Rio and Polly

Chapter 9: It's So Small

I don't know what I expected from Rio after he left me at the pharmacy promising to fight for me, for us, but it wasn't three days of silence. Maybe I'd been expecting some texts, a call, flowers delivered to my house or the pharmacy...something to show he was fighting and not just giving up. 

But all I heard was crickets. For three days. Would this man ever stop letting me down? Would that tiny spark of hope inside of me ever be completely extinguished?

Each day when I arrived at work, Frances would look at me questioningly. I'd either shrug or shake my head, and she'd frown, then keep me so busy and focused that I had no time to think or feel sorry for myself or wonder why he'd bothered to hunt me down at the pharmacy and say all those things to me.

But on the fourth day...

That morning, I opened my apartment door to leave for the pharmacy, and stopped dead. Sitting right in front of my door on a guitar stand was one of Rio's beloved guitars. He had ten and all of them had special significance to him.

This particular one was the very first acoustic guitar he bought with his own money when he was thirteen. He'd weeded gardens, painted fences, mowed lawns -- whatever he could do to earn money that hot, humid summer, he'd done it so he could buy that guitar.

And now, for some reason, it was sitting in front of my door, with a note tucked between the neck and the strings.

I plucked the note out and opened it.

Darlin', 

You know which guitar this is. I wrote and played my very first song on it.

You also know how hard I worked for it.

Now I'm going to work hard for you, as I should have been all along. I'm done taking the easy way, taking short cuts, losing sight of what matters.

This is your guitar now. Smash it, throw it out, give it away, chop it into tiny pieces, keep it -- do whatever you want to it. It's yours, just like everything of mine is yours.

You hold my music within you and you always have since the first day I met you, looked in your eyes...and I knew. You're the source for every single note I've ever written and will ever write.

I love you.

Rio

I folded up the note, tucked it back under the strings and moved the whole thing into my apartment. Then, after locking the door, I headed for work.

Frances took one look at my face  and demanded to know what was going on.

"He left me the first guitar he ever bought," I said. "It had a note, but I'm still not sure what it means. He said he's going to work hard for me and he's done with taking the easy way."

"Well, I guess we'll see what that means, don't you think?"

"If he thinks handing over the first guitar he ever bought is going to make up for all the shit he's pulled, he's insane." 

"You may have driven him crazy," she said with a little smirk at me.

Then we got down to work, and I was pretty successful not thinking about Rio and why he gave me the oldest guitar he had.

Until about four in the afternoon.

"Polly," Frances called to me, her voice strange, "you need to see this."

I hurried over to her, wondering what was wrong and she held up her iPad to me. Rio sat at a table, surrounded by microphones. 

"Liddy just texted that she got an alert that Rio was going to be doing an interview on the TMI celebrity website. Did he say anything about this?"