Page 76 of Chasing Home
“I don’t know if it was a compliment just yet.”
“Right. Well, you look like yours as well. I preferred the blonde hair, though,” I return, snapping slightly.
It was an old photo that said it hadn’t been updated in three years. I was expecting to meet a blonde woman today, not one with brown hair and a green money piece in the front. The brunette colour pales her a bit, but something tells me she doesn’t give a shit about that.
She dumps her purse on the table and twirls the green chunk around her finger. “I recently learned that colouring my hair like this pisses off my father.”
My father. I focus on not grating my teeth at the purposeful wording.
“Clearly, that’s never been a problem for me. I had two-toned hair in college. One side teal, the other pink.”
Running her gaze over my scalp and the lack of dark roots, she says, “And now you’ve gone back to natural blonde.”
“Do blondes run in the family?” I can’t help but ask.
“If you’re wanting to know if Riley has natural blond hair, the answer is yes. But he hates it and dyes it as black as his heart every couple of months. Has for longer than I’ve been alive.”
“Riley?”
Wanda huffs a breath, staring at me as though she truly has no idea why I’m here. “Lee Rose is truly Riley Rose. Lee is a ridiculous stage name he snagged years ago. That’s something you should know.”
I wrap my hands around my coffee cup and inhale, nodding to try and clear my head. Wanda’s guardedness was expected, I remind myself. I shouldn’t take it personally.
Unless I should. If it’s me she has a problem with, then this just got a whole lot more fucking awkward.
“In my mother’s letters, the ones that brought me here, she never called him by anything other than Lee. Everything was addressed to Lee Rose. But they were real. I have one with me if you want to see it for yourself.”
“How do I know you didn’t write it yourself?”
“You’ll know when you read it.”
It feels wrong to reach into my bag and pull out the neatly folded, yellowing letter from where I tucked it this morning. This letter is one of the most personal I read and downright heartbreaking. The tear marks are real, and the pain etched in every indent of my mother’s pen only serves as further proof.
“How many of these letters were there?” Wanda asks, eyeing the letter I pull free from the interior pocket.
“Too many to count. Stacks of them, most still sealed and stamped with a return-to-sender order. The few I opened were all I needed to see. That and the photos.”
“And they were what led you here, then?”
“Yes.”
After setting the letter on the table beside my coffee cup, I retrieve the small photo I brought along with it. I avoid glancing at the grainy image of my mom and Lee, hating the way the simple picture makes me want to scream and cry until my voice is gone and my eyes are dry.
Wanda doesn’t have the same issue. She slaps a hand across the table and tugs them both toward her with no hesitation. Opening up the letter first, she starts to read.
One line after another, her gaze drags along the paper. Her hazel eyes darken, anger bleeding into them. I lift my cup to my lips and take a long swig, pretending my hands aren’t shaking.
“Were they all like this?” she asks, her tone dropping some of its previous aggression.
“Like what?”
Her eyes dart above the paper, meeting mine. “Painful. Raw.”
“To an extent, yes. Some were angry, some were tired. But more than anything, they were sad. She was scared and alone, and Riley was nowhere to be found. So, she stopped reaching out. She stopped trying to get a response from him and took to raising me on her own instead. I only remember asking about my father a couple of times when I was younger, but she told me she didn’t know who he was. Eventually, I stopped caring.”
She sets the letter back on the table and pinches the small photo between her fingers. Her throat jumps before she flips it over and reads the date scrawled on the back.
“This was years before I was born.”