Chapter 11 - Why Corona?
300 dollars of my winnings later I was satisfied we had enough food in the house to keep us alive for a while. Brian tried to pay but I wouldn't have it. I told him that since I was going to be eating the food I should pay for it. After all, he was evidently happy with what passed for food at his house already. It was me that wanted to have more then bread, beer, and microwave dinners in the house. I was use to having vegetables and fruit and real meat around a kitchen. Not lean cuisine and Hungry Man dinners. Which seemed to me to be some sort of oxymoron. Brian might be a hungry man but he sure didn't need the lean cuisines. He was already pretty lean.
One thing I'm good at cooking is fajitas and Mexican rice. I decided to make that for supper. Brian was the kind of guy who'd eat anything edible so it wasn't like he was going to complain. As long as I didn't pull a Letty and burn the food. There's a few things I'm good at cooking but mostly I'm a kitchen disaster. I tend to burn meals.
I do that a lot, actually. I forget I'm cooking and stop watching the food. Stuff burns so quick. I start a meal, and then think I'll just play a little Playstation while I wait and before I know it GTA 3 is more important then anything else. It stays that way till the acrid stench of burnt food makes me aware I forgot the dinner. Again. Or the sight of Vince running with the little fire extinguisher out of his car toward the black peals of smoke leaving the kitchen takes my attention. It's like a running joke around our place. I shouldn't be allowed to cook and Mia shouldn't be allowed to undertake any sort of mechanical work on any car on the planet.
She's as hopeless around tools as I am around anything more complicated then my fajitas in the kitchen. But we do ok as long as I'm around to remind the guys that girls can do the car thing and she's around to make sure that we don't all die of malnutrition. I can make simple things. We'd never starve if I could keep my mind in the kitchen and out of the engine bay of a car or the digital world of a video game. But if we had to depend on any of the guys to cook we'd all starve. Well, all but Dominic.
Jesse finally learned how to scramble eggs and make toast. That's the extent of what he can cook. It took forever for him to learn to do that. He has my problem when it comes to cooking, keeping his mind on what he's doing. But then again Jesse has that same problem with keeping his mind on anything, except engines. And girls. For the one night they interest him anyway. But most other things are easy for him to forget, or lose track of.
Leon can make Kraft dinner. I gather he had to make a lot of it as a kid. He hates it, but if he has to cook for himself its Kraft dinner he makes. He can boil water and dump in the pre-packaged noodles and that's it. You'd think that spaghetti would've been a pretty natural progression for him but when Mia tried to teach him to make spaghetti instead he almost burned the kitchen down. You should have seen the look on V's face when he came running with the fire extinguisher to find Leon coughing in the smoke instead of me running the same way as him from the floor in front of the TV. It was priceless.
Vince. Well, let's just say that the one time Vince tried to cook a meal when the rest of us were sick with the flu and we all wished we'd just gone hungry. The after effects of eating the meal Vince cooked were worse then any flu. He's banned from the kitchen now. Well, we do let him make his own coffee. And play fireman. That's about it.
Dom has his father's talent for cooking Italian food. He can make anything he wants to and it's so good. He's so funny looking in the kitchen too. His big muscles rippling under his little tight wife beaters while he gathers ingredients and fills pots. He'd cook and I'd sit at the counter and watch him. We'd talk and he'd make dinner. Dom in the kitchen fascinated me. For a man his size he moves with so much grace. Every movement is precise and without wasted effort. He does everything with the minimum energy needed. Its how he drives to. But he made the kitchen seem even smaller then it was with his sheer size. But lately the only cooking he'd ever do was BBQ the chicken while Mia made everything else. It was like he was too good to cook a meal for us. For his family. Almost like he'd started to think that cooking a meal was a woman's job or something.
But I don't really know. I mean, he looked up to his dad more then anyone in the world and his dad cooked for us every night. No one ever thought that Van was less of a man over it. So maybe Dom doesn't think that way. But all I know is every time we asked him to make us one of the things he made better then anyone else he always had some thin excuse why he didn't want to or couldn't.
I'm wondering if this latest fuck up with Dom isn't over something to do with his dad. I mean, it's been a good few years since Van died but Dom was so close to his father. It really hit him hard. It hit all of us hard. He was like a father to me too. And Mia was and really still is such a sensitive girl. And Vince really looked up to Van too. He learned most of what he knows about cars from Van too.
Vince bought his first car with money that no one wants to know how he got. He didn't work at any 'real' job. He just disappeared from time to time and came back from where ever he went with money. I still don't know all of what he does but I'm sure that he's not the nicest man in the world to people he doesn't know. Sometimes he gets this look in his eyes that scares me, mostly when he thinks no one is looking. He went to jail once for armed robbery. Big surprise huh?
The only thing Dom ever did before that was illegal was assault Kenny Linder. He was his father's son. Van was a law abiding man. He would never have condoned the street racing or anything else we got into. He'd have been so disappointed. He never found out about Vince and whatever the hell he was into. Mrs. Toretto died giving birth to Mia so I never knew her and neither did Mia. Dom remembers her, but not much. He was only four when she died. Van was sort of like a den mother and father rolled into one. He taught us all cars, though Mia was never good at them. He taught us all to cook but only Mia and Dom caught on. He dragged us all to church.
They were a religious family. Mia still is. Dom, not so much. I never took to it. I went only because Mia wanted the company, not because I was much of a catholic. All those sins and talk of hell. I didn't want to believe that any god of the world could be so mean. Plus I was already going to hell according to the church for sleeping with Dom before we were married, so why worry about anything else. I sure as hell wasn't going to stop sleeping with Dom. It was. Earth shattering. Explosive. Moving. Every cliché thing that you ever heard sex could be the sex I had with Dom was.
But anyway, want an even bigger surprise then Vince the armed robber? I was there with him. Yep, that's right. I held up a convenience store with Vince. It was right after Dom went to jail. So Van was dead, Dom was gone for the better part of two years and things were looking grim. Somehow Mia got to stay in her family home with Vince and I even though she was only 17. There was no one to take her in, no where else for her to go. I guess letting her stay in her own home with no official guardian looked better then sending her to a home and making her a ward of the state for 8 months.
We had some money Van had left Mia and Dom. We had some money that Vince made doing what ever it was he did. We both, Vince and I, made some money racing but it wasn't enough to pay all the bills and keep the house and feed ourselves. We ran Van's garage but without Dom's reputation to fall back on the customers weren't exactly flocking to us. Plus with just me and Vince doing the work we couldn't take that many customers at a time. Mia ran the store but she was all alone too so she couldn't keep it open all the time and go to school. She had to keep going to school. Mia's so smart. She's gonna make something of herself. Something wonderful. She's going to do something good for the world. Not just take from it like the rest of us. And it was important, both to me and V that Mia got to stay in school. V made me finish high school but nothing he could say could make me go any further. I knew what I wanted to do with my life. But I didn't want to see MY Mia slave to run Dom's store and garage for him for the rest of her life. So about 4 months after Dom went in we had our brilliant plan and Vince joined Dom for 6 months and I did 6 in a juvenile centre.
Vince and I didn't think about what that would mean to Mia. She was all alone for 6 months. I guess, with the foolishness of youth we never counted on getting caught. In the scenario we envisioned we got away with enough money to keep the house up till Dom came home. In reality we went got incarcerated. It didn't work out like we planned.
Vince didn't want to take me. He really didn't. I found out what he was planning by mistake and insisted on being included. I was lost without Dom. Lost without Van. It was a very bleak time in all our lives. But that plan of Vince's gave me something to care about. Something to have an interest in when I'd sort of lost my interest in life all together. I wanted to do it for Mia. Vince wanted to do it for us. He was half in love with Mia ever since she was 16. She looked up to 'her V' like a second older brother. Vince is my boy, my partner in crime. She couldn't turn the love she had for him as a brother into love for a man. Sometimes I wish she could. But losing Vince to jail was almost as hard on her as losing Dom, plus she lost me at the same time.
So Vince and I went down for it. It was a foolish, childish plan. We thought we were foolproof. There is no such thing. This fact was proven with the truck disaster once again. My mug shot is actually rather flattering. Bet that's a new one. Vince looks like the kind of guy you don't want to meet in any sort of dark area in his. But wait, that's the kind of guy Vince is. But not with us, not with family. Dom just looks sad in his mug shot. No one knows just how much remorse Dom carries in his soul for what he did to Kenny Linder. He's soft hearted. But I'll never let that get back to him. He'd deny it with his last breath. But look at Leon and Jesse. They had no where and I think Dom saw the desperation in their eyes. And he made it sound like we needed them and offered them a place with us, on our team. Well, we did need them, but not enough to take them into our home too. But Dom knew they needed a place to crash. But he couldn't let on he did it to be nice, he did it because it was practical.
We held on, as Mia says, by the grace of god, till Dom got out of jail. When he came back he was so different from the Dom I had known. Gone was the boy of 21 who'd left us. Good natured but cocky. Muscled, but lightly in a natural way. Shy by times but openly affectionate with me. With all his family. The man who returned was harder then the boy who left. He had less compassion. Or I should say less obvious compassion. It could still be found. Like how he took in Leon and Jess. The man who returned was huge and had an ice cold temper. He didn't seem to get mad anymore. He got deathly calm. He was always holding himself in the tightest of control. He was scared to show his feelings. He thought that what he did to Kenny Linder was what happened when he let his feelings show, when he didn't keep a tight leash on them.
Sometimes when I was in bed first waiting for him to come up I'd lay on my side and watch the door, waiting for him to open it and I'd hope against hope the Dom that would be silhouetted there in our doorway by the hall light would be the slim boy just starting to come into his adult muscle, not the relative stranger that fate had sent me back from Lompoc.
He'd always been slightly embarrassed about showing any sappy feelings but he was a man after all. Most of them are like that. But he'd been outwardly affectionate with Mia and me before. He always had a hug and a kiss for Mia's forehead before and then when he came back it was like he hated to be touched. He also always use to be holding me, touching me, kissing me, he liked us to be touching in some way. But when he came back he didn't really seem to want to do that anymore. He wanted his personal space at all times. Except when we were intimate.
He got over it eventually. He got back into hugs for Mia, kisses for her cheek. He got back into those manly half hug, half handshake things that guys share with Vince and later Leon and Jesse. But he took a long time to get back into being like that with me in front of other people. Of course, when he first got out, like any man who'd been without a woman's touch for two years he could hardly keep his hands off me at night, when we were alone. But it was still like it was ok to show love to one's sister, that didn't make you soft, but showing you loved your girlfriend made you somehow less of a man. And maybe to the guys in the jail it would have. But he wasn't in jail anymore, he was home with his family.
It's only normal for prison to change a person. I know my jeuvie time make me tougher. I can't even say I didn't like the changes I saw in Dom's body. I mean, he was gorgeous before he went in but when he came out with all those muscles in all the right places I was even more proud he was mine. But the reason why he had to get big like that was so that he wouldn't be a victim in jail. It took awhile but things between us got almost back to normal and life was good for a while.
Then the whole situation with the trucks happened. And everything changed again. And not for the better. We could have lived comfortably on what the store and garage made if we'd lived fairly simply and worked hard. And Dom was ok with living simple except when it came to his car. And then all our cars. So he came up with the idea that loaded trucks would be easy to hijack because all you needed was a way to get into the cab and someone who knew how to drive them. Then Vince admitted that he knew how. And then Dom and Vince found contacts to track down trucks that were good marks. And then Leon figured out how to get into the cab and Vince volunteered to be the one to make the jump.
I'm looking inside myself and realizing now that maybe I am still mad at Dom for being the one who had to do the thing with the trucks. He dragged the rest of us in with him. And trips to mexico and the best of everything for the cars and not working such long hours sounded good to me too so I went along. But it was Dom's idea. Dom's the one who had to be tough shit with Tran and push him over the edge with Jesse. Maybe I had been sending the wrong message to Dom since the stuff with the trucks. Maybe he'd sensed my resentment over him not treating me like he use to and over everything falling apart over the stupid trucks. Over Jesse getting shot, V getting hurt, Mia getting her heart broken.
Maybe things with us had changed to the point of needed a break. Or even a break-up. But then again I had a lot of history with Dom and surely that history was worth something. Surely we weren't going to lose it all over this situation after everything else we'd survived through?
I sighed and realized while I'd been doing all that thinking I'd gotten all the vegetables chopped up and I was ready to start cooking the dinner. Brian came into the kitchen from his room.
"Hey Letty?"
"Yeah Bri?" I asked and rubbed at a stray tear on my face. I could always blame the onions after all.
"Can I ask Rome down to dinner? He's always hungry and it's not often anyone cooks for us around here."
"Sure Brian. There's lots of food. Go ahead and ask him. Just let me know so I can make enough rice and heat enough shells."
"I'll call up there now." Brian left the kitchen, or excuse me, galley, whistling. He was happy at least. He was getting a home cooked meal he didn't have to make or buy. Actually, it felt good to cook for someone who'd appreciate it. It had been a long time since anyone needed me around home.
We had Mia to cook and Dom to be in charge. Vince to keep us safe. Leon to keep the piece and be an electrical genius. Jesse to be an everything car and math related genius. Dom to race and fix the cars. No one really needed me anymore. Not toward the end. Not even Dom. At least Dom use to need me for companionship. We use to talk about our days. About what we'd done and what we planned to do. We had big plans.
Brian came back into the galley, still whistling off tune. "He's on his way down. You should have heard how excited he was."
"Why?" Why would anyone be excited over my so-so cooking?
"Because if someone would feed him, he'd eat night and day. He'd never stop."
"Why isn't he big as a house?"
"Ask him. He tells it better then I do." Brian laughed and started to set his little table for three.
Brian wasn't really happy here. I could see it if I looked. He looked older then he had in LA. I know, I know, he is older. But he didn't look older in a good way. I've watched my guys get older, don't forget. So I know what men look like as they grow up. Or in the case of Vince just add years to the total of their age, and Brian looked like the time since LA hadn't been as good to him as he'd let on. He looked tired around his eyes. He looked like someone had killed his puppy when he didn't think anyone was looking at him, when he let his guard down.
Going home to LA is going to be good for Brian too. He obviously needs to confront a few things to get some peace of mind back. He was looking pretty sad right when he was setting his table for sure.
"So how do you know Rome exactly?"
"We went to school together. We grew up together in Barstow."
"No shit! You're really from Cali? I didn't think you were from Arizona." I knew Brian had a Californian accent. One thing that bothered me about him solved.
"Yep, I'm from the middle of no where, or the middle of the Mojave depending on how you look at it." Brian smiled at me and then continued. "Rome and I use to fight in the sand all the time. He was under house arrest for something he did right around the time I was in the academy. We had a big fight about him being a criminal and me still becoming a cop. I guess he thought that we should stick together. That since I knew he was doing things that were against the law I shouldn't become one of the people sworn to uphold it."
"Did you turn him in or something Bri?" That would go against my assessment of Brian. If he couldn't turn in Dom, a man he liked and respected but hardly knew how could he turn in his childhood friend? Vince and Dom would never do that to each other.
"No! I didn't even know what he was into. I found out he'd been busted after the fact. They caught him with a lot of rims that he hadn't paid for. He was chopping cars I guess. By the time I even knew it was to late. It's old news now."
"But it's why you let Dom go isn't it?" I asked softly. He'd failed one friend, he hadn't been able to live with the thought of failing another one.
"Part of it." Brian answered and was saved from elaborating further by the arrival of his friend.
"Hey." Rome said as he walked in and sat down at the table, making it seem even smaller. He was quite a bit bigger then Brian. Well, Brian was taller. But Rome was almost as built as Dom. Plus he just had this energy, a presence. The same sort of gravity, almost, as Dom. His pull wasn't quite as strong but it did exist.
"What can I do?" Brian asked me, looking around. I looked at him in shock. A man offering to help in the kitchen? Wow. But then again Brian always had had a thing for helping Mia cook and clean up around our place too.
"Why don't you decide what you want to drink and put it on the table? This is almost done."
"K. What do you want to drink Let?"
"What else." I answered with a wink and Brian grabbed me a Corona. Rome laughed.
"Not another person around the joint that drinks that donkey piss in a bottle."
"Hey bro! You can have any brew you want. Long as it's a Corona." I retorted. Brian and I grinned at each other then laughed. It was good. Good to take one of Dom's lines and use it with someone who understood. And not feel shitty right after about the mention of Dom. It was becoming ok to talk about him without feeling like the sky was falling, or other then that coloured red instead of blue.
"That was the best damn beer I'd ever had." Brian laughed out, clearly thinking back to the first Corona he'd ever had. The one Dom had pilfered for him.
"Because it was a Corona or because it was Vince's?" I asked with a grin. Vince had been more livid over that stunt then I'd seen him in a long time. If he ever could have killed Dom it would have been over Dom giving his beer to 'the buster'.
"A little bit of column A, a little bit of column B." Brian answered, bad boy smile fully in effect.
"I'll bet." I grinned back.
"Am I missing something here?" Rome asked, slight smile on his face just at the easy banter between Brian and I.
"Yeah, I'll tell you about it while we eat." I told Rome and started piling food on the table. As soon as it was all on the table Rome went for the rice. "Ah, ah, ah. Since you went for the food first you haveta say grace." I smirked.
"But." Rome tried to protest.
"But nothing." Brian answered. "It's tradition. When a Toretto cooks the first person to reach in for the food says grace."
"Aiight." Rome answered and thought for a moment. "Dear father.Good company, good food, good meat. Good golly let's eat. Amen." Rome finished, choking on his laughter and looked at me with mischief sparkling in his eyes.
"Not bad. Not as good as Jesse, but not bad."
"Ah, Jesse. The boy wonder. He's ok then?" Rome asked and it was clear that Brian had talked about some things to his best friend.
"Yeah. He's fine."
"So you were gonna tell me about how you ruined my boy here and got him onto drinking that disgusting beer."
"You want I should tell the story Bri, or do you want to?" I started to scoop my dinner onto my plate before Rome and Brian ate it all. Rome was eating like a man who hadn't seen food in months. Or maybe years.
"You tell it Let. You have a more unbiased take on it then me." Brian settled back in his chair with a fajita and started to eat while staring at me. Rome joined him.
"Well, Brian here had been given the assignment of busting up a ring of people hijacking transfer trucks. He got briefed by his boss and they told him that it had to be street racers doing it. The immediately told him to go after Dominic."
"Why Dominic? They already knew he was doing it or something?" Rome asked.
"Naw, Dom just runs street racing in LA. They thought he was doing it but they knew even if he wasn't he knew who was or who could be. So they sent Brian to try and get into Dom's world. So he started coming around our café and almost courting my friend Mia. Mia is Dom's little sister and the one soft spot in his whole life other then his car." I laughed at the thought of Brian sitting at the little bar in 'Toretto's' eating that terrible tuna everyday. "And Brian came to our café every day. The feds had gotten him a job with Harry at 'The Racer's Edge', this parts store that all street racers shop in. Dom included. And so Brian would come around every day acting like a down on his luck racer who worked slinging parts for Harry. And every day he'd order a Tuna sandwich on white bread with no crusts." I looked at Rome and he was looking at Brian.
"You're such a baby." Rome laughed. "You having some chick cut the crust off your sandwich."
"Hey, it was smart." I answered on Brian's behalf. "Mia's got mothering instinct in spades. Anything Brian did that made him seem like he needed someone to take care of him would just start to endear him to Mia. And he always looked like he needed a keeper. His clothes all scruffy and his hair all messy. Mia was falling for him. She liked the look he had like he needed someone and the no crust thing made him seem younger then he was."
"So there. I was just being a good detective. And Dom has a bigger soft spot for you then anything." Brian answered.
"But then, Brian really was trying to pick Mia up, and my boy Vince wasn't overly impressed with it. He's loved Mia since we were all kids. We grew up together. Me'n Mia, Dom'n V. But Mia never liked him the way he liked her. But he still saw Brian as moving in on his girl. Brian and Vince got in a big fight in front of the store over Mia and Brian's constant lunch time presence. Vince called Brian some bad names and then Brian showed Vince he could fight enough to hold his own. Vince is considerably bigger then Brian. But Dom told Brian not to come around anymore in the interest of peace."
"So how is it that he came to get to stick around?" Rome asked, genuinely interested. I took a big drink of my beer, watched Rome wince, ate some of my dinner and took another big drink before continuing.
"I'll get there. That night Brian showed up at our races. Like I said Dom runs the show. If he says you don't race then you don't. Brian wanted to race Dom and beat him to try and earn Dom's respect. It would have worked. But Brian forgot to figure in the fact that Dom would also hate him for humiliating him in front of his whole crowd. But it didn't matter because Chumpy couldn't race to save his soul. He over shot the line before the race even started, he was depending on a computer to run his fuel map, tell him when to shift up, and when to dump his NOS. I mean, he expected to have time to fuck with a laptop during a race Dom was going to make good and sure only took a few seconds to complete." Brian had the good grace to blush about his ignorance the first night he showed up at races. "And Brian lost. But not by as much as he should have, and he beat out Edwin and Danny to come in second. Dom had just won Brian's car because Brian had raced for slips. No doubt thinking that the 60 g's or so the PD was into that eclipse for would make sure he bet Dom."
"It was an 80 thousand dollar eclipse actually and I caught hell for what happened to it." Brian smirked.
"Yeah, so you should have. It was a beautiful car. But anyway. He no doubt thought he would win and then he'd get Dom's respect for having won. But it didn't work out that way and Dom fully intended on taking the eclipse from Brian. But then Leon heard over the scanners that the cops were onto us and we had to split. We all got back to the house but for Dom. We didn't want to go looking for him because well, one, we'd all just escaped the cops and a huge fine, and two, we knew if the cops got Dom he was going to jail overnight because they all have it in for him anyway. But as I found out later Dom hadn't tried to get home, he'd stashed the car and started to walk away but a cop recognized him and when he called out for Dom to stop Dom ran. I think Dom hoped we'd all be out looking for him but no one was. No one but Brian. Brian picked him up, scared the shit out of him driving away from the cops and brought him home safe. Dom invited Brian in for a beer then gave us all shit about not going looking for him. Said some mean things to me, almost clocked Leon's date off the head with a beer bottle and then took Vince's beer and gave it to Brian here."
"Yeah, then Vince almost kicked the shit out of me. If it wasn't for Mia Vince and Leon would have taken me out back and kicked my ass."
"Only if you were lucky Brian. Vince would have just shot your ass and then shovelled and shut up."
"Shit. And this is your friend?" Rome asked me.
"Since we were in Junior high. I mean I knew him longer then that but we all got really tight in junior high."
"How'd Brian come to be called Chumpy?" Rome asked me with a laugh.
"That is another long story." I answered and looked at the table. I was stuffed and since all the food was gone it stood to reason that the guys were too. I'd made a lot of dinner and it was all gone. I hadn't even noticed the time pass while we'd talked. It had been a long time since I'd had a boisterous family dinner with anyone and I'd enjoyed entertaining Brian and Rome while we ate and carried on.
"I got time." Rome answered. "And I'm hoping there's desert." I burst out laughing and so did Brian.
"I can scare up ice cream sundae stuff." I answered with a giggle. "But I don't know where in the name of god almighty you're gonna put any more food."
"I got a high metabolism." Rome answered.
"I guess." I answered and went to get up to start to gather the chocolate, butterscotch, cherries and ice cream.
"I'll get the stuff Let, you tell the story. You cooked. Rome and I'll clean." Rome went to protest but Brian shot him off a look warning him not to. He must have gotten it.
"Yeah, Brian can start to clean while I gather up the stuff for the ice cream." Rome stood up with a groan. "Ok, maybe I'm more full then I knew." He laughed and I laughed with him as he rubbed his gut.
"Do you still want the." I never finished my question because he went to the freezer. Yep he was still hungry for the ice cream. Damn he could eat.
"So, chumpy. How'd that come about?"
"Well, he owned Dom a 10 second car. Which is one reason. The fact that he lost that awesome eclipse. The supra he got him to replace it is the other. It was such a chumpy car when it arrived. It was all burned up and wasted. It was a chumpy car. So I guess the reason why I call him chumpy is he was a sucky racer who lost his awesome car and got a chumpy car to replace it. And the name just kinda stuck to him."
"Yeah, it suits him." Rome laughed and Brian stared him down.
"Shut up Rome."
"Truth hurts eh Brian?" I asked sweetly.
"And what does he call you?" Rome asked me.
"Reina."
"What's that mean, why's he call you that?"
"Mean's Queen. That's what Brian said I was. The queen of racing."
"And you sure you'n Brian don't want to be alone?" Rome smirked as he asked me.
"All Brian and I have is friendship man. I was happy to see Mia happy and for that Brian was an alright kinda guy." Rome didn't have anything smart to say back to that. He just let it go. I was glad because I didn't have anything else to add to it that wouldn't hurt Brian's feelings.
We made our deserts and ate them. We had a great time just laughing and talking for another few hours.
300 dollars of my winnings later I was satisfied we had enough food in the house to keep us alive for a while. Brian tried to pay but I wouldn't have it. I told him that since I was going to be eating the food I should pay for it. After all, he was evidently happy with what passed for food at his house already. It was me that wanted to have more then bread, beer, and microwave dinners in the house. I was use to having vegetables and fruit and real meat around a kitchen. Not lean cuisine and Hungry Man dinners. Which seemed to me to be some sort of oxymoron. Brian might be a hungry man but he sure didn't need the lean cuisines. He was already pretty lean.
One thing I'm good at cooking is fajitas and Mexican rice. I decided to make that for supper. Brian was the kind of guy who'd eat anything edible so it wasn't like he was going to complain. As long as I didn't pull a Letty and burn the food. There's a few things I'm good at cooking but mostly I'm a kitchen disaster. I tend to burn meals.
I do that a lot, actually. I forget I'm cooking and stop watching the food. Stuff burns so quick. I start a meal, and then think I'll just play a little Playstation while I wait and before I know it GTA 3 is more important then anything else. It stays that way till the acrid stench of burnt food makes me aware I forgot the dinner. Again. Or the sight of Vince running with the little fire extinguisher out of his car toward the black peals of smoke leaving the kitchen takes my attention. It's like a running joke around our place. I shouldn't be allowed to cook and Mia shouldn't be allowed to undertake any sort of mechanical work on any car on the planet.
She's as hopeless around tools as I am around anything more complicated then my fajitas in the kitchen. But we do ok as long as I'm around to remind the guys that girls can do the car thing and she's around to make sure that we don't all die of malnutrition. I can make simple things. We'd never starve if I could keep my mind in the kitchen and out of the engine bay of a car or the digital world of a video game. But if we had to depend on any of the guys to cook we'd all starve. Well, all but Dominic.
Jesse finally learned how to scramble eggs and make toast. That's the extent of what he can cook. It took forever for him to learn to do that. He has my problem when it comes to cooking, keeping his mind on what he's doing. But then again Jesse has that same problem with keeping his mind on anything, except engines. And girls. For the one night they interest him anyway. But most other things are easy for him to forget, or lose track of.
Leon can make Kraft dinner. I gather he had to make a lot of it as a kid. He hates it, but if he has to cook for himself its Kraft dinner he makes. He can boil water and dump in the pre-packaged noodles and that's it. You'd think that spaghetti would've been a pretty natural progression for him but when Mia tried to teach him to make spaghetti instead he almost burned the kitchen down. You should have seen the look on V's face when he came running with the fire extinguisher to find Leon coughing in the smoke instead of me running the same way as him from the floor in front of the TV. It was priceless.
Vince. Well, let's just say that the one time Vince tried to cook a meal when the rest of us were sick with the flu and we all wished we'd just gone hungry. The after effects of eating the meal Vince cooked were worse then any flu. He's banned from the kitchen now. Well, we do let him make his own coffee. And play fireman. That's about it.
Dom has his father's talent for cooking Italian food. He can make anything he wants to and it's so good. He's so funny looking in the kitchen too. His big muscles rippling under his little tight wife beaters while he gathers ingredients and fills pots. He'd cook and I'd sit at the counter and watch him. We'd talk and he'd make dinner. Dom in the kitchen fascinated me. For a man his size he moves with so much grace. Every movement is precise and without wasted effort. He does everything with the minimum energy needed. Its how he drives to. But he made the kitchen seem even smaller then it was with his sheer size. But lately the only cooking he'd ever do was BBQ the chicken while Mia made everything else. It was like he was too good to cook a meal for us. For his family. Almost like he'd started to think that cooking a meal was a woman's job or something.
But I don't really know. I mean, he looked up to his dad more then anyone in the world and his dad cooked for us every night. No one ever thought that Van was less of a man over it. So maybe Dom doesn't think that way. But all I know is every time we asked him to make us one of the things he made better then anyone else he always had some thin excuse why he didn't want to or couldn't.
I'm wondering if this latest fuck up with Dom isn't over something to do with his dad. I mean, it's been a good few years since Van died but Dom was so close to his father. It really hit him hard. It hit all of us hard. He was like a father to me too. And Mia was and really still is such a sensitive girl. And Vince really looked up to Van too. He learned most of what he knows about cars from Van too.
Vince bought his first car with money that no one wants to know how he got. He didn't work at any 'real' job. He just disappeared from time to time and came back from where ever he went with money. I still don't know all of what he does but I'm sure that he's not the nicest man in the world to people he doesn't know. Sometimes he gets this look in his eyes that scares me, mostly when he thinks no one is looking. He went to jail once for armed robbery. Big surprise huh?
The only thing Dom ever did before that was illegal was assault Kenny Linder. He was his father's son. Van was a law abiding man. He would never have condoned the street racing or anything else we got into. He'd have been so disappointed. He never found out about Vince and whatever the hell he was into. Mrs. Toretto died giving birth to Mia so I never knew her and neither did Mia. Dom remembers her, but not much. He was only four when she died. Van was sort of like a den mother and father rolled into one. He taught us all cars, though Mia was never good at them. He taught us all to cook but only Mia and Dom caught on. He dragged us all to church.
They were a religious family. Mia still is. Dom, not so much. I never took to it. I went only because Mia wanted the company, not because I was much of a catholic. All those sins and talk of hell. I didn't want to believe that any god of the world could be so mean. Plus I was already going to hell according to the church for sleeping with Dom before we were married, so why worry about anything else. I sure as hell wasn't going to stop sleeping with Dom. It was. Earth shattering. Explosive. Moving. Every cliché thing that you ever heard sex could be the sex I had with Dom was.
But anyway, want an even bigger surprise then Vince the armed robber? I was there with him. Yep, that's right. I held up a convenience store with Vince. It was right after Dom went to jail. So Van was dead, Dom was gone for the better part of two years and things were looking grim. Somehow Mia got to stay in her family home with Vince and I even though she was only 17. There was no one to take her in, no where else for her to go. I guess letting her stay in her own home with no official guardian looked better then sending her to a home and making her a ward of the state for 8 months.
We had some money Van had left Mia and Dom. We had some money that Vince made doing what ever it was he did. We both, Vince and I, made some money racing but it wasn't enough to pay all the bills and keep the house and feed ourselves. We ran Van's garage but without Dom's reputation to fall back on the customers weren't exactly flocking to us. Plus with just me and Vince doing the work we couldn't take that many customers at a time. Mia ran the store but she was all alone too so she couldn't keep it open all the time and go to school. She had to keep going to school. Mia's so smart. She's gonna make something of herself. Something wonderful. She's going to do something good for the world. Not just take from it like the rest of us. And it was important, both to me and V that Mia got to stay in school. V made me finish high school but nothing he could say could make me go any further. I knew what I wanted to do with my life. But I didn't want to see MY Mia slave to run Dom's store and garage for him for the rest of her life. So about 4 months after Dom went in we had our brilliant plan and Vince joined Dom for 6 months and I did 6 in a juvenile centre.
Vince and I didn't think about what that would mean to Mia. She was all alone for 6 months. I guess, with the foolishness of youth we never counted on getting caught. In the scenario we envisioned we got away with enough money to keep the house up till Dom came home. In reality we went got incarcerated. It didn't work out like we planned.
Vince didn't want to take me. He really didn't. I found out what he was planning by mistake and insisted on being included. I was lost without Dom. Lost without Van. It was a very bleak time in all our lives. But that plan of Vince's gave me something to care about. Something to have an interest in when I'd sort of lost my interest in life all together. I wanted to do it for Mia. Vince wanted to do it for us. He was half in love with Mia ever since she was 16. She looked up to 'her V' like a second older brother. Vince is my boy, my partner in crime. She couldn't turn the love she had for him as a brother into love for a man. Sometimes I wish she could. But losing Vince to jail was almost as hard on her as losing Dom, plus she lost me at the same time.
So Vince and I went down for it. It was a foolish, childish plan. We thought we were foolproof. There is no such thing. This fact was proven with the truck disaster once again. My mug shot is actually rather flattering. Bet that's a new one. Vince looks like the kind of guy you don't want to meet in any sort of dark area in his. But wait, that's the kind of guy Vince is. But not with us, not with family. Dom just looks sad in his mug shot. No one knows just how much remorse Dom carries in his soul for what he did to Kenny Linder. He's soft hearted. But I'll never let that get back to him. He'd deny it with his last breath. But look at Leon and Jesse. They had no where and I think Dom saw the desperation in their eyes. And he made it sound like we needed them and offered them a place with us, on our team. Well, we did need them, but not enough to take them into our home too. But Dom knew they needed a place to crash. But he couldn't let on he did it to be nice, he did it because it was practical.
We held on, as Mia says, by the grace of god, till Dom got out of jail. When he came back he was so different from the Dom I had known. Gone was the boy of 21 who'd left us. Good natured but cocky. Muscled, but lightly in a natural way. Shy by times but openly affectionate with me. With all his family. The man who returned was harder then the boy who left. He had less compassion. Or I should say less obvious compassion. It could still be found. Like how he took in Leon and Jess. The man who returned was huge and had an ice cold temper. He didn't seem to get mad anymore. He got deathly calm. He was always holding himself in the tightest of control. He was scared to show his feelings. He thought that what he did to Kenny Linder was what happened when he let his feelings show, when he didn't keep a tight leash on them.
Sometimes when I was in bed first waiting for him to come up I'd lay on my side and watch the door, waiting for him to open it and I'd hope against hope the Dom that would be silhouetted there in our doorway by the hall light would be the slim boy just starting to come into his adult muscle, not the relative stranger that fate had sent me back from Lompoc.
He'd always been slightly embarrassed about showing any sappy feelings but he was a man after all. Most of them are like that. But he'd been outwardly affectionate with Mia and me before. He always had a hug and a kiss for Mia's forehead before and then when he came back it was like he hated to be touched. He also always use to be holding me, touching me, kissing me, he liked us to be touching in some way. But when he came back he didn't really seem to want to do that anymore. He wanted his personal space at all times. Except when we were intimate.
He got over it eventually. He got back into hugs for Mia, kisses for her cheek. He got back into those manly half hug, half handshake things that guys share with Vince and later Leon and Jesse. But he took a long time to get back into being like that with me in front of other people. Of course, when he first got out, like any man who'd been without a woman's touch for two years he could hardly keep his hands off me at night, when we were alone. But it was still like it was ok to show love to one's sister, that didn't make you soft, but showing you loved your girlfriend made you somehow less of a man. And maybe to the guys in the jail it would have. But he wasn't in jail anymore, he was home with his family.
It's only normal for prison to change a person. I know my jeuvie time make me tougher. I can't even say I didn't like the changes I saw in Dom's body. I mean, he was gorgeous before he went in but when he came out with all those muscles in all the right places I was even more proud he was mine. But the reason why he had to get big like that was so that he wouldn't be a victim in jail. It took awhile but things between us got almost back to normal and life was good for a while.
Then the whole situation with the trucks happened. And everything changed again. And not for the better. We could have lived comfortably on what the store and garage made if we'd lived fairly simply and worked hard. And Dom was ok with living simple except when it came to his car. And then all our cars. So he came up with the idea that loaded trucks would be easy to hijack because all you needed was a way to get into the cab and someone who knew how to drive them. Then Vince admitted that he knew how. And then Dom and Vince found contacts to track down trucks that were good marks. And then Leon figured out how to get into the cab and Vince volunteered to be the one to make the jump.
I'm looking inside myself and realizing now that maybe I am still mad at Dom for being the one who had to do the thing with the trucks. He dragged the rest of us in with him. And trips to mexico and the best of everything for the cars and not working such long hours sounded good to me too so I went along. But it was Dom's idea. Dom's the one who had to be tough shit with Tran and push him over the edge with Jesse. Maybe I had been sending the wrong message to Dom since the stuff with the trucks. Maybe he'd sensed my resentment over him not treating me like he use to and over everything falling apart over the stupid trucks. Over Jesse getting shot, V getting hurt, Mia getting her heart broken.
Maybe things with us had changed to the point of needed a break. Or even a break-up. But then again I had a lot of history with Dom and surely that history was worth something. Surely we weren't going to lose it all over this situation after everything else we'd survived through?
I sighed and realized while I'd been doing all that thinking I'd gotten all the vegetables chopped up and I was ready to start cooking the dinner. Brian came into the kitchen from his room.
"Hey Letty?"
"Yeah Bri?" I asked and rubbed at a stray tear on my face. I could always blame the onions after all.
"Can I ask Rome down to dinner? He's always hungry and it's not often anyone cooks for us around here."
"Sure Brian. There's lots of food. Go ahead and ask him. Just let me know so I can make enough rice and heat enough shells."
"I'll call up there now." Brian left the kitchen, or excuse me, galley, whistling. He was happy at least. He was getting a home cooked meal he didn't have to make or buy. Actually, it felt good to cook for someone who'd appreciate it. It had been a long time since anyone needed me around home.
We had Mia to cook and Dom to be in charge. Vince to keep us safe. Leon to keep the piece and be an electrical genius. Jesse to be an everything car and math related genius. Dom to race and fix the cars. No one really needed me anymore. Not toward the end. Not even Dom. At least Dom use to need me for companionship. We use to talk about our days. About what we'd done and what we planned to do. We had big plans.
Brian came back into the galley, still whistling off tune. "He's on his way down. You should have heard how excited he was."
"Why?" Why would anyone be excited over my so-so cooking?
"Because if someone would feed him, he'd eat night and day. He'd never stop."
"Why isn't he big as a house?"
"Ask him. He tells it better then I do." Brian laughed and started to set his little table for three.
Brian wasn't really happy here. I could see it if I looked. He looked older then he had in LA. I know, I know, he is older. But he didn't look older in a good way. I've watched my guys get older, don't forget. So I know what men look like as they grow up. Or in the case of Vince just add years to the total of their age, and Brian looked like the time since LA hadn't been as good to him as he'd let on. He looked tired around his eyes. He looked like someone had killed his puppy when he didn't think anyone was looking at him, when he let his guard down.
Going home to LA is going to be good for Brian too. He obviously needs to confront a few things to get some peace of mind back. He was looking pretty sad right when he was setting his table for sure.
"So how do you know Rome exactly?"
"We went to school together. We grew up together in Barstow."
"No shit! You're really from Cali? I didn't think you were from Arizona." I knew Brian had a Californian accent. One thing that bothered me about him solved.
"Yep, I'm from the middle of no where, or the middle of the Mojave depending on how you look at it." Brian smiled at me and then continued. "Rome and I use to fight in the sand all the time. He was under house arrest for something he did right around the time I was in the academy. We had a big fight about him being a criminal and me still becoming a cop. I guess he thought that we should stick together. That since I knew he was doing things that were against the law I shouldn't become one of the people sworn to uphold it."
"Did you turn him in or something Bri?" That would go against my assessment of Brian. If he couldn't turn in Dom, a man he liked and respected but hardly knew how could he turn in his childhood friend? Vince and Dom would never do that to each other.
"No! I didn't even know what he was into. I found out he'd been busted after the fact. They caught him with a lot of rims that he hadn't paid for. He was chopping cars I guess. By the time I even knew it was to late. It's old news now."
"But it's why you let Dom go isn't it?" I asked softly. He'd failed one friend, he hadn't been able to live with the thought of failing another one.
"Part of it." Brian answered and was saved from elaborating further by the arrival of his friend.
"Hey." Rome said as he walked in and sat down at the table, making it seem even smaller. He was quite a bit bigger then Brian. Well, Brian was taller. But Rome was almost as built as Dom. Plus he just had this energy, a presence. The same sort of gravity, almost, as Dom. His pull wasn't quite as strong but it did exist.
"What can I do?" Brian asked me, looking around. I looked at him in shock. A man offering to help in the kitchen? Wow. But then again Brian always had had a thing for helping Mia cook and clean up around our place too.
"Why don't you decide what you want to drink and put it on the table? This is almost done."
"K. What do you want to drink Let?"
"What else." I answered with a wink and Brian grabbed me a Corona. Rome laughed.
"Not another person around the joint that drinks that donkey piss in a bottle."
"Hey bro! You can have any brew you want. Long as it's a Corona." I retorted. Brian and I grinned at each other then laughed. It was good. Good to take one of Dom's lines and use it with someone who understood. And not feel shitty right after about the mention of Dom. It was becoming ok to talk about him without feeling like the sky was falling, or other then that coloured red instead of blue.
"That was the best damn beer I'd ever had." Brian laughed out, clearly thinking back to the first Corona he'd ever had. The one Dom had pilfered for him.
"Because it was a Corona or because it was Vince's?" I asked with a grin. Vince had been more livid over that stunt then I'd seen him in a long time. If he ever could have killed Dom it would have been over Dom giving his beer to 'the buster'.
"A little bit of column A, a little bit of column B." Brian answered, bad boy smile fully in effect.
"I'll bet." I grinned back.
"Am I missing something here?" Rome asked, slight smile on his face just at the easy banter between Brian and I.
"Yeah, I'll tell you about it while we eat." I told Rome and started piling food on the table. As soon as it was all on the table Rome went for the rice. "Ah, ah, ah. Since you went for the food first you haveta say grace." I smirked.
"But." Rome tried to protest.
"But nothing." Brian answered. "It's tradition. When a Toretto cooks the first person to reach in for the food says grace."
"Aiight." Rome answered and thought for a moment. "Dear father.Good company, good food, good meat. Good golly let's eat. Amen." Rome finished, choking on his laughter and looked at me with mischief sparkling in his eyes.
"Not bad. Not as good as Jesse, but not bad."
"Ah, Jesse. The boy wonder. He's ok then?" Rome asked and it was clear that Brian had talked about some things to his best friend.
"Yeah. He's fine."
"So you were gonna tell me about how you ruined my boy here and got him onto drinking that disgusting beer."
"You want I should tell the story Bri, or do you want to?" I started to scoop my dinner onto my plate before Rome and Brian ate it all. Rome was eating like a man who hadn't seen food in months. Or maybe years.
"You tell it Let. You have a more unbiased take on it then me." Brian settled back in his chair with a fajita and started to eat while staring at me. Rome joined him.
"Well, Brian here had been given the assignment of busting up a ring of people hijacking transfer trucks. He got briefed by his boss and they told him that it had to be street racers doing it. The immediately told him to go after Dominic."
"Why Dominic? They already knew he was doing it or something?" Rome asked.
"Naw, Dom just runs street racing in LA. They thought he was doing it but they knew even if he wasn't he knew who was or who could be. So they sent Brian to try and get into Dom's world. So he started coming around our café and almost courting my friend Mia. Mia is Dom's little sister and the one soft spot in his whole life other then his car." I laughed at the thought of Brian sitting at the little bar in 'Toretto's' eating that terrible tuna everyday. "And Brian came to our café every day. The feds had gotten him a job with Harry at 'The Racer's Edge', this parts store that all street racers shop in. Dom included. And so Brian would come around every day acting like a down on his luck racer who worked slinging parts for Harry. And every day he'd order a Tuna sandwich on white bread with no crusts." I looked at Rome and he was looking at Brian.
"You're such a baby." Rome laughed. "You having some chick cut the crust off your sandwich."
"Hey, it was smart." I answered on Brian's behalf. "Mia's got mothering instinct in spades. Anything Brian did that made him seem like he needed someone to take care of him would just start to endear him to Mia. And he always looked like he needed a keeper. His clothes all scruffy and his hair all messy. Mia was falling for him. She liked the look he had like he needed someone and the no crust thing made him seem younger then he was."
"So there. I was just being a good detective. And Dom has a bigger soft spot for you then anything." Brian answered.
"But then, Brian really was trying to pick Mia up, and my boy Vince wasn't overly impressed with it. He's loved Mia since we were all kids. We grew up together. Me'n Mia, Dom'n V. But Mia never liked him the way he liked her. But he still saw Brian as moving in on his girl. Brian and Vince got in a big fight in front of the store over Mia and Brian's constant lunch time presence. Vince called Brian some bad names and then Brian showed Vince he could fight enough to hold his own. Vince is considerably bigger then Brian. But Dom told Brian not to come around anymore in the interest of peace."
"So how is it that he came to get to stick around?" Rome asked, genuinely interested. I took a big drink of my beer, watched Rome wince, ate some of my dinner and took another big drink before continuing.
"I'll get there. That night Brian showed up at our races. Like I said Dom runs the show. If he says you don't race then you don't. Brian wanted to race Dom and beat him to try and earn Dom's respect. It would have worked. But Brian forgot to figure in the fact that Dom would also hate him for humiliating him in front of his whole crowd. But it didn't matter because Chumpy couldn't race to save his soul. He over shot the line before the race even started, he was depending on a computer to run his fuel map, tell him when to shift up, and when to dump his NOS. I mean, he expected to have time to fuck with a laptop during a race Dom was going to make good and sure only took a few seconds to complete." Brian had the good grace to blush about his ignorance the first night he showed up at races. "And Brian lost. But not by as much as he should have, and he beat out Edwin and Danny to come in second. Dom had just won Brian's car because Brian had raced for slips. No doubt thinking that the 60 g's or so the PD was into that eclipse for would make sure he bet Dom."
"It was an 80 thousand dollar eclipse actually and I caught hell for what happened to it." Brian smirked.
"Yeah, so you should have. It was a beautiful car. But anyway. He no doubt thought he would win and then he'd get Dom's respect for having won. But it didn't work out that way and Dom fully intended on taking the eclipse from Brian. But then Leon heard over the scanners that the cops were onto us and we had to split. We all got back to the house but for Dom. We didn't want to go looking for him because well, one, we'd all just escaped the cops and a huge fine, and two, we knew if the cops got Dom he was going to jail overnight because they all have it in for him anyway. But as I found out later Dom hadn't tried to get home, he'd stashed the car and started to walk away but a cop recognized him and when he called out for Dom to stop Dom ran. I think Dom hoped we'd all be out looking for him but no one was. No one but Brian. Brian picked him up, scared the shit out of him driving away from the cops and brought him home safe. Dom invited Brian in for a beer then gave us all shit about not going looking for him. Said some mean things to me, almost clocked Leon's date off the head with a beer bottle and then took Vince's beer and gave it to Brian here."
"Yeah, then Vince almost kicked the shit out of me. If it wasn't for Mia Vince and Leon would have taken me out back and kicked my ass."
"Only if you were lucky Brian. Vince would have just shot your ass and then shovelled and shut up."
"Shit. And this is your friend?" Rome asked me.
"Since we were in Junior high. I mean I knew him longer then that but we all got really tight in junior high."
"How'd Brian come to be called Chumpy?" Rome asked me with a laugh.
"That is another long story." I answered and looked at the table. I was stuffed and since all the food was gone it stood to reason that the guys were too. I'd made a lot of dinner and it was all gone. I hadn't even noticed the time pass while we'd talked. It had been a long time since I'd had a boisterous family dinner with anyone and I'd enjoyed entertaining Brian and Rome while we ate and carried on.
"I got time." Rome answered. "And I'm hoping there's desert." I burst out laughing and so did Brian.
"I can scare up ice cream sundae stuff." I answered with a giggle. "But I don't know where in the name of god almighty you're gonna put any more food."
"I got a high metabolism." Rome answered.
"I guess." I answered and went to get up to start to gather the chocolate, butterscotch, cherries and ice cream.
"I'll get the stuff Let, you tell the story. You cooked. Rome and I'll clean." Rome went to protest but Brian shot him off a look warning him not to. He must have gotten it.
"Yeah, Brian can start to clean while I gather up the stuff for the ice cream." Rome stood up with a groan. "Ok, maybe I'm more full then I knew." He laughed and I laughed with him as he rubbed his gut.
"Do you still want the." I never finished my question because he went to the freezer. Yep he was still hungry for the ice cream. Damn he could eat.
"So, chumpy. How'd that come about?"
"Well, he owned Dom a 10 second car. Which is one reason. The fact that he lost that awesome eclipse. The supra he got him to replace it is the other. It was such a chumpy car when it arrived. It was all burned up and wasted. It was a chumpy car. So I guess the reason why I call him chumpy is he was a sucky racer who lost his awesome car and got a chumpy car to replace it. And the name just kinda stuck to him."
"Yeah, it suits him." Rome laughed and Brian stared him down.
"Shut up Rome."
"Truth hurts eh Brian?" I asked sweetly.
"And what does he call you?" Rome asked me.
"Reina."
"What's that mean, why's he call you that?"
"Mean's Queen. That's what Brian said I was. The queen of racing."
"And you sure you'n Brian don't want to be alone?" Rome smirked as he asked me.
"All Brian and I have is friendship man. I was happy to see Mia happy and for that Brian was an alright kinda guy." Rome didn't have anything smart to say back to that. He just let it go. I was glad because I didn't have anything else to add to it that wouldn't hurt Brian's feelings.
We made our deserts and ate them. We had a great time just laughing and talking for another few hours.