so heartfelt that he pulled his baby sister into his arms too. They had different mothers, but they all had Reno as their father. Jimmy’s mother had died long ago, but Trina was his mother just like she was Carmine’s, Sophia’s, and Dommi’s, as far as he was concerned.

But when they stopped embracing, Jimmy quickly looked at Carmine.

“He’s okay too,” Trina said. “Don’t worry. We’re just waiting on the test results, but he’s good.”

“Then why is he passed out?”

“They had to give him a sedative. He was convinced Sophie had died in that car crash and he wouldn’t stop screaming her name until they ran to her room and rushed her to his room. They he was convinced that she had to have had internal damage and that she would drop dead at any moment.”