CHAPTER THIRTY
Alex
Now
We sat in that back room for three hours.
The coffee went cold. Neither of us moved to refresh it. The two men in the front room filtered out at some point and the building went quiet and neither of us noticed or commented on it.
We talked.
I hadn’t anticipated it. Not the seeing him or the telling him or the way his face had looked when I said I left because I was pregnant.
Those things I’d rehearsed in some form or another for years.
What I hadn’t rehearsed was this. Just talking.
The way we used to. Easy and unhurried with long silences that didn’t require filling.
He asked more about Arthur.
I told him. All of it. The solar system project and the soup and the way he shook hands with strangers at his father’s funeral and the bossy quality he’d developed somewhere around age nine that I suspected was permanent.
Riley listened the way he always listened. Completely. Like what I was saying was the only thing happening.
“He sounds like a good kid,” he said.
“The best kid,” I said. “He’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”
He was quiet for a second. He looked at his hands on the table. “What was it like? The marriage.”
“Long,” I said.
He gave me a look.
“Difficult,” I said. “He wasn’t a kind man. Not consistently.” I looked at the wall. “Not to me, anyway.”
Riley said nothing.
“I made my bed,” I said.
“You were twenty-two,” he said.
“Old enough.”
“Old enough to make a mistake,” he said. “Not old enough to have it held against you forever.”
I held his eyes. “Are you holding it against me?”
He considered it. “I was angry for a long time,” he said.
“I won’t lie to you about that. I tried to find you.
Called your number until it was disconnected.
Called Martina until she stopped answering.
” He picked up his cold coffee and looked at it.
“It’s been years. At some point I stopped being angry. ”
“What replaced it?”
“Nothing,” he said. “For a while, nothing.” He set the cup down. “Then just time. Work. The club.” He looked at me. “You didn’t exactly leave a gap I could fill with something else.”
I pressed my lips together. “I’m sorry.”
“I know you are.”
“Riley—”
“I know,” he said. “I mean it. I know.”
We sat with that for a while, the silence doing the work neither of us had words for. Somewhere outside a truck downshifted on the main road, the sound rising and fading, and a fly bumped twice against the window glass and gave up.
“Can I ask you something?” I asked.
He gestured for me to go on.
“Did you look for anyone else?” I asked. “In those years? Was there...” I stopped, unsure I actually wanted the answer, and asked anyway because not knowing had its own cruelty. “Was there someone serious?”
He considered the question with the same care he gave everything. “There was someone, for about two years,” he said. “Good woman. Ran a diner in Oro Valley. It didn’t take.”
“Why not?”
“She used to ask me what I was thinking about,” he said, “and about half the time the honest answer would’ve been you, and I got tired of lying to her about it.
Seemed unfair to keep doing that to someone who didn’t deserve it.
” He turned his cup a quarter turn on the table, an old habit I remembered suddenly and completely.
“She figured it out eventually anyway. Told me I was the most decent haunted man she’d ever dated.
” He almost smiled. “I didn’t argue with her. ”
I felt something in my chest twist, gratitude and guilt tangled too tightly together to separate. “I’m sorry,” I said. “That I did that to you. Without ever knowing I was doing it.”
“You didn’t do it to me,” he said. “You did it to yourself too. I watched you just now, telling me about a ten-year-old boy who reads books he shouldn’t be old enough for yet, and I don’t think you’ve let yourself be happy in longer than I have.
” He looked at me steadily. “That’s not a competition I wanted either one of us to win. ”
He drove me back to the hotel. When he offered, I didn’t even think of leaving the rental at the clubhouse. Maybe I did, but I didn’t admit it. I wanted to be close to him. As much as I could.
We rode in his truck, which was different from the truck I remembered but felt the same inside.
He drove the way he always drove. Settled.
One hand on the wheel. The desert went by on both sides the way it did at dusk, the light going warm and orange along the ground while the sky above went purple.
I watched it go by.
“Are you staying?” he asked.
“For a few more days,” I said. “Then I need to get back to Arthur.”
He nodded.
“And then,” I said. “I don’t know. I need to think about what comes next. Practically. There’s the house. Arthur’s school. Things to sort out.”
He said nothing.
“I’m not asking for anything,” I said. “I want to be clear about that. I came here to see if you were still here. If you were—” I stopped. “I didn’t come here with expectations.”
He pulled into the hotel lot and parked.
He turned and looked at me.
“Have dinner with me,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
“Tonight,” he said.
“Okay,” I said again.
He almost smiled. “Okay.”
That evening, we went to a place on the edge of Marana that had been there since before I arrived in Arizona the first time. Low light. Wood interior. A menu that hadn’t changed significantly since the eighties and didn’t need to.
I ordered a chilidog.
He was watching me, something like amusement pulling at his mouth.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“It’s what I always order.”
“I know,” he said. “I ordered one here by myself once, about three years back, just to see if it tasted the same.” He shook his head slightly at himself, like the memory embarrassed him a little. “Wasn’t the same. Never figured out if that was the recipe or just me.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I reached across the table and took his hand, briefly, and let go before either of us had to decide what it meant.
He ordered a burger. We ate. We talked. The conversation moved the way it always had, finding its own level without effort. He told me about the club. About the charity work they’d taken on over the past few years.
“Price organized it?” I asked.
“Price organized it.”
“The same Price who once told Sparks that community service was for people who got caught?”
“The same,” he said. “He’s mellowed.”
“Price has mellowed.”
“Slightly,” he said. “Don’t push it.”
“What happened?” I asked. “To make him mellow, I mean. People like Price don’t just soften on their own.”
Riley considered the question, turning his glass slowly on the table.
“His sister’s kid,” he said. “Got in trouble a few years back. Bad crowd, worse decisions. Price paid for a lawyer, quietly, never told anyone until Lackey found the receipt by accident.” He shrugged.
“Kid straightened out. Went into a trade program. Price started showing up to things after that. Never explained why. Didn’t need to. ”
“That’s a good story,” I said.
“Most of them are, if you wait long enough to hear the whole thing,” Riley said. “People don’t change because someone gives a speech. They change because something actually happens and they’re standing close enough to feel it.”
I thought about that longer than the sentence probably warranted, turning it over the way I turned over most things he said now, looking for what it meant about the two of us sitting at this particular table.
I laughed. It arrived easy and unguarded, the way laughter did when you were somewhere you felt safe.
He watched me laugh.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “I forgot what that sounded like.”
I looked at him.
“Your laugh,” he said. “I forgot what it sounded like.”
I didn’t know what to do with that. So I did nothing. Just sat with it and let it mean what it meant.
“I forgot a lot of things,” I said quietly. “And then I got here and remembered all of them at once.”
He was quiet a moment. He understood that.
“Does it feel strange?” he asked. “Being back.”
“No,” I said. “That’s the strange part. It doesn’t feel strange at all.” I looked at the table. “It feels like the other thing was the strange part.”
“The other thing,” he said.
“California,” I said. “Joshua. All of it.” I looked up. “This feels like the thing that was always supposed to be happening.”
He held my gaze.
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “It does.”
He drove me home back to the hotel at ten.
We sat in the parking lot in the dark with the engine off.
“Thank you,” I said. “For tonight.”
“Thank my mother,” he said. “It was her idea.”
I laughed. “I’ll thank Della,” I said. “I’m thanking you too.”
He looked at the hotel. “Arthur doing okay without you?”
“He’s fine.” I reached for the door. Then I stopped.
I turned back and kissed him.
Not long. Not complicated. Just deliberate. The way things are when they’ve been decided rather than arrived at.
He was still when it started. Then he wasn’t.
I pulled back.
His eyes stayed on mine, waiting.
“Goodnight,” I said.
“Night,” he said. His voice had changed slightly. Lower. He was looking at me with that directness of his and something additional that he wasn’t putting into words.
I got out of the truck.
I went inside.
I leaned against the closed front door in the dark hallway and pressed the back of my hand against my mouth and smiled like an idiot.
I stood there for a long minute like that, grinning at nothing. I understood that whatever this was between us, it wasn’t the kind of thing you forgot how to feel. You just forgot, for a while, that you were still capable of it.