CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Alex
Now
We fell into a rhythm.
Weekday mornings were mine and Arthur’s. School runs. Homework at the kitchen table. Martina’s cooking filling the house at dinnertime.
Weekends belonged to all of us.
Saturday mornings Riley came over with coffee and we sat on the back porch while the desert warmed up. Arthur appeared eventually, always with a question he’d apparently been saving since the last time he saw Riley. Riley answered every one. Completely. Without shortchanging them.
Sunday was Della’s.
We were on the back porch on a Saturday morning when Riley said it.
Not dramatically. Just the next true thing.
“I’ve been thinking about the house,” he said.
“What house?”
“This one,” he said. “The rental.”
I wrapped both hands around my coffee. “What about it?”
“Lease runs out in March,” he said.
“I know.”
He looked at the yard. At the saguaro. At the mountains. “I’ve got a house,” he said. “Three bedrooms. Good yard. Better than this.” He held my gaze. “I’d like you and Arthur to be in it.”
The morning was quiet.
“Is it big enough for Martina?” I asked.
He looked at me. “Three bedrooms.”
“Martina comes with us,” I said. “Wherever we go.”
“She going to tell me my kitchen is wrong?”
“Without question,” I said.
He looked at the mountains. “Fine.”
“That’s it? Fine?”
“She raised you,” he said. “She’s family.” One shoulder lifted. “Fine.”
I looked at my coffee.
“Okay,” I said.
He glanced at me. “Okay?”
“We’ll move in,” I said. “March.”
He looked out at the yard for a moment, and something in his shoulders loosened, a tension I hadn’t clocked as tension until it was gone.
“I’ve had that third bedroom sitting empty for six years,” he said.
“Kept telling myself I’d turn it into a proper workshop.
Never did.” He glanced at me sideways. “Guess some part of me knew what it was actually for.”
“That’s either very romantic or slightly unsettling,” I said.
“Take it either way you want,” he said. “Both are true.”
Something eased out of his shoulders. Settled. Like the conversation was the formality and the decision had been made elsewhere, earlier, by both of us.
“Good,” he said.
We drank our coffee.
“Riley,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Is that all you wanted to say?”
He held my gaze. Something behind his eyes that hadn’t quite surfaced.
“For now,” he said.
I turned back to the mountains.
For now was enough.
Martina was at the kitchen table when I came back inside.
She’d heard everything through the open window. She had the look of a woman pretending she hadn’t.
“Don’t,” I said.
I sat across from her. “He said for now,” I said.
“For now,” she repeated.
“Meaning there’s more,” I said. “When the time is right.”
She looked at me steadily. “With that man,” she said, “the time will be exactly right.” She took a sip of her coffee. “Just be ready.”
“Ready for what specifically.”
She gave me the look. “To say yes,” she said. “Obviously.”
She got up and went back to the kitchen.
I sat at the table and thought about it.
In the morning I was still thinking about it.
I didn’t mind at all.
We moved in March, the way we’d said we would.
It took one truck and half a Saturday, which surprised me until I remembered how little of the rental had actually ever been ours.
Furniture that came with the lease, dishes we’d bought used, a life assembled quickly and provisionally because none of us had believed, not really, that it was going to be permanent.
Arthur claimed the smaller of the two extra bedrooms before I’d even gotten out of the truck, on the grounds that it had a better view of the garage, which told me everything about his priorities and none of it surprised me.
“You could have the bigger room,” I told him.
“I don’t need the bigger room,” he said. “I need to be able to see when Riley’s out there working.” He set his box down inside the door with great finality. “This one.”
I didn’t say what I was thinking, which was that the motorcycle was out there too.
The same boxes from the third bedroom, moved into the garage the week before in trips Riley hadn’t let either of us help with, still taped shut.
He’d taught Arthur to check his own oil.
Taught him which wrench was which before he could properly tie his shoes.
Answered every question lobbed at him from the porch like the asking itself was the whole point of the conversation.
But not that. Not yet. I told myself it was nothing, a man pacing a project too big to rush, and mostly I believed it.
But some smaller, less generous part of me, the part still sitting on a secret of my own I hadn’t found the courage to hand him, wondered whether he could feel some version of the same thing I could, without either of us having a name for it yet.
I didn’t ask him. Some things, I was learning, you leave in their boxes until they’re ready to be lifted out.
Martina took the other, and stood in the doorway of it for a long moment before she said anything, and when she finally spoke it was only to ask where the nearest outlet was for her sewing machine, which was as close as Martina ever came to saying a place felt like home.
I stood in the kitchen while Riley carried in the last of the boxes, and I ran my hand along the counter, his counter, for six years, now somehow also mine, and felt something settle into place that had been unsettled for longer than I could easily measure.
“Well?” Riley said, setting the last box down.
“It’s good,” I said. “It’s really good.”
“Just good?”
I looked around at the kitchen, at Arthur’s voice already carrying from the garage where he’d wasted no time inspecting the workbench, at Martina’s radio starting up faintly down the hall.
“It’s home,” I said. “That’s better than good.”
He stopped in the doorway with the next box already in his arms and looked back. At me, at Arthur’s voice carrying in from the garage, at Martina’s radio finding its station down the hall.
“Four of us,” he said. Not quite a question.
“Four of us,” I said.
He nodded slowly, like he was checking the number was real by saying it out loud. “Never pictured it this full,” he said. “Family, I mean. Always pictured you. Didn’t let myself picture the rest of it too.” He looked at me. “This is better.”
I didn’t have an answer for that worth saying out loud, so I crossed the kitchen and put my arms around him, box and all, and let the moment be exactly as full as it was.
Then he kissed the top of my head, the way he did with things that mattered too much for him to trust his voice with them, and went back out for the next box.
Arthur was asleep by ten, worn out from a day of hauling boxes and claiming territory. Martina’s light was off down the hall, her sewing machine silent for once.
I found Riley in what would eventually be his workshop, standing in the dark with his hands braced on the empty workbench, not doing anything in particular.
Just standing in a room in the corner of the garage that was finally, after six years, going to be used for something other than storing what he’d told himself he’d get to eventually.
“You coming to bed?” I asked from the doorway.
He turned. In the dim spill of light from the hall his face had the stillness it got when something had moved through him too fully to name right away.
“In a minute,” he said. “Just—” He looked around. “Six years I told myself I didn’t need anything in here. Guess I was waiting on you two without admitting it.”
I crossed the room and put my arms around him from behind, my cheek against his back, and felt him exhale, long and slow, the day finally settling into him.
He turned in my arms.
“Come here,” he said, and there was nothing careful in the way he said it, none of the deliberate slowness of years of longing finally allowed to catch up with itself.
Just the plain, unhurried want of two people who had spent years apart and had, as of tonight, absolutely nowhere left to be but exactly where they were.
He backed me against the doorframe of the room that would be his workshop, in the house that was now ours, and kissed me with his hands framing my face like I was something he still couldn’t quite believe he’d gotten to keep.
“Not out here,” I murmured against his mouth. “Martina.”
“Martina sleeps like the dead,” he said, but he took my hand anyway and led me down the hall, past Arthur’s door, into the bedroom that had been his alone for six years and was, as of tonight, ours.
He undressed me in the dark the way a man unpacks something he has been carrying a long time. Not piece by piece for show. One thing, then the next, set down like it belonged on this dresser and not the last one.
The window was cracked. Desert air moved across my back. His bed was bigger than the one I had been sleeping in and it still smelled like him, soap and shop and the detergent Della bought because she always had.
I put my palm on the headboard. Wood. Nicked. A life that had gone on without me in this exact room, and I was not jealous of the wood. I was grateful it had waited without knowing it was waiting.
He sat on the edge of the mattress and drew me between his knees. His mouth found the hollow of my sternum. Then the underside of my breast. Then the place at my hip that still carried a faint line from a life I was done explaining.
I made a sound I did not recognize as mine.
“Tell me if you need to stop,” he said.
“If you stop I will put you back in that empty bedroom,” I said.
He laughed once, against my skin, and the laugh went through me harder than the mouth did.
We went down together. Not hurried. His weight was a fact I had missed in my bones. I hooked an ankle over his calf and felt the scrape of work-rough skin and did not romanticize it. It was just him. It was enough.
When he slid into me I shut my eyes and then opened them because this house deserved to be seen. The ceiling fan. The crack in the plaster over the closet. His face above me, older than the boy on Mount Lemmon and not less.
My throat went tight. Not fear. The opposite. The body catching up to a decision the mouth had already made on a porch with coffee in it.
He held still until I breathed.
Then he found a pace that belonged to this room and not to any room that had come before it.
I met it. The headboard knocked once and he put a hand up to quiet it, which was the most Riley thing he had done all night, and I almost laughed and then I could not laugh because the next wave took the air out of me.
I came with my hands in his hair and my eyes open. No performance. Just the shake of it, and the quiet after, and his forehead against mine while he followed, soundless except for the breath he let go into my mouth.
We stayed like that until the house remembered how to be quiet.
Afterward I lay against his chest listening to his heartbeat even out and thought that I had spent years mourning a version of my life I hadn’t even known I’d been allowed to want back.
“Welcome home,” he breathed against my ear, right before I fell asleep.
I didn’t answer. I didn’t need to. I was already there.