“Uh, it’s good,” I replied.
“Haven’t seen you at the Hendrix. Job must be keeping you busy,” he said, still watching me too intensely.
The way he said it made me feel guilty for not going to visit Lily again, but I didn’t know the woman. Gran had not asked me to befriend her. I had no reason to feel guilty. Yet with his clear blue eyes staring at me, I felt as if I had failed the lady somehow.
“Yeah, it has,” I said finally.
He said nothing but then he didn’t take those eyes off me either. In the light from the setting sun, they stood out even more and drew you in.
“Let’s go for a walk,” Rio said and I tore my gaze from Saul’s to look up at him. I managed a nod and he gave Saul one last look before walking past him and toward the stairs that led down to the beach below.
“Where are you taking her, Rio? She was my friend first!” Drake called out.
“We will be back later,” Rio replied then shook his head. He leaned closer to me. “Be careful with that one. Don’t take him seriously,” he whispered.
Almost the same words Saul had said to me. I glanced back at Saul then but the girl who I knew now was named Fleur was standing in front of him with her arms around his neck. I quickly looked away and headed down the stairs.
We said nothing while we took off our shoes and left them there at the bottom of the stairs. I fell into step beside Rio and wondered how long we were going to walk and if this was where I got my answers about Gran and the tool boxes.
“Saul and I moved here about the same time. Neither of us had grown up here and we were outsiders together.”
I waited silently for him to say more. When a few moments passed and he said nothing, I thought about just asking him about the tool boxes.
“When I was sixteen, my mom decided she had lived enough life. I found her, but she knew I would. No one else lived there with us. All she left behind was a note apologizing for my life and a lot of bills she couldn’t pay. My pops came to get me that day. We lived about five hours from here in a town called Sumiton. Before that we had lived in Atmore and before that it was Pelham. Mom would meet a man then things would go badly and we would pack up and move without a warning. This town, it’s the longest I’ve ever lived in one place. And Saul, he’s the longest friendship I’ve ever had.”
My heart hurt as I listened to Rio’s story. I didn’t understand why he had chosen to tell me all of this, but I was going to listen. He needed someone to, it seemed, and he had chosen me.
“I never knew my dad. My mom got pregnant when she was eighteen and he wasn’t interested in being a father,” he said.
“I didn’t know mine either,” I told him. Although my life with my mother may have been hard, it was not as awful as what he had suffered.
“I know,” he replied.
I stopped walking and stared at him confused by his response. “You know?” I asked.
He stopped a few feet in front of me and turned around to face me. “Yeah. I do.”
Eight
It was one of those moments when so many thoughts hit you at once and you had to wade through them to decide which one was the most important or made the most sense. I stared at Rio with the setting sun behind him and the waves crashing on the shore and tried to figure out a link between tool boxes, his pop, him, his mother, and me. Things that I knew were not possible crossed my mind, but in the end, I simply asked, “How did you know that?”
He sighed then and his shoulders rose and fell with the action. He looked out over the waves instead of at me, as if he needed to gather his thoughts. I waited patiently, but it also gave my mind more time to make up possibilities that I didn’t want to believe.
“I found a box of letters about a year ago in the attic. They were mixed in with other things like concert tickets, a dried rose, a silver ring with a small stone in it, and a piece of torn fabric. The box had been my mother’s. She had several shoe boxes stuck in the attic at my grandparents’ house. They were full of her memories. I read the letters. All of them. It told me more than I had ever known about my mom and my father.” He shifted his gaze back to me.
“Majority of the letters were ones written to my mom from my father their senior year of high school. They weren’t lengthy or very informative. Mostly just the guy responding to whatever letter my mom had left him. It was their method of texting it seemed. Anyway, the last three letters were from someone else. A girl, younger than my parents. She was a sophomore from what I read and the letters were not meant for my mom. She was writing them to a guy. I am assuming was my father, but she never addresses him by name in the letters. How my mom has them I don’t know. What I do know is the girl was scared and she was pregnant and it was this guy’s kid. The girl signed the letters Lyra. I found my mom’s senior yearbook and looked up a Lyra in the tenth grade. There was one. Lyra Warren.” He stopped talking then.
I said nothing. I wasn’t sure what all this meant or if I was connecting the dots correctly. It was more complicated than I had first assumed. When a moment passed and he said no more, I knew he was waiting on me.
“You think your mom had the letters my mom wrote because my mom had written the letters to your mom’s boyfriend?” I asked to clarify things.
Rio nodded.
“I don’t even know my dad’s name. My mother wouldn’t even talk about him.”
“My mom wouldn’t either. However, in the letters she calls him, Rebel. There is no Rebel in the senior class that year. I can only assume it was a nickname,” Rio explained.
“How did your father die?” I asked then, wondering if this would link up our stories.
“Drug overdose,” Rio replied.
“Mine was a motorcycle accident,” I told him.
Rio didn’t look convinced. He gave me a sardonic smile. “And you believe that?”
“Do you believe yours died of a drug overdose?” I shot back.
“Nope. My mom lied to me all my life about my father and that was if I could get her to answer my questions.”
We stood there silent for a few moments. I didn’t know what to think about this or the letters. I wanted to see the ones my mother had written. I wanted to show them to her. Make her explain them. Both Rio and I needed some honest answers.
“I spent a year researching. I found very little. My grandparents shut down whenever I ask them anything. The photos I found of my mom when she was in high school all have the guy that would have been in the photo cut out. There is nothing in the yearbook or my grandparents’ attic that tells me the name of my father. The only thing I managed to do was find out who your mother was, that her mother still lived in town, and that your mother did have a daughter my age. When Drake mentioned you living in your grandmother’s house, I had started thinking up ways I could meet you. Then you come walking into the market with tools for my pop. I just, I don’t think it was a coincidence. I think it was orchestrated,” he said.