Mick Sinatra 4: If You Don't Know Me by Now (22 page)

Roz’s look
turned serious too.
 
It had been a trying
day, and the main thing, Gloria, was still unresolved.
 
They both needed the release.
 
“Then what are you waiting for?” she asked.

Mick didn’t
wait a moment longer.
 
He pushed her head
down closer, to where her lips touched his lips, and began kissing her
passionately.
 
Her naked body against his
naked body only heightened the feeling, and he wrapped her in his arms.

They kissed
for a long time.
 
Mick loved the taste of
her so much he couldn’t stop kissing her.
 
He was groaning in her mouth, as he kissed her, and she was returning
his affection.
 
She knew fear about
Gloria’s whereabouts, and about Roz’s own brief incarceration, was driving his
emotional release, but his love was driving it more.
 
And she latched onto that, and held on, and
allowed him to do what they both needed him to do.

He moved his
hand down her body as he kissed her, cupping and squeezing her ass, and then
fingering her vagina.
 
He fingered her,
and flicked her clitoris, until she was wet and ready.
 

He was still
kissing her, his need, his hunger, was still drinking her up.
 
Then he guided his fully aroused penis inside
of her.
 
Deep down.
 
And that was when Roz took over.

She sat up,
on top of her husband, and began to ride his rod.
 
She rode him up and down. She rode him as he
slid deeper into her folds and crushed her walls with his fullness, with his
stiffness.
 
She rode him for a long
time.
 
And he loved the feeling.
 
He closed his eyes and relaxed for the first
time since the day began.

And then he
pulled her down, so he could suck her breasts, as she fucked him.
 
He sucked, and she fucked, and they made
long, passionate love.

And then he
came.
 
Mick pulled her further down on
top of him, and wrapped her tightly into his arms, as he poured into her.
 
He came first.
 
It was rare.
 
But Roz expected it.
 
What she
didn’t expect was for her orgasm to be so strong.
 
She thought she was too tired.
 
She thought she was too traumatized by being
in that police car and sitting in that jail cell, and by Gloria’s predicament.
 
But Mick’s sex took her there again.
 
She was never too tired, nor too traumatized,
to feel his penis penetrate her, and break in her, and deliver to her
sensations nobody else ever could.
 
And
she took it all in.
 
She had an orgasm
delight.
 
She came hard.

But several
hours later, after they had both cum and had managed to finally fall asleep,
her ringing cell phone woke them up again.
 
She answered quickly, hoping that it was good news about Gloria.
 
But it wasn’t about Gloria at all.
 
It was about her mother.
 
She had taken a turn for the worse.
 
Could Roz come?

Roz’s plan
was to slip out of town quietly, get Mick’s pilot to fly her to Memphis, have a
rental car waiting, and then drive over to her hometown of Belt Buckle,
Tennessee and see about her mother.
 
Mick, however, told her no.
 
He
squashed that idea in its infancy.
 
She
wasn’t about to go anywhere without him.
 
Somebody tried to frame her for Gloria’s disappearance.
 
And that craziness in New York.
 
As far as he was concerned, she was still the
target.

“But I need
to see my mother,” Roz said.

“I agree,”
Mick responded.
 
They were still in bed,
and it was just after the call.

“Then how am
I going to see about her if you won’t let me go and see about her?”

“I didn’t
say you couldn’t go see her.
 
And you can
do all those things you mentioned.
 
You
can slip out of town quietly.
 
My pilot
can fly you to Memphis.
 
A rental car can
be waiting.
 
But I will be with you.”

Roz turned
and looked at Mick, her breast uncovered along with her deep concern.
 
“You?” she asked.
 
“But you can’t leave Philly, Mick.
 
What about Gloria?”

“I have
every man I employ working on finding my daughter.
 
With the cops involved now, it’s become a
little more complicated.
 
They will get in
the way.
 
But nothing has slowed down or
stopped.
 
But I have a responsibility to
you too.
 
I’m not going to skirt my
responsibility to you.”

Roz
considered him.
 
“You think it’s a plot
to get me to Tennessee, the same way Melo got me to New York.
 
Don’t you?”

Mick shook
his head.
 
“No.
 
Of course not.
 
Your mother was ill before Gloria went
missing.
 
You need to see about her.
 
So we’ll go see her and come back.
 
A day trip is the best you can do right
now.
 
If her situation is determined to
be even
more dire
, then I’ll have to reassess.
 
But one thing will be clear, my darling: what
I say goes.
 
No debates.
 
No second guessing.
 
Do I make myself clear?”

Roz
remembered New York and what her decision to go against his wishes almost cost
her.
 
She wasn’t about to make that
mistake again.
 
She was married to Mick
the Ticking Time Bomb
Sinatra, not some
average Joe.
 
“Perfectly clear,” she
said.

And with
that understanding they showered and dressed, Mick put Teddy and Deuce in
charge of the twins and the twins’ nannies for the day, and they flew to
Memphis.
 
From Memphis they got into
their rental car, a Chrysler 300, and drove to Roz’s hometown of Belt Buckle,
Tennessee.
 
Population: 2000.
 
Roz’s father, Cecil Graham, was still in
town.
 
He answered the front door.

When Roz saw
the worry on her father’s face, she pulled him into her arms.
 
He and Roz’s mother were divorced, but he
still loved her.

Cecil
extended his hand to Mick, and Mick shook it.
 
“Come on in,” Cecil said.

They walked
into the beautiful, Tudor-styled home of Judge Bernadette Graham.

“How is she,
Dad?” Roz asked as he closed the door behind them.

“She’s
feisty as ever.
 
She’s disagreeable as
ever.
 
She’s mad.”

“Dogs get
mad,” Roz said.
 
“You mean she’s angry.”

“I mean
she’s mad.
 
I know what I’m saying.”
 
Then a sad look came over his handsome
face.
 
“She’s ill.”

Roz was
shocked.
 
“You don’t mean
physically?
 
You mean mentally ill?”

“I mean
both.
 
She keeps going on and on about
stuff that don’t make any sense.
 
Like
she’s saddled with a lot of guilt.
 
I
don’t know.
 
She’s tried a lot of
cases.
 
I think she might have put some
people in prison that she knew were innocent, and it’s getting to her now.”

“May we see
her?” Roz asked.

“That’s why
you’re here.
 
See away.”

Roz was
nervous, and Mick placed his hand in the small of her back, as they made their
way to her mother’s master bedroom near the backside of the house.

Judge
Bernadette Graham wasn’t lying in bed the way Mick and Roz had expected to find
her, but was sitting in a rocking chair.
 
She was sitting at her big, bay window looking out over her big,
backyard.
 

“Hello,
Mother,” Roz said as they slowly approached her, and she smiled a weak smile,
but it was the best she could manage.

But as soon
as her mother turned her way, with that look of umbrage she always displayed,
Roz’s smile was gone.
 
Most girls had a
nurturing relationship with their mother.
 
Roz had always had a contentious one with hers.
 
“I hear you aren’t feeling well?”

“I’m fine,”
Bernadette said.
 
“Wherever did you get
that idea?
 
Cancer is cancer.
 
It’s hardly anything strange.
 
People get it all the time.
 
It’s just my time.
 
I’ll beat it.
 
I beat everything else.
 
And why
are you standing there like a scared child?
 
Sit down.”

Roz wanted
to lash back at her mother, but she didn’t.
 
And she sat down.

“I see you
brought Mr. Personality with you,” Bernadette said.

Mick knew
she was being facetious in that nasty way of hers.
 
He returned the favor.
 
“You aren’t exactly Miss Congeniality
yourself,” he said.
 
“How are you, Bernadette?”

Roz expected
her mother to order Mick out.
 
She wasn’t
above it.
 
But she didn’t.
 
A strange look appeared on her face.
 
“Scared,” she said.

Mick’s heart
dropped.
 
Roz’s did too.
 
Neither one of them expected that.
 
Roz leaned over, and took her mother’s
hand.
 
“It’s just cancer, like you said,
Mom.
 
You’ll beat it.”

“I beat it
before.
 
I’ll beat it again.”

“That’s
right.”
 
Roz glanced at Mick.
 
She never recalled a time when her mother had
cancer.
 
But she’d only been back home
once, and that was just before she married Mick, since she left for
college.
 
“There’s nothing to be afraid
of.”

Bernadette
looked at Mick.
 
Somehow she saw in him a
man with life experience.
 
The fact that
he was closer to her age than to Roz’s helped too.
 
“Is she right, Mr. Personality?
 
Do I have nothing to be afraid of?”

“You have
plenty to be afraid of,” Mick said bluntly.
 
“But what’s the point in being afraid?”

Bernadette
could relate to Mick’s response far more than Roz’s.
 
Because he understood her.
 
She nodded her head.
 
“Rightly so,” she said.
 
Then she looked at Roz.
 
“Where’s your father?”

“He’s up
front.
 
In the living room.”

“Good,”
Bernadette said.

“He says
you’ve been talking a little out of your head, Mom.
 
He’s worried.”

Bernadette
smiled.
 
“Oh, I know what I’m doing.
 
If he thinks I’m going nuts, he’ll stick
around longer.
 
If he thinks it’s just
cancer, and I’m getting the treatment I need, he’ll take off on one of those
ridiculous gigs of his again.
 
A man his
age still doing gigs.
 
Ridiculous.
 
I keep him around this way.”

Roz was
shocked.
 
“Oh, really now?
 
I didn’t think you wanted him around.”

Bernadette’s
smile was gone.
 
And she was reflective
again.
 
“People always assume I don’t
want anything or anybody.
 
So they don’t
come around.
 
Not even my own
children.
 
But Cecil comes.
 
Sometimes I think he’s all I have.
 
I don’t want to lose him.”

Roz had
never seen this side of her mother before.
 
Vulnerable?
 
Her mother?
 
She didn’t know how to respond to this
person.
 
So she didn’t.
 
“What kind is it?” she asked.

Bernadette
looked at her.
 
“Excuse me?”

“What kind
of cancer is it?”

“Oh!
 
Breast.
 
Stage three.
 
I’ve been on chemo,
but it’s been making me really ill.
 
Cecil thought I was going to leave this place before day this
morning.
 
That’s why he called you.
 
But I’m fine.
 
I’ll survive.”

Roz
smiled.
 
“Glad to hear it, Mom.”

“So you can
go back to your life,” Bernadette added, the old Bernie coming out, “and feel
good in knowing that at least you came and stayed ten minutes.”

“That’s not
fair, Mom.”

“I know it’s
not.
 
I know, in your mind, you give me
what I deserve.
 
In my mind, I deserve so
much more from you.
 
You ungrateful
bitch.”

Roz,
astounded, stood up.
 
Mick was staring at
Bernadette.
 
“I came to see about
you.
 
And I had every intention of
staying longer than ten minutes.
 
But you
will not talk to me any kind of way, or mistreat me in any way.
 
I allowed it my whole life.
 
Not anymore.”

Bernadette
smiled.
 
“Oh, so you marry the gangster
and all of a sudden you’re gangster too?
 
You’re still the pathetic human being you’ve always been.
 
Even as a child you were pathetic.
 
Now you have the nerve to tell me what you
won’t allow anymore.
 
You don’t tell me
any such thing.
 
I tell you!
 
And I’m telling you to get out of my home,
and my life, at once!
 
Leave now, while
you still can.”

Roz was so
hurt she could barely stand the sight of her mother.
 
And she wasn’t about to argue with her own
mother about something she’d been arguing with her about all of her life: her
right to exist.
 
She left.
 
She walked right out.

Mick left
too.
 
But as Roz went out onto the front
porch to cool down, and as her father hurried out onto the porch to comfort
her, Mick began thinking.
 
Something
wasn’t right about that encounter.
 
Something didn’t feel right!
 
And
suddenly, he had an idea.
 
A terrible
idea.
 
Bev, Beverly.
 
But instead of Bella, could Devin Terranz
have meant
Bernadette
?

He pulled
out his cell phone, and phoned his background man.
 
“I need you to check out one of my wife’s
parents,” he said.

“Her
father?” Mick’s man asked.

“No,” Mick
said.
 
“Her mother.”

Later that
day, after Bernadette continued to refuse any contact with Roz, Mick said it
was time for them to go.
 
They piled back
in their rental car, and headed back toward the airstrip in Memphis.

“I don’t
want to leave her this way,” Roz said regretfully as Mick drove them back
toward Memphis.

“I know you
don’t want to,” Mick said, “but you have to.”

Roz had
already resigned herself to that reality.
 
“I know.
 
We have to think about
Gloria.
 
But the things my mother said to
me.
 
She was so heartless.
 
Why does she hate me so?”