Lift You Up (Rivers Brothers 1)

"I'm sure you can find someone in town who would be good at the job. Anyone who grows up in Navesink Bank is used to gruesome, uncomfortable things. I mean I came of age in this town when that guy was still kidnapping women off the streets and holding them and abusing them for weeks or months at a time. Everyone knew he did it, no one ever brought him in on charges."

"I think that was a little before my time," Kingston said, reminding me that he was a transplant, that he hadn't grown up in the weird counterculture that was our town by the river.

"Did you take all the pictures?" I blurted out suddenly. The question was spring-loaded, like it had been waiting all day to burst out.

"What?" His gaze slid from the wall over to me, curious.

"The ones in the lobby. Of Navesink Bank," I clarified.

"Oh, yeah. I got a good camera to do security work. I wanted to test it out. So I rolled to some of my favorite places around. I found them all when I was setting up the office. Decided to get them blown up and framed."

"They're really pretty. What about this one?" I asked, gesturing to the one on the wall behind me.

"My mom took that. Back when she had to sell the house after our father died to cover expenses. It was our first day in our new home. She told us she wanted to remember the day our new life started. I wanted to remember her. Back how she was in those days. Before she got sick."

"What was she like?" I asked. "I mean, you don't have to tell me. It seems like a sore subject with your brothers and Scotti."

"Maybe because they didn't have as long with her before she got sick as I did," he figured. "Mom was how you picture moms, y'know? Like old school TV moms. Always smiling, light, singing. We'd wake up on weekend mornings to brownies cooking. And she'd pile ice cream and whipped cream on them. And we'd all have ice cream brownie sundaes for breakfast. Or she would keep us home from school to go on a little field trip. There wasn't a ton of money when we were kids since only our father worked, and the budget was tight. But we'd go to a public park or something and she'd teach us about weather or animals or flowers. I think that was how Scotti got the flower gene," he added. His sister owned a floral store in town, had a thriving fruit and vegetable garden every summer, often driving around town to all the Mallicks houses to drop off fresh produce, leaving big packages at the soup kitchen when she had too much to give away.

"She sounds like a great mom."

"She was," he agreed, giving me a sweet and sad smile. "Too kind-hearted to be raising four pain in the ass sons."

"I heard about how Rush used to be a bit of a prankster."

"Christ, I can't tell you how many times I would come home from work to Scotti shrieking at him, or him taunting her. Those two seemed intent on out-annoying each other."

"Was it hard?" I found myself asking, always having been around him when he was around his siblings, knowing he would never say anything negative about the situation in front of them. "Being, essentially, like a father to all of them once your mom got sick, once she passed?"

"You ever hear parents call raising kids a labor of love? It is that. I mean, that makes it sound like it is long days full of patient talking-tos and long hugs. When, in reality, it is picking up clothes strewn all over the place, trying to find nickels to rub together to grab groceries, and listening to the endless fighting between a bunch of half-grown people. It was surreal. And hard. But I wouldn't trade any of it."

"Has it been weird, starting over?"

"No. Yet very much so yes," he said, shrugging. "The plan always was for us to retire from that old lifestyle, start fresh somewhere new. Though, we were pretty sure that would be in Russia," he admitted. "No extradition," he added, reminding me just how severely they could have been punished had they ever been caught. I couldn't - or maybe simply didn't want to - picture Kingston behind bars, see his light sucked out of him little by little day by day for years. "But even if you did prepare to restart everything somewhat late in life like I had to, every step of it makes you feel like a clumsy kid. Like you're always stumbling about. But I think things finally seem to be falling into a rhythm. It's easier since Scotti shacked up with the Mallicks."