CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Alex
Now
Della called on a Thursday.
“Sunday,” she said. “Bring Arthur. He’s staying with me.”
“He’s staying with you,” I repeated.
“For the evening,” she said. “You and Riley are going out.”
I looked at the phone. “Did Riley put you up to this?”
“Riley doesn’t put me up to anything,” she said. “I put Riley up to things. There’s a difference.” A brief pause. “Be here at four. I’m making tamales.”
She hung up.
I looked at the phone for a moment longer.
Then I went to tell Arthur he was having a sleepover at Della’s whether he liked it or not.
He liked it.
He packed a bag that evening.
Not a big bag. A reasonable bag. Pajamas, a book, his toothbrush. He set it by the door the way he always set things by the door when he’d made a decision about them. Neat and ready and not to be discussed further.
“This is your first sleepover there,” I said.
“I know,” he said.
“And you’re already packed.”
He looked at the bag. Then at me. “She said I could help with the tamales,” he said. “I’ve never made tamales.”
“You’ve eaten mine,” I said.
He gave me a diplomatic look.
“That’s fair,” I said.
He picked up his book and went to his room.
Sunday arrived the way Sundays in Arizona arrived. Immediately. The light through the bedroom curtains at six in the morning was not a suggestion. It was a declaration.
I lay in bed for a while and listened to the house.
Arthur was already up. I could hear him in the kitchen. The refrigerator opened and closed. A cabinet. The sound of cereal hitting the bowl.
I lay there and thought about the evening ahead. Something between anticipation and the nerves of a woman who had not been on a proper date in longer than she cared to calculate.
Riley had texted the night before. Seven o’clock. Dress comfortable.
That was the whole message.
Dress comfortable. Of course.
We arrived at Della’s at four.
Arthur had his bag over his shoulder before I had the SUV in park. He was out the door with the efficiency of a boy who had somewhere to be.
Della was on the front step.
She spread her arms.
Arthur walked straight into them without hesitation. She wrapped both arms around him and squeezed and said something in his ear that made him laugh. Then she released him and pointed him toward the kitchen and he went without argument.
She looked at me.
“Go,” she said.
“I’m not leaving until seven,” I said.
“Then come in and help with the tamales,” she said. “But at seven, you go.”
The kitchen smelled like masa and chile and the warmth of a house that had been cooking since morning. Arthur was already at the counter with a bowl in front of him and a look of concentration that told me Della had given him a job and he was taking it seriously.
I sat at the table and watched them.
Della directed without hovering. She told him what she wanted, showed him once, and then left him to it. When he did it wrong she corrected him without making it a thing. When he did it right she said nothing, which Arthur seemed to understand was the higher compliment.
They moved around each other in the kitchen with the ease of people who had been doing it for years.
“You’re Italian, right?” Arthur asked. “Mom said your family’s from near Rome.”
“Sicily, technically, on my mother’s side. Close enough.” She didn’t look up from the pot she was stirring.
“So how come tamales are your favorite thing to make? Aren’t you supposed to make, like, pasta?”
She did look up at that, one eyebrow arched in a way that clearly delighted her.
“I make excellent pasta, mister. Every Christmas Eve, seven fishes, the whole production.” She went back to the pot.
“But I learned tamales from Rosa Delgado forty years ago, three doors down from the first house Antonio and I ever owned, back when I didn’t know a soul in this state and she brought a plate over unasked because that’s what you did for the new Italian girl who looked half-lost in her own kitchen.
I’ve been making them every way she taught me ever since.
” She tapped the spoon once against the pot’s edge.
“A recipe doesn’t ask where your grandmother was born, baby.
It asks who fed you when you needed feeding.
Rosa fed me. So now I feed you tamales instead of manicotti, and you’ll live. ”
Arthur considered this with the seriousness he gave everything. “That’s a good answer,” he decided, and went back to his bowl.
It had been forty minutes.
“He’s a natural,” Della said, not looking up.
“He’s competitive,” I said. “He doesn’t like doing anything badly.”
“Good,” she said. “Mediocrity has no place in my kitchen.”
Arthur glanced over his shoulder at me with an expression that said he had found his people.
Riley picked me up at seven.
He was at the door in dark jeans and a dark shirt and his vest. His hair was pushed back. He smelled like soap and the warm clean scent I’d been cataloguing since the first afternoon on the back of his motorcycle at eighteen years old.
He looked at me.
“You look good,” he said.
“Thank you,” I said. “Where are we going?”
“You’ll see,” he said.
“Riley.”
“Get in the truck,” he said.
I got in the truck. There was a cooler behind the seat and a folded blanket beside it, which I noted and didn’t ask about, because asking would have ruined whatever he’d planned, and he’d clearly planned something.
He drove us to a building I didn’t recognize on the edge of downtown Marana.
Scaffolding along one side. Fresh plywood over two of the windows.
A hand-painted banner zip-tied to the chain-link that read MARANA COMMUNITY CENTER — REBUILDING, THANKS TO YOU, with a list of names underneath it in a dozen different handwritings.
“This is the fire building,” I said.
“Was the fire building,” Riley said. “Now it’s the club’s Tuesday nights and most of my Saturdays for the last four months.”
He parked around back, where a section of new roof was still open to the sky and a stack of drywall sat under a tarp, and he came around and opened my door and led me through a side entrance that didn’t have a lock on it yet.
Inside, the framing was up but the walls weren’t.
You could see straight through to what would eventually be a gymnasium, a kitchen, a row of offices.
Sawdust still hung faintly in the air. Someone had strung a single strand of work lights along one wall, the kind that clip to rafters, and they cast everything in a warm, amber, unfinished glow.
He spread the blanket in the middle of the future gym floor.
“You brought me to a construction site,” I said.
“I brought you to see what Price organized,” he said. “You don’t believe me when I tell you things. I decided to show you instead.”
“Price organized this?”
“Price organized this,” he said. “Every dollar. Every weekend. He hasn’t missed one.”
“The nephew,” I said. It wasn’t a question.
Riley glanced at me, surprised, then remembered he was the one who’d told me the story two weeks ago. “The nephew,” he agreed. “He’d still deny all of this if you asked him directly. Told Lackey it was ‘good publicity for the club.’ Hasn’t missed a Saturday in four months for the publicity.”
“Some men just don’t know how to say the real reason out loud.”
“Some men have a reputation to protect,” Riley said. “Price included.”
He opened the cooler. Sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, the good kind from the place by the clubhouse, and two bottles of root beer sweating in the desert evening.
We ate sitting on the blanket in the middle of a building that didn’t exist yet, surrounded by the skeleton of what it was going to be.
“Why here?” I asked. “Of everywhere you could have taken me.”
He considered the question the way he considered most things, slowly, like it deserved the time. “Because years ago I couldn’t have told you a single good thing about myself that wasn’t already obvious,” he said. “I wanted you to see one that wasn’t.”
I looked at the framing overhead. At the names on the banner outside. At a man who’d spent four months of Saturdays he didn’t have to give, giving them anyway.
“I already knew,” I said.
“Knew what?”
“That there were good things about you that weren’t obvious,” I said. “I’ve known that since a Harley came out of a dust cloud and stopped for a stranger who had nothing to offer him.”
Something moved across his face, the private kind he didn’t usually let land in the light. He looked away from me, out toward the unfinished gymnasium, like he needed a second to put it somewhere.
“You have this effect,” he said finally, “where you say something and I have to sit with it a minute before I can talk again.”
“I forgot I had that effect,” I said. “It’s nice to have it back.”
He laughed. It came out low and easy, the sound I’d been rebuilding a memory of for years and had never quite gotten right until I heard it again, live, in a half-finished building that smelled like cut lumber.
We stayed until the work lights were the only light left and the desert outside had gone fully dark, and he told me about the kids the center was for, and the roof budget that had run short twice, and Sparks nearly falling off a ladder in a way that had apparently become a permanent joke among the brothers.
I told him about Arthur’s science project and the specific, escalating war he was waging against long division.
It was easy. It had always been easy, with him. I kept relearning it, over and over, as if it might stop being true if I didn’t.
He drove me home at ten.
We sat in the driveway in the dark with the engine off. The desert was doing its nighttime sounds around us. The sky above the house was enormous and ridiculous with stars.
“Thank you,” I said. “For tonight.”
“Thank my mother,” he said. “The tamales were her idea. The rest was mine.”
“I’ll thank her for the tamales, then,” I said. “I’m thanking you for the rest.”
He looked at the house. “Arthur okay over there?”
“Arthur is in heaven,” I said. “He may never come home.”
“He’s welcome to stay,” Riley said. “She’ll keep him.”
“Don’t tempt me.”
I reached for the door. Then I stopped.
I turned back and kissed him, easy this time, without the nerves that used to live in it, the way you kiss someone once you’ve stopped bracing for them to change their mind.
He kissed me back like a man with nowhere else he needed to be.
I pulled back.
He looked at me.
“Goodnight,” I said.
“Night,” he said. He caught my hand before I could open the door all the way. “Alex.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m glad you’re building something you can show me too,” he said. “Whenever you’re ready to.”
I didn’t ask him what he meant. I think I already knew, and I think he knew that I knew, and some things are better left to arrive on their own schedule.
“Soon,” I said.
He let go of my hand.
I got out of the truck and stood in the driveway until his taillights turned the corner, and only then did I let myself grin, wide and unguarded, the way I hadn’t in longer than I could accurately measure.
Arizona at ten o’clock in February smelled like creosote and somebody’s charcoal grill three houses down, and I stood in the middle of it for a full minute before I went inside, because there are certain kinds of happy you don’t want to rush indoors and lose.