CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Alex
Now
Sunday dinners became a standing arrangement.
Nobody discussed it. Nobody proposed it formally or put it on a calendar. It simply happened the way things happened in that family, which was that Della decided something was going to occur and everyone adjusted their lives accordingly.
We showed up every Sunday at four.
Arthur looked forward to it with an enthusiasm he tried to moderate and mostly failed at. By the third Sunday he was setting the table without being asked. By the fourth he knew where everything was in Della’s kitchen and retrieved things on request without having to be shown twice.
Della watched all of it.
She didn’t say anything. Not directly. But I caught her watching him with that expression and I looked away each time and told myself the same thing I’d been telling myself since the first Sunday.
Riley and Arthur found their footing quietly.
It happened the way real things happen. Not in a single moment.
In accumulation. A question asked in the truck on the way to Della’s that Riley answered without shortchanging it.
A tool handed over in the driveway when Riley was working on his bike and Arthur materialized at his elbow without being invited and was neither sent away nor made a fuss of.
Just handed a tool and put to use.
I watched from the kitchen window.
Arthur asked something. Riley answered. Arthur asked something else. Riley answered that too. He handed the boy a wrench and pointed at something and Arthur leaned in and looked at it with the focused attention he brought to things that interested him.
I stood at the window for a long time.
Then I went back to what I was doing.
The motorcycle came up one evening in late November.
We were at Della’s. After dinner. The men were in the living room and Arthur had positioned himself at the edge of the group, present without imposing, the way he always was.
Lackey was telling a story about a ride he’d taken through New Mexico. Something about a highway and weather and a decision that turned out to be wrong in a specific and avoidable way. The story was long. It was worth it.
Arthur was listening.
Riley was watching Arthur listen.
When Lackey finished, Arthur looked at Riley. “Do you still ride?”
“Every chance I get,” Riley said.
“Mom said you have one that’s never been built,” Arthur said. “In boxes.”
The room went slightly quiet in the way rooms do when something has been said that lands with more weight than expected.
Riley glanced at me.
I looked at my coffee.
“I do,” Riley said.
“How come you never built it?” Arthur asked.
Riley was quiet for a moment. “Waiting for the right time.”
Arthur considered this. “Is it the right time now?”
Riley looked at him for a long moment. Long enough that I set my coffee down and watched him not answer right away.
“Not yet,” he said finally.
Arthur took that more easily than I expected. “How will you know when it is?”
“The day will come,” Riley said. “And, I’ll just know.”
“I could help,” Arthur said. “When it’s time. If you wanted.”
“Maybe,” Riley said. Not a yes. Not a no. The careful nothing of a man protecting something he wasn’t ready to say out loud, even to himself.
Price made a sound from the corner. It might have been a laugh. It was hard to say with Price.
Arthur went quiet, like maybe was still an answer worth having, and let it go the way he let go of most things that weren’t his to push.
He looked, in that moment, so specifically like the man across from him that I had to set my coffee cup down and look at the wall.
Della was looking at the wall too.
Then she looked at Arthur.
Then she looked at her hands in her lap.
Then she looked at me.
I held her gaze.
Neither of us said anything.
We didn’t need to.
The following Sunday, dinner was over and the table mostly cleared, and I was in the kitchen with Della starting on the dishes when it happened.
Arthur had drifted into the living room the way he did most Sundays once the plates came up, folded onto the end of Della’s sofa with one leg tucked under him, flipping through a comic book he’d brought from home.
On the low table in front of him sat the little cluster of ceramic animals Della had collected over the years and kept there without ever explaining why.
A handful of small desert figures, none of them worth a second look.
He picked one up without paying it much attention, turning it over once in his hand while his eyes stayed on the comic.
Then he set it back down.
And picked it up again with his toes.
Della made a sound.
Not a word. Not a sentence. A sound. Sharp and small and involuntary, the kind that escapes before you can decide whether to let it.
Her hand went to her mouth.
I stood with the spoon in my hand and looked through the doorway at Arthur, completely unaware of either of us, turning the little figurine over with his toes with the casual ease of someone doing something they’ve always done.
The room was very quiet.
Della’s eyes went to me. I made myself hold them.
Her hand was still at her mouth. Her eyes were bright and doing something complicated and she was looking at me with an expression I had never seen on her face before. Not in four years of Sunday dinners and backyard evenings and every version of love she’d ever offered me.
This was something different.
Her eyes went from Arthur to me, and I set the spoon down on the counter.
Neither of us moved.
Arthur set the figurine back on the coffee table. He looked up toward the kitchen doorway. He sensed something. He was perceptive. He’d spent his whole life reading rooms.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
He looked at Della.
She smiled at him. It arrived a half second late but he didn’t notice. “Nothing, baby,” she said. Her voice was steady. Entirely steady.
He looked at us both one more time with mild suspicion.
Then he slid off the sofa and went to find Riley.
Della and I stood in the kitchen and listened to his footsteps go down the hallway.
Then she turned to me.
Her eyes were wet. Just at the edges. She was holding the rest of it together by sheer force of will, which was the most Della thing she had ever done.
She opened her mouth.
She closed it.
She looked at the hallway where Arthur had gone.
From the living room, we heard Riley say something. We heard Arthur respond. We heard Riley say something else, quieter, and then the particular sound of a boy laughing at something a man said.
Della looked at me.
I looked at her.
“Della,” I said quietly.
She held up one hand.
She needed a moment.
I gave her one.
She pressed her fingers to her lips. She breathed. She looked at the ceiling briefly and then back at me.
“Is it possible?” she asked. Her voice was almost nothing.
I looked at the hallway.
I thought about a hotel room I didn’t remember entering. A ceiling I didn’t recognize. A notebook with careful handwriting and words I couldn’t see around.
Wonderful, he’d written.
I thought about Arthur. About every version of him I’d watched grow from something small into someone I recognized completely and couldn’t always explain.
I thought about Riley’s hands on a wrench.
Arthur’s hands on a wrench.
I looked at Della.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly.
She held my gaze.
“But it’s possible,” I said. “Maybe.” I thought of the timeline. Counted months. Sex. “Not really.”
She closed her eyes.
When she opened them they were steadier. She exhaled once, slowly. She reached out and picked up the spoon I’d set on the counter.
She handed it to me.
“Stir,” she said.
I took the spoon.
I stirred.
From the living room, Arthur laughed again at something Riley said.
Della stood at the counter with her back to me and I watched her shoulders rise and fall with one long breath.
Neither of us said another word about it.
Not that night.