“Thanks.” Fredo took the cup and retreated to the restroom. A short time later he brought out the cup and waited in the hallway.
“Your wife’s in the waiting room, Mr. Chavez,” one of the staff whispered to him.
Doctor Feldman motioned for him to follow him back to the lab. He smeared Fredo’s semen sample onto a slide with a swab stick, placed it under the microscope and turned on the bright light. He flipped off the room lights and then examined through the lens.
“Hmm.”
“What is it?”
“Well, see for yourself.”
Fredo leaned over, squeezing his fingers together into fists. He peered down the barrel of the lighted contraption. While he did see several sperm with dented heads that were completely motionless, he also saw a few very active ones moving all over the place.
“Holy crap,” he said and hugged the doctor, causing him to drop his glasses. Fredo scooped them up, presented them back to him, then he gave the man a big kiss on his cheek. “Thank you!”
He ran down the hallway, ready to tell Mia the news. And on the way home, he was going to buy some more tofu, get one of those vegetable drinks for the whole family, plus buy more broccoli and beets and whatever else green he could find.
* * *
Continue reading the prequel novella…
Fredo’s Secret
A Novella
Sharon Hamilton
Chapter 1
‡
FREDO WAS NOT sure how Mia would take the results of his doctor visit, but his training taught him to just be direct with it, tell her that he could not father children. They had little Ricardo, who was not his biological son, but the son of a lowlife now in prison. Fredo and some of his team buddies had rescued Mia from this evil man and his gang. So, Fredo told himself he already had a son. Ricardo would grow up thinking of Fredo as his father in every important sense of the word. But he wanted to give Mia more sons, and perhaps a daughter or two.
God had other plans.
An inner city kid growing up, Fredo had been like a lucky penny, associating with both street kids and gang members, as well as the pretty girls who played volleyball and went out for cheerleading in high school. After high school, he escaped being caught, unlike some of his friends; not for doing bad things, but for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was the custom that once a youth got into the system, they rarely escaped. Fredo was sharp and lucky enough to never get into the system in the first place.
He thought Cooper would have some solid advice on his parenting situation since he and Coop were still two of the tightest buddies on SEAL Team 3. Cooper now had two children, a boy and a girl.
The Scupper was nearly empty, but that was probably because it was barely three o’clock in the afternoon.
He found his old friend sitting at a long table, as if they were expecting their usual cadre of regulars from Kyle’s Team. Fredo hoped Coop hadn’t invited anyone today.
“How’s it hanging, Fredo?” Coop asked as they fist-bumped.
“Not complaining.” Fredo motioned to their usual waitress, and she acknowledged his need for a beer. Cooper sat behind his mineral water, chewing on ice, and making his usual noise.
“You know, Coop, I’m not sure your dentist is very happy with you. You gonna crack all your teeth.”
“Nothin’ wrong with my teeth, Fredo. My great-grandfather was a horse. We got great teeth.”
“I’m not talking about how well you are endowed. I was talking—”
“Well, that, too, if you must know. But then you seen me in the shower, so this should be no surprise. So you wanna tell me why we’re talking about my dick?”
Fredo adjusted his defense mechanism. He was going to spout off something offensive in response to Coop’s remark, as was their pattern, but he reeled himself in. Part of him was so angry, he wanted to punch something. If Cooper got in the way, it wouldn’t be good.
“Okay, well, I just came from the doctor, and he told me I’m sterile. I’m fuckin’ shootin’ blanks. No little zarapes or baby sombreros in my future, Coop. No father of the bride walking down the aisle shit for me.”
“Borrow one.”
“Borrow a sperm? You mean let Mia get a sperm from someone else?”
“No, asshole, that wouldn’t be borrowing one. That would be making one a part of your family.” Cooper’s half smile and partial frown were hard to read. “Borrow a kid,” he said, nodding.
“Just how the fuck do I borrow a kid? Besides, Mia wants her own kid. She wants my kid.”
“No, she doesn’t. She wants you, and if she doesn’t, she’s hopelessly crazy.”
“I think I know my Mia.”
“Sure you do. What I’m sayin’ is you adopt. Nothing wrong with that. Hell, I’d have done that if it happened to us.”
“But I want my own.”
“You honestly think you could tell which fuckin’ sperm was yours if you looked at them under a microscope? What the hell difference does it make? That’s like saying you could never love a woman because some other man got there first. That makes no sense at all.”
Cooper did have a point. “I think, in this case, I would be able to tell mine from others. Mine would be with dented heads and wouldn’t move.”
“Dented heads, huh? What kind of a doctor showed you what your sperm looked like? That does no fuckin’ good. I’d have nightmares if they showed me that shit. Like a science fiction freak show or something.”
“I wanted him to prove it to me.”
“Oh. Well, then, that explains it. You dumb shit. You didn’t need to see that.”
Cooper nearly finished his mineral water, sucked on the lime until his cheeks caved in, and then chewed on ice. He looked at Fredo like a cow chewing hay, watching the cars go by and not keeping up with the movement. “I don’t care what mine look like.”
“Yeah, well, yours swim.”
“Apparently.” Cooper swallowed and went for the last gulp of ice. Before he could set his plastic glass down, the waitress brought him another mineral water and lime with tons of ice.
“I don’t know what to say to Mia.” Fredo wanted to be honest with his best friend. He was still trying to reconcile the fact that beautiful Mia, who could have been a model or a beauty queen if she’d chosen that path, and was the most stunning of all the SEAL wives, had chosen him. And Fredo knew he was generally thought of as the least handsome of the bunch. He’d had to work long and hard to win her love. He worried that perhaps this would disappoint her. Ever at the back of his mind was the concern that she would one day leave him.
“I can hear all that Mariachi music rolling around in your head, Fredo. Don’t get your cart before the horse. You’re worrying about something that might not exist.”
“But what if it does? What if she’s angry? Coop, what if she thinks I’m not right for her?”
“Fredo, you dumb shit. How can you say that? You think she’s that shallow? Mia’s a strong and beautiful woman, inside and out. She loves you, Fredo. When she finally got it, she was hooked, man.” Cooper nodded to a couple of young tadpoles who had entered the bar. “God almighty, they make ’em younger every year. Did we ever look like that?” He nodded to the new recruits.
“I think I was born with hair all over my body. Someone who knew my mom said she called me a little gorilla. Not sure I ever looked like a little boy.”
Cooper was laughing. “That’s a visual I need eye bleach to get rid of, Fredo. Why did you have to go tell me that? Now I won’t be able to think, seeing this little gorilla boy running around the streets of LA.”
Fredo began to get steamed. “Okay, asshole. I can see this was a big mistake. I come to you with something serious, and you get me all talking about my childhood and sperm and stuff.” Fredo knew it was an unfair argument, but he couldn’t hold it back.
“Okay. Calm down. Seriously, Fredo. You just tell her the truth. You ask her what she wants to do, okay? And then you do whatever she wants. If s
he wants to adopt, you adopt. If not, you stay good with that. If she needs to think it over, you give her space, let her know you’re here to discuss it if she wants. But let her decide. We don’t make those decisions, they do.”
Fredo figured it was probably the best advice he’d get tonight, or any night. He did dangerous things every day, especially when he was overseas. But today, this sitting down and talking to Mia about the doctor visit was the hardest thing he’d have done in over a year.
“You guys have plans for Christmas?” Coop asked.
“Getting together with her mom and Mayfield. What about you?”
“We’re going up for a couple of days to Libby’s folks’ cabin at Big Bear. You should come up.”
“I’ll ask her.”
On the way home, Fredo stopped to buy Mia’s mother some items he knew she’d want for her Puerto Rican traditional Thanksgiving feast. The little supermercado was in a seedy part of town where every bar, restaurant, house, and school had bars on the windows. Even the windows at the public park were barred and locked at night with large iron grates.
Fredo only knew the shop owner as Jose, since that’s what Mia’s mother called him. Recently, Mayfield had insisted on accompanying her. Fredo knew some of the gangs in the area were not opposed to robbing an older military type, even a retired cop, which Mayfield was. So, Fredo tried to do the shopping for her mother as much as he could. Mia almost never cooked. Mama Guzman insisted on doing all of it, so there was no arguing with that. Ever.
He picked up some corn husks and specialty tomatillo sauce, the hot sauce she liked that was made in her hometown in Puerto Rico, and some good rum that Felicia loved to mix with her coconut milk to celebrate anything that required alcohol.
Outside the mercado, he found a couple of pre-teen boys looking for someone to buy them liquor.
“Jefe, you maybe wanna help us out some?” the kid with the blue eyes said. Fredo remembered seeing him before, since it was so rare to see a Mexican kid with blue eyes.
“I told you boys I wouldn’t do it last time, but what the hell. It’s nearly Christmas. You tell me what good deeds you done this week and I’ll think about it.”
His two friends swore and snuck around the lamppost, walking in the opposite direction, disgusted. But blue eyes stayed behind.
“Punched a kid at school who was being rough on a girl,” the boy blurted out. “That good enough for you, frog-man?”
“Where’d you get that name, son?” Fredo asked.
“Because that’s what you are. You got webbed feet. You got tats, and you’re a fuckin’ swaggering asshole frog-man.”
“Asshole? This the guy you expect to buy you some booze and you call me an asshole?”
The kid grinned. Fredo saw something different about him. It was either something dangerous or dangerous for the environment. He was eager. Maybe too eager. Fredo adjusted his stance, moving his package to his left arm so he could retrieve his gun from the holster in the small of his back with his right.
The boy’s eyes half-lidded. That made Fredo even more nervous.
“I hate you frogs.” He ran off.
Fredo stood for a moment and surveyed the alarmingly calm street. It was always like that overseas, too. When it was quiet, that’s when you had to worry about getting picked off. That’s when the shit hit.
Or maybe he was getting paranoid. Fredo rolled his shoulder, checked both sides of the street again, squinting into the sun and still not seeing anything that gave him a reason for all the hair on the back of his neck to be stuck at full attention.
But something was definitely wrong. He couldn’t find any of the three boys he’d seen. He began getting into his beater four-door truck. He heard the ping of the windshield before he felt the shot to his chest. He was surprised it didn’t hurt more than it did. But he couldn’t breathe. He felt the blackness all around his eyes as he began to lose consciousness. It was fuckin’ hard to breathe. That meant the shot hit a lung, and he was not going to survive if the blood was fast.
The street was a tunnel when he felt the tug at his pants. His wallet was taken. He did hear swearing, an altercation, and some choice words in Spanish. He wanted to get up and stop the fight, but couldn’t move for some reason. Someone was still upset. Then a lady screamed. He slumped over in the front seat, trying to stay on his back so he wouldn’t expose the gun he had at his waist. Just before he passed out, he saw a pair of blue eyes and focused on them until everything was black.
Chapter 2
‡
FREDO AWOKE AND thought he was in heaven. The beautiful angel hovered above him, light all around her, just like the pictures he’d seen at Sunday school when he was a kid. Her long brown hair fell around her face and over her shoulders. Then he realized the angel he was staring at was his wife, Mia.
“Mmm—” He tried to say her name.
“Shhh, Fredo. My love, oh, I’m so hoppy to see you’re awake.”
His eyes must have looked wild.
“You were shot, Fredo. Do you remember who shot you? You were shot doing Mama’s shopping. I’m so sorry. They robbed you, but thank God, they did not rob you of your life.”
She smelled clean, from fresh soap. Her large almond-shaped eyes were framed with worry lines on her otherwise flawless smooth forehead. He used to think he could see his soul in those eyes when he first fell in love with her, before he heard it in her breath, in the way she talked to him. Her full lips were ripe and did wonderful things to his body. Right now, she was talking to him, and he was only hearing every other word.
“Someone did some quick medical attention on you, Fredo, or you would have died. Oh, God, I couldn’t have taken that!” She threw herself onto his chest, her hair tickling his chin and neck. He looked to the ceiling of what he assumed was the hospital, as if God was leaving him a message in clouds that weren’t there. Her moist tears stained his chest. The vibrations from her sobs gently rocked him. He tried pulling his right arm up and couldn’t, so bent his left arm at the elbow and placed his palm gently at the small of her back. Immediately, her sobbing stopped. She arched up to him, just the way she did when she made love to him, her beautiful face bordered by her wild natural curls. He could never look at her, even after two years of marriage, and not be stunned.
“Mia, I’m glad I didn’t die, too.” It was stupid, and it wasn’t what he really wanted to say, but his words were sparse.
“Oh, my love. You have to promise me you will never go to that supermarket again.”
He smiled. “I promise.” He was rewarded with a relieved smile on her face, just about the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen in his life.
Then he remembered his doctor visit that morning, and sadness fell upon him.
“What’s wrong? Are you in pain?”
“No,” he said, but he avoided eye contact.
She insisted he look at her, holding his jowls between her red fingernails. Her fingernails were always red, and her hands always smelled like the vanilla hand cream she used, just like today. She adjusted his head and peered down at him. “Tell me, Fredo. Tell me.”
She was hard to lie to. She was hard to do anything but love as often as he was allowed to love her, any way he could love her. She was hard not to do any little thing for. Even taking out the trash was an homage to this beautiful woman who owned him more than he ever thought possible. But today, he would lie.
“It makes me ache to see you so worried, Mia, my love.” Then he thought of something he could say that would be plausible. “Did they get my gun?”
“No.” She arched back, the top of her cotton vee-neck shirt revealing her soft breasts. Her forearms were on his torso. It was his favorite way to watch her, when she was naked, resting her body against his, her legs between his, feet and sheets entangled. This was coming close. “Your gun was still on you when the paramedics arrived. They got there in just a minute. Happened to be nearby. Otherwise, Fredo,” her lower lip began to quiver again, “you would have di
ed. And I would have died alongside you.”
That made him laugh. Always so high strung and over-the-top dramatic, Mia was like the ancient Mayan women who used to throw themselves on their dead husband’s funeral pyre. His laughing made him begin coughing.
Mia was off him, dashing out the door. Fredo still smelled her beautiful body and felt the moistness and warmth of her even after she was gone. He was left aching.
A very homely nurse with a reddish horse face was the next person he saw. She had a wide nose, nearly Fredo’s width. No unibrow, but her eyes were small, and her jaw was prominent, like a man’s. Seeing her made him inhale, and he stopped coughing.
“Glad to see you’re awake, Mr. Chavez. How do you feel?” Mia stood behind her.
He wanted to say something like, ‘Can she stay with me tonight?’ but he knew that wouldn’t fly.
“Hurts when I cough.”
“Yes, well, you’ve got a tube in there, for drainage, and to keep your lung inflated. They’ll probably take it out tomorrow, if everything goes well. You were in surgery for nearly three hours. You’ll be sore for a while, but you were lucky it was a small caliber bullet.”
“I want to go home.”
“No, I’m sorry. You’re spending Thanksgiving here in the hospital, I’m afraid. You’re not cleared to discharge until the Navy doctor gives the okay.”
“Can he have food? My mother will be so disappointed—” Mia was chirping like a little bird at the woman’s side, her hands flying everywhere.
“Nope, I’m sorry. You’re going to be on clear liquids for twenty-four hours. Closest thing I can get you is perhaps some turkey or chicken broth. That’s it, I’m afraid.” She checked his IVs and made some notes to his chart with a computer at the side of his bed. “I’ve alerted the doctor that you’re awake. Not sure what his plans are, but I think he’ll be in to see you later. Are you in any pain?”
“Just when I cough.”
“Let’s see what he says first. Be thankful you don’t need a ventilator. Welcome back. We’re all glad you made it alive, Mr. Chavez.”
Fredo's Dream: SEAL Brotherhood: Fredo Page 21