CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Alex
Now
Della cried.
Not immediately. She held herself together through the front door and through the hallway and through the kitchen and it wasn’t until she had both arms around me in the middle of her living room that she let go. Two or three seconds of it. Quiet and controlled, the way Della did everything.
Then she stepped back and held my face in both hands.
She looked at me for a long time.
“You look exactly the same,” she said.
“I don’t,” I said.
“You do to me,” she said.
She released my face. She smoothed the front of my shirt with both palms, which accomplished nothing practically. Then she looked past me at Arthur, who was standing in the doorway with his hands in his pockets.
She looked at him.
Something moved across her face. Quick and unexamined. Here and then gone.
“And you,” she said. She crossed to him and took his face in her hands the same way she’d taken mine. He submitted to it with good grace. “Arthur.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“Della,” she said. “Call me Della.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
She laughed. She released his face. “Come in,” she said. “Both of you. I’ve been cooking since yesterday.”
The table was full.
Brisco was there, thinner than I remembered and carrying it with the pride of a man who had done something difficult. He stood when I came in and opened his arms and I walked into them.
“Squirt,” he said.
“Brisco.”
He held on for a moment. Then he held me at arm’s length and looked me over. “You look good,” he said. “Too thin.”
“You can talk,” I said.
He laughed. Big and sudden. “Fair point.”
Lackey was beside him. He grabbed my shoulder with both hands and shook it. “About damn time,” he said. “We were starting to think you were a myth.”
“I’m not a myth,” I said.
“Jury was out,” he said.
Price was at the end of the table.
He didn’t stand right away, the way Brisco and Lackey had. He looked at me for a second first, the unhurried assessment of a man who ran a room by deciding, quietly, what he thought of everyone in it before he let them know they’d been decided on.
He stood and pushed his hair back. He extended his hand rather than his arms.
I shook it. He didn’t pull me in the way Brisco had.
I understood it. I’d earned it.
They’d trusted me enough to give me a kutte once.
Price himself had handed it to me, had said the words that made it mean something.
When I left Riley, I hadn’t only left him.
I’d left all of them, the whole found family that had fed me and claimed me and called me Squirt like it was a fact rather than a nickname, without so much as a phone call to any of them either.
Price, I suspected, was the only one at that table who’d actually let himself hold that against me, quietly, in the quiet way he held most things.
“Squirt,” he said.
“Price,” I said.
He released my hand and sat back down and that was the whole of it.
From Price, on an ordinary day, that would have been a parade.
Tonight it read, underneath the two syllables, like a door left open only partway.
Not shut, not yet all the way trusted back open either.
I noticed it. I didn’t say anything. I understood, better than anyone else in that room could have, that some things had to be re-earned one Sunday dinner at a time, and that Price, of all of them, was the one who’d make me do the earning honestly.
Arthur sat between Riley and me.
He ate what was put in front of him without complaint, which in Della’s kitchen was the only appropriate response. He answered questions when they were asked. Brisco asked about school. Arthur answered directly and without embellishment, which Brisco appeared to approve of.
Lackey asked if he rode motorcycles.
“Not yet,” Arthur said.
Riley said nothing.
But the corner of his mouth moved.
After dinner the men moved to the living room.
Della and I sat at the kitchen table with coffee while the noise from the other room drifted in around the edges.
“He’s wonderful,” she said. “Arthur.”
“He is,” I agreed.
She wrapped her hands around her cup.
She looked at the table. “I can’t name it exactly,” she said. “A stillness. When he’s listening to something.” She glanced toward the living room. “He went very still when Price was talking. Not bored. The opposite. Like he was filing it away.”
I said nothing.
She looked toward the living room. “He’s going to be all right here.”
I looked at my coffee.
“Alex,” she said.
“Della.”
She held my gaze. Her eyes were steady and warm and entirely too perceptive for my comfort.
“He already is,” I said.
She picked up her coffee and looked at the wall.
I picked up mine.
We sat in the kitchen and listened to the noise from the living room, where Arthur was saying something that made Brisco laugh and Riley respond with one quiet sentence that made everyone laugh harder.
I closed my eyes briefly.
When I opened them Della was still looking at the wall.
“More coffee?” she asked.
“Please.”
She poured it without another word.
We drank the coffee. That was the whole conversation.