CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Alex
Now
Della called it a small Sunday.
That was what she said when she called Friday evening. Small Sunday. Just us. No club. No extra chairs dragged in from the garage. No Brisco holding court at the end of the table.
Just family, she said.
I didn’t examine the word too closely. I just said we’d be there at four.
The table was set for six when we arrived.
Six. I counted without meaning to. Della. Riley. Me. Arthur. Martina, who’d ridden over with us and never needed a special invitation to family things. And one more.
Addy was in the kitchen when we walked in. She turned around and screamed.
Not a frightened scream. The other kind.
She crossed the kitchen in four steps and wrapped both arms around me and squeezed with the ferocity of a woman who had opinions about the amount of time that had passed and was expressing all of them simultaneously through physical force.
“You absolute nightmare,” she said into my hair.
“Hello, Addy,” I said.
“Years,” she said. She pulled back and held me at arm’s length. “You look amazing. I hate you. I’ve missed you so much.” She pulled me back in. “Don’t ever do that again.”
“I won’t,” I said.
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
She released me. She looked at Arthur, who was standing slightly behind me with the alert expression of someone witnessing a natural event of significant magnitude.
“You must be Arthur,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
She looked at him for a moment. Something quick and unexamined crossing her face before she smoothed it over.
“I’m Addy,” she said. “I’ve heard about you.”
“I’ve heard about you too,” he said.
She raised an eyebrow. “What did you hear?”
He considered it. “That you interrupt stories.”
Addy turned and looked at Riley.
Riley was looking at the ceiling.
She turned back to Arthur. “I prefer to think of it as improving them.”
Arthur nodded gravely. “That’s a good way to think about it,” he said.
Addy looked at me. “I like him,” she said. “He can stay.”
Della made pot roast.
The kind that required most of the day and filled the entire house with something that made it impossible to be unhappy. Arthur arranged his plate with the precision of a small engineer.
Addy watched him do it. “You’re very neat,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“That wasn’t entirely a compliment,” she said.
“Addy,” Della said.
“I just mean loosen up a little,” Addy said. “Let the gravy go where it wants.”
Arthur looked at his plate. He picked up the gravy boat and poured it deliberately over the entire arrangement.
Addy stared at him.
“Better?” he asked.
She pointed at him. “Much better,” she said. “Fast learner.”
“Everyone keeps saying that,” he said.
Riley made a sound into his water glass.
Della was watching from the head of the table, not eating, her fork resting against the rim of her plate.
She wasn’t looking at Arthur’s plate or his manners.
She was looking at his hands. The way he’d set the gravy boat down afterward, squared to the edge of the table, exactly the way Riley squared a wrench back onto its hook when he was done with it, a small unconscious tidiness that belonged to no one Arthur had ever met.
I caught her looking. She caught me catching her. She smiled, easy and unbothered, and reached for the bread basket, and if I hadn’t known her I might have believed that was all it was.
It wasn’t all it was.
This wasn’t the kitchen-window startle from a few Sundays back, either.
The sharp intake of breath, the hand at her mouth.
She’d had time since then to sit with what she suspected, and whatever she was doing now, watching him pour a gravy boat like it was nothing, wasn’t wondering anymore.
It was patience. The deliberate patience of a woman deciding exactly how and when she meant to act on something rather than simply react to it.
I recognized that too, from four years of watching her decide things about people long before she said a word about it out loud.
After dinner Addy took Arthur to the backyard.
Their voices drifted in through the open window. Something Addy said made Arthur laugh. Then Addy laughed too, louder and less restrained.
Riley and I stood at the kitchen window.
He looked at the yard. At Arthur doubled over at something Addy was demonstrating with her full body.
“Small Sundays’ll do,” he said quietly.
“They will,” I said.
He put his hand over mine on the counter.
I turned my hand over and held it.
Della moved around the kitchen behind us and said nothing, which was its own kind of eloquence.
We were in the truck on the way home when Arthur said it.
He was in the back seat. He’d been quiet since we left. He looked out the window at the desert going dark on both sides.
“Is Riley going to be my stepfather?”
I looked at Riley.
Riley looked at the road.
I turned in my seat. “What made you think about that?”
Arthur shrugged one shoulder. “Just wondering.”
“We haven’t talked about that yet,” I said carefully. “It’s early.”
He looked out the window. “Okay,” he said.
“What would you think?” I asked. “If that happened.”
He was quiet for a while, long enough that I thought he’d let it go. Then, while still looking out the window, he continued. “Better than Joshua, probably.”
“Arthur.”
“What? You asked.” He picked at a loose thread on his sleeve, not looking up.
“Riley actually listens when I’m talking.
Like he’s actually going to remember it later.
” He shrugged, small, like the shrug was doing some of the work his voice didn’t want to do.
“And he came to my school thing last week. Joshua never came to one. Not one time.” He glanced at me sideways. “I’m not trying to be mean about it.”
“He was your father,” I said. “Whatever else—”
“He wasn’t, though,” Arthur said, and his voice wobbled a little on it, like the sentence had surprised him on the way out.
“Not really. He was just. He was there. Sometimes.” He went back to the thread on his sleeve.
“Riley’s more like an actual dad. I think.
” He looked at me, quick, checking. “Is that bad? To say?”
I didn’t have an answer ready. I found I didn’t want to correct him anymore either.
“No,” I said, and meant it more than I expected to. “It’s not a bad thing to say.”
He was quiet for a moment, like the words had settled something, and turned back to the window, and didn’t say much else the rest of the way home.
Riley’s hands were on the wheel. Still. He was looking at the road and I could see nothing of his face from where I sat.
I faced forward.
The desert went by on both sides.
I thought about what Arthur had just said and what he didn’t know he’d said and what it meant and what it might mean and I looked at the road ahead and said nothing for the rest of the drive.
Some things settle in their own time.
This one was settling whether I was ready or not.