CHAPTER 1
“MY GOD, I don’t have my cross on,” Fred Crisostomi said after he pulled into the parking lot of The Station nightclub with fiancée Gina Russo. He’d patted his burly chest as he often did to touch his three-inch gold crucifix. It wasn’t there. Then he remembered taking it off while cleaning up after work. It was probably back in the bedroom.
Fred never went anywhere without wearing that necklace, and he felt incomplete without it. That was silly, of course. It was something he cherished, but he wasn’t the type who had fits about little things like jewelry. Smile, laugh, and go with the flow, that’s how Freddy saw life. He wasn’t going to let the missing cross interrupt their evening. He was excited to see Great White.
“Let’s go home and get it,” said Gina. The nightclub was only a few minutes’ drive from Fred’s house and they’d be back in plenty of time.
Fred smiled. Gina always looked out for him, one of the many reasons he loved her so much. She knew how much the cross meant to him, and wouldn’t think twice of inconveniencing herself to please him. Great White wasn’t one of Gina’s favorites, and the only reason they were there was because Freddy was a fan.
The necklace snafu was just the latest in a series of little missteps that evening. It was one of those on again, off again, on again days. Fred was late getting home from work from his painting company for dinner at Gina’s place, where her mom had slaved over the stove for most of the day, as she always did on Thursdays for pasta night. Mom, as he’d affectionately come to call her, made the best meatballs. Fred arrived in time to join a snowball fight with Gina’s boys Nicholas and Alex, ages six and nine. He felt like a little kid again mixing it up like that, making such a ruckus that one of the neighbors waved and asked him how he was doing.
“What a great day to be alive,” Fred told her.
He meant it. He adored Gina’s sons, and their two families had quickly bonded. Fred’s nine-year-old son Brandon and thirteen-year-old stepdaughter Nicole were both looking forward to everyone going up to New Hampshire that weekend, a preview of what life would be like when Fred and Gina were married and they officially became one big family.
It had been a whirlwind nine and a half months since he first met Gina. She was fresh from a nasty divorce and Fred could tell that she was being careful when she started dating again, not just to protect her sons, but also to guard her heart. Yet from the start the two had instantly clicked.
He owed it all to a local dating website, HipDates.com. Gina would later tell him that she was not impressed with the men she’d met through the site, and she was just about to close her account when she received Fred’s message. They chatted through the service’s instant messages for two hours, discovering they had so much in common: they loved the same TV shows, movies, music, and bands. They also both detested smoking, and it wasn’t always easy to find a fellow nonsmoker in Rhode Island. When they felt the keyboards and typing were getting in the way of their conversation, they broke one of the cardinal rules of meeting strangers online and exchanged numbers to talk by phone. Fred was taken by Gina’s voice the first time he heard it, with her familiar Rhode Island accent, a dialect that mixes New York, Boston, and sass. Within minutes of talking they realized they had mutual friends, not surprising in a state so small that it seemed like everyone knew everyone else. Fred had grown up in Silver Lake in Providence, the same neighborhood as Gina’s ex-husband. Small world.
Rhode Island was such a tiny state. Fred loved to tell the story of when his parents, Nancy and Carmino, were first dating, and his dad was serving in the Coast Guard. One day he walked by a fellow Coastie’s workspace on the base and noticed a picture of Nancy pinned up on the guy’s wall.
“Why you got a picture of my girlfriend?” Carmino confronted the man.
“Girlfriend?” the man responded. “That’s my sister!”
Inspired by his father’s Coast Guard service, Fred went into the Navy right out of high school, and worked as a cook on a ship. The more Gina and Fred spoke on the phone that first night, May 2, 2002, the more it became clear how close their paths had already come to crossing. Fred’s sister Crystal worked for Gina’s doctor, and Gina had also met Fred’s other sister Nancy through a friend. It was even possible that Gina attended a basketball game where Fred had played.
Before getting off the phone they made a plan to meet in person a couple days later, another no-no of the online dating service’s rules. They were both grown-ups and it made no sense to move slowly. Fred was thirty-eight, six foot one, and a firm 285 pounds, with a mustache and a thick, salt-and-pepper curly mane some jokingly called “Elvis Hair”—a genuine bear of a man, not some insecure teenager, so he didn’t need the guidance of a website to tell him how and when to date a woman.
When he finally met Gina in person he gave her a huge hug, like they’d already grown so close. She was pretty with her short-cropped dark hair and those intense hazel-colored eyes. And although she was somewhat shy and reserved at first, when Fred got her to relax she was actually lively, quick, and funny, and, as a guy who constantly made jokes, he loved that about Gina. In person they had even more chemistry than online or the phone. When he got home from that first date he immediately called his sister Nancy and told her he’d finally met the woman he’d spend the rest of his life with. It was like something out of a movie.
They’d spent nearly every day together since then. Why waste time? Fred had seen people he cherished pass away in the prime of their lives: his dad from a heart attack in his early fifties, and a beloved aunt who was killed when she fell off a horse. Maybe it was because his loved ones had died young, but Fred always needed to be doing something, needed to stay constantly busy. Friends called him the life of the party, but the truth was Fred couldn’t sit still. If he wasn’t working, he was playing. Similar to some other Italian Americans in Rhode Island, Fred spurned the Red Sox and was a rabid fan of the New York Yankees and took the bus to the Bronx for games several times a season. An avid collector of sports memorabilia, his two-bedroom apartment in a two-story house in Warwick was full of collectibles, including more than thirty boxes of trading cards.
Fred also loved live music, and he and Gina had seen Journey, Rick James, REO Speedwagon, Alice in Chains, and Tesla. If not by going to a concert or a game, Fred was always looking for ways to have fun with Gina.
Earlier that evening, after the snowball fight with the boys and dinner, Fred and Gina took off to see the new Ray Liotta movie Narc, but when they arrived they discovered that the film had already started. Neither wanted to see a movie after missing the beginning, so they went home to Fred’s apartment to regroup. There he checked his email and read about the Great White show. Gina wasn’t thrilled, and pointed out that they didn’t have tickets. They curled up in front of the TV instead, but after flipping through all the stations it became clear there was nothing good to watch.
“Great White?” Fred asked again.
Gina warmed to the idea—as long as they didn’t stay out too late—so Fred called the club and was told there was still room. It was around 10 p.m., but other bands were on first, and Great White wouldn’t take the stage until 11 p.m.
Fred called his young cousin Rene Valcourt to see if he wanted to join. Fred had given Rene the nickname “Ugly” because the man was so handsome. When he got Rene’s voicemail Fred said, “Hey, Ugly. We’re going to The Station tonight to see Great White if you want to come meet us. But we’re not going to stay long.” At ten thirty he and Gina were out the door and headed to the club in her ’98 black Pontiac Grand Am.
Eight minutes later they were in the parking lot and Fred fretted about his missing necklace. It was so typically Gina to want to make him happy by going all the way home to get the cross. Fred saw people headed into the club, and with a national act like Great White he and Gina were lucky they found parking. It made no sense to leave and come back for the sake of jewelry.
“No,” Fred said. “Let’s go see the show.”
Copyright © 2020 by Scott James
