CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Alex
Now
Tucson smelled exactly the same.
I don’t know what I expected. Ten years is long enough that you assume things will have changed enough to be unrecognizable. The airport was bigger. The highway out of the city had a new interchange that didn’t exist before.
But the smell was the same.
Dry. Clean. Something underneath it that was specific to the desert and nothing else. Like heat and rock and a particular kind of quiet all compressed into something you breathe in without thinking about it.
I breathed it in.
I’d forgotten how much I missed it.
I rented a Jeep at the airport.
Not intentionally. It was what they had in my category and I didn’t argue it. I threw my bag in the back and adjusted the mirrors and sat for a moment with both hands on the wheel.
A Jeep in Arizona.
Some things don’t change.
I pulled out of the rental lot and headed toward Marana.
I hadn’t booked a hotel in Marana specifically. I’d booked something in Tucson, forty minutes south, which gave me a degree of separation that felt necessary. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when I got there. I had no plan beyond arrive. Beyond see.
Beyond know.
The drive took forty minutes. I took the long way without meaning to, which is what happens when your hands remember roads your brain has stopped consciously tracking.
I went past the exit for the university.
Past the stretch of highway where the mountains appeared on the left at a particular angle that I had never forgotten.
They were the same.
Blue at the edges. Exactly as blue as I remembered.
I gripped the wheel a little tighter and kept driving.
I found the clubhouse without looking for it.
That wasn’t entirely true. I knew the address. I’d had it memorized since the night I found it on my phone in the dark of my bedroom. But I told myself I was just driving. Getting familiar with the area again.
I turned onto North Silverbell.
The building was there. Updated, as the photographs had suggested. New signage. The parking lot repaved and expanded. But the bones of it were the same. The same low roofline. The same position relative to the road. The same cluster of motorcycles along the front.
I drove past without slowing.
Went two blocks further. Turned around in a parking lot.
Drove past again.
This time I slowed enough to see the bikes properly. Six of them. Seven.
No one was outside.
I kept driving.
Lather, rinse, repeat, for two days.
I wasn’t proud of it. Driving past. Turning around. Driving past again. Parking across the street and down half a block and sitting with the engine off and telling myself I was building courage when what I was actually doing was losing it, incrementally, with each pass.
On the first day I saw Brisco.
He came out the front door at half past two in the afternoon and stood in the parking lot with a coffee cup and looked at the sky. He was older. His hair had gone gray. But the way he stood was exactly the same. Like a man who had never once been uncertain about where he was.
I slouched in the seat like a criminal.
He finished his coffee, looked at the sky a moment longer, and went back inside.
I sat there a while longer after he’d gone in, engine off, windows cracked against the heat.
I let myself catalogue the parking lot the way I used to when it was mine to catalogue.
The same faded yellow line dividing the same twelve spaces.
The same dented dumpster around the side, repositioned maybe a foot from where I remembered it.
A wind chime someone had hung from the eave by the side door, new, catching the light every few seconds and doing nothing at all in the still afternoon air.
Small, meaningless details that had no business meaning anything, and meant everything anyway, because they were evidence that this place had kept existing without me in it, running its own quiet life while I ran mine in another state.
I ate lunch alone that first day at a diner two miles down the road, a different one than the one Riley and I used to go to, because I wasn’t ready yet to find out whether the old one was still standing.
I ordered a chilidog out of some reflex I didn’t examine too closely and ate exactly half of it.
I drove back to the hotel with the windows down, letting the desert air do what it had always done to me, which was make me feel like I was finally breathing correctly after a long time of forgetting how.
On the second day I saw Lackey.
He walked out with another man I didn’t recognize and they stood beside a bike in the parking lot talking about something. Lackey did most of the talking, which had always been true. His hands moved the way they always had, wide and emphatic.
I watched from across the street.
I felt ridiculous.
I also didn’t leave.
At one point that second afternoon, Della’s minivan pulled into the lot.
I recognized it before I let myself admit I recognized it, the same dent in the rear bumper from an incident involving Brisco and a shopping cart that I remembered being told about in exhaustive detail years ago.
She went inside carrying two grocery bags balanced against one hip with the exact competence of a woman who had been doing this specific task for three decades.
She came back out twenty minutes later without the bags, paused at her car door, and looked, for one long moment, directly across the street.
I froze.
I don’t think she saw me. The sun was behind me and the glass was tinted and I was, by any reasonable measure, one anonymous woman in a rental Jeep among the handful of cars parked along that stretch of road.
But she stood there longer than the moment required, her hand resting on the top of the door, looking in my direction with an expression I couldn’t read from that distance and didn’t want to.
Then she got in and drove away. I sat there afterward with my heart going too fast for a woman who had, as far as she knew, done nothing at all.
I thought, absurdly, that she might have felt it. Della had always claimed to feel things before they happened. A phone call before it rang, rain before the sky earned it. I didn’t believe in that sort of thing. I believed in it a little, sitting there.
On the third day I saw Riley.
He came out just after noon. Alone. He stood in the parking lot for a moment the way he always had, letting his eyes adjust to the light.
He was in jeans and a dark shirt and his vest, and his hair was shorter than the photograph but longer than I expected, and he moved exactly the way I remembered.
Like a man who had decided where he was going and was in no particular hurry to get there.
He walked to the far end of the parking lot. He crouched down to look at something near the rear tire of a motorcycle. He stayed like that for a few minutes. Then he stood. He pulled his phone from his pocket and looked at it. Put it back.
He looked up at the sky.
I held my breath.
He went back inside.
I sat across the street with both hands in my lap and my heart doing something loud and inconvenient. I thought about ten years. About what ten years actually meant when you were sitting across the street from the person you’d spent them thinking about.
It meant nothing.
Ten years of distance collapses the moment you see the person. One look and it’s gone. All of it.
Just Riley. Standing in a parking lot. Looking at the sky.
My hands were shaking on the wheel.
I noticed, in the specific delayed way you notice a thing your body has been doing for a while before your mind catches up to it.
I made myself sit with it rather than start the engine right away, because starting the engine felt like fleeing.
I had done enough fleeing in my life that I recognized the shape of it instantly and refused, for once, to let it win outright.
I thought about walking across that street.
I got as far as picturing it. My hand on the door handle, the heat coming up off the asphalt, the twenty or so steps it would actually take.
Before the picture simply stopped, the way a film reel runs out, because I didn’t have the next part.
I didn’t know what I’d say. I didn’t know what his face would do.
Three days of watching had taught me nothing except that I still didn’t have the courage for the thing I’d flown nine hundred miles to do.
That realization sat in my chest like a stone the whole drive back to the hotel.
I started the Jeep.
I drove back to the hotel.
I sat on the edge of the bed and called Arthur.
He answered on the second ring. “Hey, Mom.”
“Hey, bud.” I pressed the phone against my ear. “How’s things?”
“Fine,” he said. “Martina made the soup again.”
“What kind?”
“The good kind.” Tinny music picked back up behind his voice, some game he’d clearly paused to answer the phone and was now itching to get back to. “With the bread.”
I laughed despite everything. “I’ll go get some when I’m home.”
He paused. “When are you home?”
“Soon.”
“Okay.”
“Mom.” Another pause. Longer. “The soup’s better when you’re here.”
“I’m aware.”
“So come home.”
I pressed my lips together. “When did you get so bossy?”
“I learned from the best,” he said.
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
He hung up.
I looked at the phone.
Then I looked at the door.