CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Alex
Now
Riley didn’t come home the next day.
I told myself that meant nothing. He had a business to run, a shop full of motorcycles that didn’t fix themselves, a life that existed independently of me even now, even sharing a roof. I told myself this while checking my phone every twenty minutes, which is its own kind of answer.
He didn’t call. He didn’t text. By nine that night I’d stopped pretending to myself that I wasn’t afraid, and started being afraid outright, in the specific, familiar shape of a fear I recognized because I’d caused its exact twin once, a long time ago, to somebody else.
I called the shop. No one answered after hours.
I called Price, who said, carefully, that he’d seen Riley earlier and Riley had said he needed a night to think.
When I asked where he was now, Price went quiet a bit too long before he said he didn’t know, and the not-knowing in his voice did nothing to make mine any easier.
I didn’t sleep. I lay in the dark running through every version of the next morning, the ones where he came back and the ones where years turned out to run in both directions, and understood, somewhere around three in the morning, that I had absolutely no standing to ask a man not to disappear on me for a night, having once disappeared on him for years without so much as a note.
That didn’t make the waiting easier. It only made it feel, cruelly, fair.
He called at seven the next morning. His voice was rough, like he hadn’t slept either. “I’m okay,” he said, before I could ask. “I needed to not be anywhere near people last night. I should have told you that instead of just going quiet. That wasn’t fair to you.”
I sat down hard on the edge of the bed, more relief in my legs than I’d expected. “Where were you?”
“Drove out past the Tortolitas and sat on my tailgate for about six hours,” he said. “Didn’t do anything dramatic. Just needed the quiet.”
He didn’t come home that day either. He called to say he’d crashed at the shop. Easier than driving back at midnight, he said, which might even have been true.
After the night before, it felt like something closer to relief than absence.
He texted. Short. Working late. Talk soon. Nothing in it I could point to as wrong, and nothing in it that sounded like him, either. Riley had never in his life texted me a sentence that could have been sent to anyone.
By the third day I drove to the shop.
I found him in the back bay, alone, working on a bike that didn’t need the amount of attention he was giving it. He had a rag in one hand and a wrench in the other and he was cleaning a part that was already clean.
“Hey,” I said.
He didn’t look up right away. “Hey.”
I stood in the doorway. The shop smelled like oil and metal and the quiet of a building after everyone else has gone home.
“You’ve been busy,” I said.
“Yeah.” He set the wrench down. Picked it back up. Set it down again. “Been thinking a lot.”
“About Arthur?”
“About everything.” He finally looked at me, and there was something in his face I hadn’t seen since the porch, not the same thing, though. That had been grief, mostly, grief with the edges still soft.
This was harder.
Something that had had three days alone in a garage to sharpen itself.
“I keep doing this thing,” he said, “where I try to remember a specific day. His first day of kindergarten. His first tooth. The first time he rode a bike without someone holding the seat. And I can’t, Alex.
I can’t remember any of it, because I wasn’t there for any of it, because I didn’t know I was supposed to be there.
” He set the wrench down for good this time.
“And then right behind that thought is another one, which is that you knew. The whole time. You knew there was a chance, and you let years go by without picking up a phone.”
I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t a version of the sentence I’m sorry that hadn’t already been said and hadn’t already been not enough.
“I’m not trying to punish you,” he said.
“I want to be clear about that, because I can hear how this sounds. I’m not sitting back here trying to figure out the cruelest way to say it.
I’m trying to tell you the truth, which is that I’ve spent three days being angrier than I’ve been at anything in my adult life, and some of that anger doesn’t have anywhere decent to go, and I didn’t want to say any of it to you until I was sure I could say it without trying to hurt you with it. ”
“You can be angry,” I said. My voice came out smaller than I wanted it to. “You’re allowed to be angry at me. I’d rather have that than have you pretend you’re not.”
“I know I’m allowed,” he said. “I’ve been giving myself permission for three days straight.
Doesn’t make it comfortable to sit across from you and feel it.
” He looked at his hands. “I keep thinking about the two of us on that porch. How you needed me to already be past it, that same night, so we could get to the part where we tell him and everyone’s okay again.
And I let you have that, because you needed it and because I didn’t know yet what I actually felt, underneath the grief.
It took me three days alone back here to find out there was more underneath it than I let on. ”
“I didn’t mean to rush you.”
“I know you didn’t mean to. That’s not really the point.
” He wiped his hands on the rag, slow, deliberate, giving himself something to do with them.
“The point is I get to be slow about this. Might still be angry a week from now. A month from now. Doesn’t mean I’ve stopped choosing you.
Two different things.” He looked up. “I need you to be able to hold both without falling apart every time I need a minute.”
I made myself stay still. Made myself not reach for him, not fix it, not perform the anxious repair I’d been doing my whole life whenever someone else’s feelings got too large in a room I was standing in.
“Okay,” I said. “Be angry. Take the time. I’ll still be here.”
He looked at me for a long moment.
“That’s what I mean.” He shook his head slowly. “None of it’s going to go away on any kind of schedule that’s convenient for either of us.”
“I don’t need it to be convenient,” I said. “I need it to be honest. That’s all I’m asking for.”
“Then I’ll be honest,” he said. “Right now, today, I’m about eighty percent certain I’m not going to let this take us down. I can’t promise you what the percentages will look like tomorrow.”
“I can live with eighty percent,” I said. “I can live with the twenty, too, as long as you let me see it instead of doing this—” I gestured at the shop, the rag, the three unanswered days. “Instead of disappearing into a garage.”
He almost smiled. It cost him something to do it. “Fair.”
He put his hand against the side of my face, the way he used to. I let myself lean into it and didn’t ask for anything more than that.
“Sunday,” he said. “We tell him Sunday, like we said.”
“Sunday,” I agreed.
“And I’m going to be angry sometimes between now and then, and sometimes after,” he said.
“Not at him. Never at him. At you, some. At myself, more, probably, for years of not asking a question I should have asked a long time ago.” He held my gaze.
“I need you to let me have that without thinking it means I’m leaving. ”
“I won’t think that,” I said. “I promise you I won’t.”
He nodded once, the way he nodded at things he’d decided to believe.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go pick up our son from school.”
Our son.
The words did something to the room that neither of us tried to name out loud, and we drove to the school together in a silence that felt, for the first time in three days, like the ordinary kind.