CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Alex
Now
The grief was shallow.
I’ve felt worse about things that mattered less. I recognized that about myself and didn’t examine it too closely.
I did what was required. The arrangements. The service. The reception afterward at the house, where people I barely knew stood in my living room and said kind things about a man they’d known in a context I hadn’t been part of.
The service itself was well attended, in the specific way that a man’s professional life attends his funeral more thoroughly than his personal one ever managed to.
Colleagues from the firm. Men from the country club who spoke about his golf handicap with more genuine emotion than anyone spoke about his marriage.
A pastor who had clearly been briefed on the basics and delivered them competently, calling Joshua a devoted husband and father in a tone that suggested he’d used the same words at a dozen funerals for a dozen men he’d never actually met.
I sat in the front pew with Arthur’s hand in mine and listened to strangers describe a man I recognized only in fragments, and I wondered, not for the first time, how much of any life is visible only from certain angles, and whether anyone at my own funeral would someday struggle the same way to reconcile the versions.
His father, Robert MacAfee, held my hand for a long time without speaking.
I let him.
He was a man who had lost his son. Whatever else was true, that was true, and it deserved respect.
Robert looked older than the last time I’d seen him, at Arthur’s christening, a lifetime ago.
He’d flown in the morning after the call and had been quietly, competently useful in the way wealthy men who have run large organizations their whole lives are useful at funerals.
Handling the caterer, the florist, a disagreement with the funeral home about the program’s typesetting.
Tasks small enough to be beneath him and large enough, in the moment, to keep his hands occupied.
“He talked about you,” Robert said to me, at some point in the long gray afternoon, apropos of nothing. “More than you’d think. More than he probably let you know.”
I didn’t know what to do with that, so I thanked him, and he nodded once and moved off to intercept a caterer with a question about chafing dishes, and I stood there for a moment turning the sentence over, unsure whether it was a kindness or simply a grieving father’s need to believe his son had loved better than he had.
Through it all, Arthur was a revelation.
He greeted every person who came through the door. Shook hands. Accepted embraces from people he didn’t know with a grace that made my chest ache. At one point I found him in the hallway talking to an elderly woman who had gotten turned around looking for the bathroom, walking her there himself.
He was still a child. Barely.
I watched him from across the room.
He caught me watching and gave me a small nod. A checking-in nod. Making sure I was upright and functional.
I nodded back.
The house emptied by seven.
Martina cleaned up. Arthur was asleep by eight-thirty. He’d been awake since five.
I sat on the couch in the quiet house.
I thought about the next day. And the day after that. And the shape of a life that was now defined by the weight of something I was carrying, and what it might feel like to set it down.
I didn’t know yet.
But I was going to find out.
In not time, a month passed.
I gave it a month. It seemed like the right amount of time to be in one place before I started looking in another direction.
I searched online. Quietly. At night after Arthur was asleep.
I found the same things I’d found before. The club’s charity work. The clubhouse address. Antonio’s obituary. Three grandchildren.
I found nothing about Riley.
He didn’t exist online in any meaningful way. No photographs. No mentions by name. He was a man who lived in the physical world and left no digital record of it, which was so consistent with who he was that I couldn’t even be frustrated by it.
I found one thing.
A local news piece from four years prior. A photograph of the club at a veterans’ event. A dozen men in leather standing in front of their motorcycles in a parking lot somewhere.
I looked at every face.
On the far right, slightly apart from the others the way he always stood, was Riley.
He was older. Of course he was older. His hair was shorter than I remembered. The lines around his eyes had deepened. He was still looking at the camera the same way he looked at everything. Directly. Without apology.
He was not smiling.
He never smiled for photographs.
I zoomed in as far as the image would allow before it dissolved into meaningless squares of color.
I traced the shape of his jaw with my thumb, absurdly, like I could feel it through the glass.
I found myself cataloguing the differences the way I once catalogued the similarities.
A decade adds things to a face, and takes things away, and I wanted an inventory of both before I let myself decide anything.
There was a woman in the photograph too, three men down the row.
My stomach dropped before I registered that she was standing beside someone else entirely, her hand in a stranger’s, nothing to do with Riley at all.
I sat with the aftershock of that small, unearned jealousy for longer than I wanted to admit.
Ten years, and I still didn’t have the right to feel it. I felt it anyway.
I sat in the dark of my bedroom and looked at his face on my phone screen for a long time.
Then I got up and went to Arthur’s room and stood in the doorway and watched him sleep.
He was on his back. One arm thrown over his head. His hair curled slightly at the temples the way it did when he’d been warm.
I stood there for a while.
Then I went back to bed.
And I booked a flight to Tucson.