Page 45 of Money Shot

“It sure is. How far along are you?” I asked.

“Half,” he said.

I nodded my head. “You’ll love it.”

“Have to beat anybody up this week?” I asked, coughing out a laugh as I did so.

He shook his head and started to laugh, almost choking on his water as he did so. “No. But I pushed a guy down some steps on accident.”

“Really? By accident?” I asked.

He eventually stopped laughing and told the story. “I told him I was going to, and I grabbed his shoulders and acted like I was about to shove him. He was some Romanian dude, and he was wearing one of those shiny fucking track suits. So, I grabbed him, pushed him a little to add some incentive, and the fucker slipped out of my hands and fell down the steps. Those shiny jackets are slippery as fuck.”

“Did he pay up?” I asked.

“Like a fucking slot machine. As soon as I got to the bottom of the steps, he was reaching for his wallet,” he said.

“Well, I guess that’s good,” I said.

It didn’t bother me that Vince did what he did for a living. In his own words, he forced people to realize the responsibility associated with making a promise. Most of the broken promises he dealt with had to do with money, and he simply made sure they met their part of the commitment they had already agreed to. In his mind he was teaching people to be moral.

“And yesterday, a couple of one hundred and ten pound twin meth heads who owed a guy thirteen grand and hadn’t paid him a dime had a box with about thirty grand worth of meth and twenty-five grand in cash in it when I showed up. But they didn’t make one phone call to try and pay for the dope that got them there. I fucking swear,” he said.

“Drug dealers without morals,” I said as I shrugged my shoulders.

“Men without a moral code. It doesn’t matter the profession,” he said.

I guess not,” I said.

I waved at the waitress as she walked past. We had been at the restaurant long enough after dinner that we’d changed waitresses.

“I need coffee,” I said as she walked up to the table.

“Make it two, please,” Vince said.

“Cream or sugar?” she asked.

“Black on both,” he responded.

Vince paid attention to all of the details. I liked it that he knew how I liked my coffee, noticed what perfume I was wearing, and remembered the year of car I drove. He recalled what jeans or outfits I wore on certain days, and made reference to them later, describing the time, place, and article of clothing. It was nice to think a man had enough interest in me to remember things about me. As with most things about Vince, his actions and his manner of living reminded me of my father.

The waitress quickly returned with two cups of coffee. After thanking her and sliding one of them toward my side of the table, Vince raised his cup to his mouth and took a sip.

“So, I have a question,” he said over the rim of the cup.

He wasn’t a very predictable man, but when he preceded a question with that particular statement, it meant that whatever he was going to ask was something he felt was significant.

“Let’s hear it,” I said as I reached for my cup of coffee.

“Well, Thanksgiving is coming up a week from this coming Thursday, and I was wondering if you’d like to spend the day at my mother’s? I want you to meet her and she’s been asking about you,” he said.

Immediately, my heart felt swollen. “You told her about me?”

He lowered the cup of coffee to the table and pushed it to the side. “I told her about you six months ago, Sienna. She knows we’re in a relationship now, and she’s pretty excited. So yeah, she wants to meet you.”

When my father went to prison my mother’s sister came down from Ohio and stayed with me. At the time she was young, single, and felt sorry for me. Although I never met her before my father went away, we got along fine, but I always felt in the back of my mind that she blamed my father for the death of my mother. Why else would my aunt never take the time to meet her niece, I wondered? After my father was released, she left, and I hadn’t seen her since.

For me, holidays were a thing of the past. Since my father’s death, my music was my Christmas, and I enjoyed his favorite album, A Very Special Christmas, all year round. I hadn’t celebrated a birthday, Thanksgiving, or a Christmas in the presence of anyone since he died, and although I hadn’t told Vince yet, Christmas was not only Christmas as he knew it, but it was my birthday.