The Real Thing Read online

  Amen to that.

  He looks behind me.

  “You checking out my butt, Red?”

  Red nods. “You fill out her clothes a whole lot better than she does.”

  I don’t dare tell him these aren’t her jeans.

  “Go out there and ring that bell,” he says, pointing at a bell hanging under the eaves of the front porch. “Let’s get our dinner on.”

  Where, I hope, I can have some tasty conversation.

  Chapter 6

  The Italian food is tasty, but the conversation is foreign. Dante doesn’t speak anything but Italian at the meal, which at first is sexy as hell but then becomes utterly rude. He and DJ talk at the other end of the table as if I’m not here. DJ isn’t nearly as fluent as Dante is, and it seems as if Dante is correcting DJ every so often. DJ doesn’t seem to mind, though. If it weren’t so rude to me, I’d think it was charming the way father and son get along.

  Red and Lelani whisper sweet nothings to each other for most of the meal, and I can tell they’re still in love. I’ve never sat this closely to a real Hawaiian before, and she is stunning. Lelani has to be half Red’s age. With her rounded cheekbones, jet black hair, and Asian eyes that I swear are purple with green accents, Lelani has an all-over tan darker than Red and me combined. She has no visible tan lines, so she has to sunbathe in the nude. I wonder where.

  No, I don’t. Life is embarrassing enough without the threat of accidentally stepping on a nude Hawaiian in the Canadian woods.

  During the salad garnished with Red’s homemade croutons, I catch a few phrases like grazie and per favore and squisito and molto graziosa. When Dante looks at me and says something something cioccolata, however, I get right upset. I’m not dark chocolate. I’m not even partially chocolate. I’m kind of average, run-of-the-mill, Crunch bar chocolate. I can’t stand not interviewing the interviewee or at least breaking the ice for the real interview later. And there’s something unseemly about the host excommunicating more than half of his dinner table.

  I have to do something.

  When I’m halfway through my pasta, I decide that enough is enough. I turn to Red. “Red, everything is so delicious. How’s the bread, everybody?”

  Silence reigns. Linguini twirling stops, spoons arrested in the air.

  Direct questioning it is. “DJ, how is the bread?”

  DJ looks first at Dante, hesitating.

  Dante nods.

  “It’s good,” DJ says, returning his eyes to his plate.

  “Not too buttery?” I ask.

  DJ lifts his head.

  Dante nods.

  “No,” DJ says.

  Hmm. The son has to get permission from his daddy to speak. I might as well try to give Dante whiplash.

  “I wasn’t sure how much butter to use,” I say. “And how was the salad, DJ?”

  Same routine, Dante’s eyes receding to two little dark dots.

  “Fine,” DJ says.

  I can’t believe no one is talking about food at the dinner table. It’s not normal. It doesn’t fit into my stereotype of a typical Italian meal. Even commercials for the Olive Garden are noisy with conversation.

  I stare into Dante’s eyes. “May I try some of those fish filets? They look delicious.”

  Dante doesn’t even blink. He had already eaten most of them, leaving two small pieces on the platter.

  “May I?” I ask, smiling. “I want to get the full Canadian experience.”

  Dante still doesn’t blink.

  I smile at DJ. “DJ, could you pass the fish to me, please?”

  DJ looks shaken. Sorry, big guy. I have to mess with your daddy. You just happen to be in the middle.

  Dante eventually nods, but he still doesn’t blink. My eyes would be completely dried out by now.

  DJ hands the platter to Red, who holds it out in front of me.

  “Grazie,” I say, and I take one of the filets. I look up. “Does anyone else want this last little bit?”

  Lelani’s eyebrows rise slightly. I’ll bet she has wanted some of these filets for years. I mean, she’s from Hawaii. I’ll bet she craves fish.

  I dish out the last filet to her, and she gobbles it up the second it hits the plate.

  I bite into the filet, and it is divine! Lemony, buttery, salty, and peppery—perfect. “You were right, Red. This is good. Bass, is it?”

  Red nods. “Smallmouth that Dante caught this morning.”

  I flex my arms. “I’m feeling stronger already.”

  Red coughs.

  After fifteen more seconds of silence, the forks and spoons resume their noise, but no one speaks English or Italian. I have silenced them with the simple “theft” of two smallmouth bass filets.

  It is now time for shock and awe.

  “So, Red, how is Dante’s training going?” I ask brightly. “All I saw was his cliff diving and swimming exhibition.”

  Red stares me down.

  I roll my eyes. I know I wasn’t supposed to talk, Red, but dinner isn’t fun without some conversation. And if you haven’t figured it out, I’m trying to get under Dante’s skin. Some of my most effective interviews took off once I thoroughly pissed off my interviewee.

  “His training is going well,” Red says, avoiding Dante’s eyes.

  I dab my lips with a napkin. “Will he be ready to go all twelve rounds?”

  Red bites viciously into a piece of bread. “He could go fifteen rounds if he had to,” he says through clenched teeth.

  Hmm. Dante doesn’t seem to be fazed. I must not be pushing the right buttons yet. “So, for a boxer at his advanced age, would you say his stamina is poor, fair, or good?”

  Red clears his throat and sips some ice water. “His stamina is excellent, Christiana.”

  Oh. Throw in my name, as if it will shut me up. “Does Dante have a jab yet?”

  Dante’s mouth drops open. Good. My words are getting under his skin. The jab is his soft spot. Cool. I’ll be jabbing at him all night now.

  Red seems to choke and has to drink some more of his ice water. “He’s, um, he’s working on it.”

  I wait for the silence to get louder. “So…he doesn’t have a working jab yet. Don’t you think he’ll need it? Tank Washington didn’t get his nickname from counterpunching. He roars straight ahead. Even a half-hearted jab slows him down. But then again, a half-hearted jab won’t stop a man like Tank completely. He’s good at wearing his opponents down. He’s not very exciting to watch, but Tank is certainly effective.”

  Dante finally blinks. He shuts his mouth.

  Red glances quickly at Dante, then back to me. “He’ll need his full arsenal of punches to—”

  “Is Dante getting any stronger?” I interrupt. “His left hook isn’t what it used to be. Sure, he knocked Avila out with it, but it wasn’t a one-punch knockout. It wasn’t even early in the fight. I think I counted fifteen left hooks over the first nine rounds before Avila hit the deck. But, Avila, what was he, fifty? He was way past his prime. What did he have, a hundred fights? I think Avila’s grandkids were in the audience watching him.”

  Dante throws his head back and laughs, shoots bursts of Italian to DJ, and smiles.

  Finally. Not exactly the reaction I was expecting, but at least it’s a reaction. “What is so funny, Mr. Lattanza?”

  Dante nods and continues smiling. “You will find out firsthand tomorrow, Christiana. Firsthand. I make a joke.” He stands. “Andiamo,” he says to DJ, and the two of them leave, banging out the front door to the deck outside.

  Red turns to me, grabbing my forearm. “What are you trying to do?”

  I watch Dante, and sure enough, he looks back at me. “I’m just trying to stir the pot a little.” I turn to Red. “I haven’t even begun cooking yet, Red.”

  “I asked you here to motivate him, not to alienate him,” Red whispers.

  “I know what I’m doing, Red,” I whisper back. We’re being so clandestine. “And from the way he just laughed, I don’t think I’m pissing him of
f too badly.” I clear my throat and raise my voice. “What were, um, he and DJ saying about me?”

  “You don’t want to know,” Lelani says. “Really.”

  “Oh, but I do,” I say. “It’s rude to talk about someone in front of their back, too.” Which almost makes sense.

  Red sighs. “They were comparing you to Evelyn.”

  I smile. “How’d I do?”

  “Until you opened your mouth, you were winning,” Red says. “You were beating her on points.”

  “Really?” It’s nice to be winning. “No knockout, technical or otherwise?”

  Red gets up and leaves the table, joining DJ and Dante outside.

  “Listen, Christiana,” Lelani says, “I don’t understand everything they said about you, but Dante hasn’t smiled this much in a long time.”

  “He was smiling? All I saw was a man with his mouth open.”

  Lelani giggles. “It must be a European thing. I have noticed European males do that all the time.”

  “But he’s from Brooklyn.”

  “There are still lots of Europeans in Brooklyn, Christiana, aren’t there?” She squeezes my arm. “Whatever you’re doing, just…keep it up.”

  “I plan to.” I look around. “Did I talk too much for real?”

  Lelani nods. “You could be Italian.”

  I guess there’s a little Italian in every journalist. We don’t talk with our hands, though. We couldn’t write anything down if we did that.

  “Why didn’t you say anything?” I ask.

  “This is a man’s world,” Lelani says, stretching and patting her stomach. “Except when Evil Lynn’s around, but I don’t want to talk about her, Christiana.”

  “Call me Tiana.”

  She shakes her head. “Here, you are Christiana. It sounds Italian. Dante seems to like saying it.”

  “Sheesh, Dante likes it. Dante this, Dante that. Is he the king or what?”

  “Yeah,” Lelani says.

  “Well, I didn’t vote for him.”

  Lelani giggles again. She stands and motions me to the kitchen. “This is his castle, he is the king, and we are his subjects.”

  But he’s a king without a queen. At least until his ex gets here.

  Lelani throws me a dishrag as I enter the kitchen. “You wash, I’ll dry.”

  We are going to have a serious stack of dishes and plenty of pots to do. “That’s not fair.”

  She fixes me with those purple mood eyes of hers. “I know where everything belongs, and if Red can’t find what he’s looking for in any of these cabinets, I’ll catch hell.” She sighs. “I do most of the dishes around here. It’ll be nice to get a little break, okay?”

  I turn on the hot water and wait for it to steam. Lelani adds Joy and a capful of bleach to the water. Then I wash the dishes as she brings them in from the table.

  It’s so good to be one of the king’s subjects. I hold up a plate. Is this the king’s plate? I had better clean it spotless for his highness.

  Reporters should never do dishes.

  After a lull and cringing at what the bleach will do to my fingers, I ask, “Lelani, how did you meet Red?”

  Lelani groans. “Are you interviewing me, too?”

  I flip a glob of suds at her. “Shoot. We’re just two sisters talking while doing the dishes, and the boys…” I see Dante and DJ throwing rocks off the outcropping, Red fiddling with a pair of red boxing gloves. “Are they just…throwing rocks?”

  “And talking,” Lelani says. “They talk a lot more than anyone I know.”

  I smile. “Until you met me.”

  She wrinkles up her lips. “True. I just think it’s sweet. They are so close, all three of them. Red is almost DJ’s grandpa, you know?”

  I grab a plate and dunk it in the water. “Now that we’re close and they’re far away, I have to know more about you and Red.”

  Lelani rinses a plate and immediately dries it. “You’re curious how a Hawaiian wahine hooked up with a black brother from Brooklyn.”

  How alliterative for her to say so. “Well, yeah. What were you doing messing with the men from my neighborhood?”

  She smiles. “Red and I met in a kitchen, but not like this one. The one at the Four Seasons. I was working as a hostess slash waitress slash you-name-it.”

  “Didn’t you…” I mimic holding a round card over my head.

  “Didn’t I what?”

  I take a few steps and turn, my hands still over my head.

  “What are you doing, Christiana?”

  I drop my arms. “Never mind.”

  “Anyway,” Lelani says, “Red would fix me something special, new, and unpronounceable at the end of my shifts and offer it to me. When Felix wasn’t around.”

  “Who’s Felix?”

  “Felix was the queen of cuisine, if you catch my drift.”

  “Drift caught.” I hand her another plate. “Naturally you ate all these exotic dishes.”

  “Not at first, but eventually…yeah. The man can cook. Red won my stomach first. Back then I had been doing the card girl bit at Madison Square Garden—”

  I raise my arms again. “I just asked you if—”

  She laughs. “Is that what you were doing?”

  I nod.

  “Girl, let me show you how it is done.” She rolls up her shirt, revealing the flattest stomach I’ve ever seen, and raises a plate in the air, her face one bright smile. She then circles the butcher block, thrusting her chest forward, shaking her hips wickedly, and posing in front of me at the end. “You just weren’t doing it right.” She puts the plate away.

  “Oh.” If I ever did that, the cops would arrest me for soliciting.

  “Anyway, on a night I was to go out between the third, seventh, and eleventh rounds, I saw Red in Dante’s corner.” She shakes her head. “I felt kind of embarrassed, you know, me all in my almost nothingness, but there he was, his eyes never leaving mine. He had to be the only man in Madison Square Garden who only looked at my eyes that night.” She rinses a few more plates. “A few days later at work, he told me he liked me.” She looks at her hands. “He said he liked me. Since I was wearing a long coat and boots when he said it, I fell for him.” She flashes those purple eyes at me. “He likes me for my mind.”

  “C’mon, and your body.” And those eyes. She should be an eye model. Do they have those? “Did you ever do a Hawaiian Tropic calendar?”

  She blinks. “That was ages ago, when I was twenty-five.”

  “Ages ago?”

  “Girl, I’m forty.”

  I hate her! I hate her a lot. Hawaiians must never age. “I never would have guessed it.”

  “I love getting carded.”

  I rarely get carded! Life is so unfair. Forty! That’s just not fair. She has the flawless skin of a teenager but without the acne and baby fat, not a single wrinkle or worry line, and her body is sculpted. Hey, wait a minute. “I’ve been thinking of having a breast reduction.” Not. “Have you ever had any work done?”

  “Like implants or Botox?”

  I knew it! She brought up the B word, not me. “Yes.”

  “No.”

  I hate her! I hate her even more than a lot! Some women have all the luck. Wait. They’re not married. Hmm. Maybe there’s trouble in paradise. “So why aren’t you two married?”

  Lelani sighs. “After twelve years you’d think we’d be married, but we’re not. We came into this thing with no preconceived notions of how a relationship was supposed to be. We were both raised by single parents, so we had no firsthand knowledge of what a good marriage was.”

  And neither do I.

  Granddaddy raised me, and most of the couples I witnessed as a child in Red Hook were unmarried. They seemed to drift into a relationship, fight a lot during the relationship, and fight even harder to get out of the relationship. And even when the relationship ended, they still fought. I don’t remember anyone so much as holding hands—during the day, now—in Red Hook. Edgar and Marion Moody were the only ma
rried people Granddaddy and I knew, and they lived just across the hall from us, where they fussed and fumed all week, slamming doors and probably each other. They only seemed to love each other on payday over a couple bottles of wine. Then Edgar would have one drink too many, Marion would remind him of the previous week’s mayhem, and they were at each other’s throats again, their screaming matches echoing long into the night. “Them sure are some moody people,” Granddaddy used to joke, and it wasn’t long before I associated marriage with moodiness and screaming matches. “I’m never getting married,” I once told Granddaddy, “cuz I wanna be happy.”

  Lelani places another plate in the cabinet. “Red and I even have an agreement that if either one of us wants out, it’s cool. No reasons or explanations necessary.”

  I don’t know if I like the open-endedness of that. Just…poof! I’m out! Later! Gotta go! “But twelve years has to prove something to you, right?”

  “I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of Red,” she says. “And I guess, so far, he’s not tired of me.”

  Red would be out of his mind if he ever tired of Lelani. They make the most handsome couple. “Didn’t you ever want children?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  I shouldn’t have asked that. “Oh, you can’t have—”

  “I’m sure I can. I just couldn’t very well have a child if there were no guarantees her father would be in her life, right?”

  Beautiful and smart. Lelani is a lethal combination. “So…Red doesn’t want children.” I am getting far too nosy, but I can’t help myself. It’s in my blood.

  “Sometimes he does, and sometimes he doesn’t. You see, Red’s main loyalty lies with Dante, not with me.”

  “And you’re okay with that?”

  “Not completely, but, yeah, I’m okay with it. It’s something I can count on in a world where there isn’t much written in stone, you know? I can always count on those two being friends. Always. They have been through so much together. All those victories, those defeats, the divorce, the comeback. I’m just fortunate to be along for the ride.” She smiles. “I have been to so many places with Red, so many…” She laughs. “So many restaurants. I think he chooses cities for their cuisine. We’ve been to New Orleans, Chicago, Miami, Boston, New York, Memphis, Toronto, Pittsburgh—”