CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Alex
Now
The house was loud.
All of them. Every chair filled. Brisco at one end holding court about something nobody had asked his opinion on. Lackey beside him, disagreeing on principle. Price in the corner with his hair pushed back.
Addy was there with her kids. Two of them, both under seven, both completely feral in the specific way of children who knew they were in a safe place and were taking full advantage of it.
Her husband wasn’t present, which was its own kind of fixture in that family by now.
“Don’t get me started on that man,” Della had told me once, early on, with the particular fondness of someone who’d long since forgiven a person for being exactly who they were.
“Best father those two could ask for. Home every night. Never misses a thing that matters to them.” She’d shaken her head, more admiring than exasperated.
“Put him in a room with more than four people who aren’t blood, though, and watch him go quiet as a stone.
Some men just aren’t built for crowds. I stopped holding it against him years ago. ”
Arthur had positioned himself at the edge of the main group, the way he had.
Present without imposing. Listening without performing.
He’d found a spot near Price, which I noted and said nothing about.
Price had noticed him there two Sundays ago and had not moved away, which from Price was an engraved invitation.
Della had made everything.
That was the only way to describe it. Every surface in the kitchen held something. The table was crowded with dishes that overlapped each other’s territory without apology.
The evening wound down slowly.
Brisco’s argument with Lackey resumed and resolved and resumed again. Addy’s children fell asleep on the couch in a tangle of limbs that nobody disturbed. Price left at eight with a nod to the room.
One by one the chairs emptied.
Riley took Arthur out to the truck at nine. Arthur was tired in the way that arrived after a full Sunday, boneless and quiet and leaning against Riley’s arm as they walked to the door.
I stood in the kitchen with Della.
The house settled around us. The noise of it filtering out through the front door until only the two of us remained.
Della sat at the kitchen table.
I sat across from her.
We looked at each other.
“When Riley was young, he would pick up things,” she said flatly. “With his toes.”
That was all she said.
I said nothing. Not immediately.
I had watched her studying Arthur since that Sunday, and it bothered me a little. Not frustration. Bewilderment, maybe. Without the two of us speaking about the things she kept to herself, I sensed what she was thinking.
I knew what she wanted to know, but it really wasn’t a possibility. Nevertheless, she wondered, and it was eating her up.
“I’ll see about a DNA test,” I said, breaking the silence between us. “Not because I believe you. Because I want this out of the room. You and I keep it to ourselves.”
She didn’t argue.
My mind went to the front room. To the little cluster of ceramic animals she kept on the coffee table there.
I thought about a little boy picking one of them up with his toes and having no idea what he’d just done.