Page 211 of Seasons of Love
I jumped when a hand touched my shoulder.
"It's only me, son." I looked up to see a concerned Sebastião.
"I didn't mean to overhear, but I was walking past to see my Margarida and saw you crying. Do you want to talk?"
I got up from the ground, placing the daisy I had in my hand next to the rest of the bouquet.
"Come on, let's go for a walk," he said.
I followed Sebastião as he led me out of the cemetery toward the Luís I bridge over the river Douro. I smiled as he stopped in the middle. On one side we had the colorful houses on the Porto riverfront and on the other side scattered across the hill of Gaia we could see the many Port wine caves with their big signs.
"You're smiling. I see the walk has already done you good."
"This is where Rodrigo proposed to me. He said that on one side we had the city that was our forever home and on the other, we had the Port caves, meaning our love, like Port wine, would only get better with age. He was right. Every day with him was better than the day before."
"That's not true, is it?"
There was no malice in his voice as he questioned my statement.
"No. Some days he was downright difficult to be around. He thought he was always right and couldn't stand when he was challenged. Not even when that came from me. But damn, I loved how he stuck to his beliefs regardless of what anyone thought. He had such presence, and man did he ever fill out a suit nicely."
"Margarida was very intelligent, but she was a terrible cook. She wanted to be a teacher, but her parents thought the place of a woman was in the kitchen. When we were married, she went back to school, and whenever our parents came over for dinner, I did all the cooking. Till the day the last one of them died, no one ever found out that it wasn't my Margarida cooking dinner."
The glittery water of the river framed by the buildings around it was mesmerizing. I'd never get tired of this view.
"I thought we still had a long time together," I confessed. "He was my first boyfriend, my best friend. How do I carry on without him? I accepted a job in Lisbon, and I'm not sure I can do it now."
"I can't tell you how to grieve, Vítor. God only knows, some days I think I can hear the sewing machine in the spare room where she used to make the costumes for the student plays. But I can tell you that keeping still is no life for anyone. If you carry on and cross the bridge, you might just find that things from the other side look just as nice. Sometimes there's enough time in our life to live on both sides of the bridge."
Sebastião patted my back and smiled.
"I will look after him until you can visit again. And that young man that visits him every day. Leave him to me."
I was speechless as Sebastião walked away from me in the direction we had come from. Had Mateus visited his dad's grave? Was he doing it on a daily basis? Maybe there was still hope that he'd one day forgive his dad for what he’d done.
The other side of the bridge was calling for me, so with Sebastião's words in my head, I decided to go for a walk. Maybe things wouldn't be so bad after all.
6
TIAGO
I hadn't heard from Fred in a week, two if I was to count the week before when he stood me up at the bar, and I was becoming more and more worried with each day that passed. I didn't want to text him or call if he was in the middle of a case, but the silence was driving me nuts, especially because of his last cryptic text.
Living in a constant seesaw of hopefulness and hopelessness was exhausting. I had to believe my brother was out there somewhere. He would be twenty-one now, so he was no longer the little boy that ran away all those years ago. I'd kept all my social media channels open in case he ever wanted to reach out. I didn't engage much, but my name and photo were available for anyone to see. Equally, I spent hours each day looking through photographs, profiles, and names, anything that could lead me to him.
Some days I woke up in fear that I would walk past him in the street and not recognize my brother as the young man he now was. Today was one of those days, and when I felt like this, I couldn't be at the center. It hurt too much to see the young kids who spent time there because I wanted all of them to be my brother, and none were.
I decided to get in the car and drive south of the Tagus river to Caparica to see David, one of my best friends.
Until last year, David was out only to a few very close friends; that was until his childhood best friend and love of his life came back to Portugal from America and they fell in love. It was beautiful seeing David and Joel together. Much like Isaac and Max, they had the kind of love that happens once in a lifetime, and when it does, it changes everything forever.
David was also a top baker and volunteered his time at the center, running baking workshops. The kids loved it so much that some went as far as enrolling in college to become chefs. It made me so proud to see that life could knock these kids down fiercely but they were still strong enough to stand on their own feet and fight back.
As entrepreneurial as he was charitable, David had taken Bruno, one of the kids we helped at the center, under his wing and given him a job at Café Lima, the business he owned with his aunt and uncle, Teresa and Mário.
They'd worked hard over the years to build up the business David's mom, Paula, had started up, and now that David's talent as a baker was becoming more widely known, they were always featured in some kind of best-kept-secret list.
Every time he added a new video to his blog, it went viral because David was not only very talented and came across as passionate about his craft, he was also very kind and extremely easy on the eye.
