CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Alex
Now
Sunday arrived the way Sundays in that house always did.
Full. Warm. Smelling of something Della had been working on since morning.
Arthur came through the front door ahead of me and went straight to the kitchen the way he always did, checking what was on the stove before he said hello to anyone, which Della had decided was the highest compliment and encouraged accordingly.
“Tamales,” he said.
“Your favorite,” Della said.
“How did you know they were my favorite?”
“I know everything,” she said. She kissed the top of his head. “Wash your hands.”
He went to the sink.
I stood in the doorway and looked at Della.
She looked back at me.
Riley was behind me. I felt him.
We ate first.
That was the right thing. Della had made everything and it deserved to be eaten without the weight of what was coming pressing down on it.
Arthur ate tamales and rice and a portion of the salad that wasn’t really a salad and talked to Della about school and to Riley about the motorcycle and to me about nothing in particular, which was his way of including everyone equally.
He was a good boy.
He was the best boy.
When the plates were cleared and Della had put the coffee on and Arthur had settled into his chair with the ease of a boy in a place that felt like home, Riley looked at me.
I let out a breath.
“Arthur,” I said.
He looked up.
“We need to talk to you about something,” I said. “All of us.”
He looked at me. Then at Riley. Then at Della. He read the room the way he always read rooms. Thoroughly and without panic.
“Okay,” he said.
He folded his hands on the table.
I started at the beginning.
Not the very beginning. The beginning that mattered for this. “A long time ago, before you were born, I loved someone very much,” I said. “Riley.”
Arthur’s eyes flicked to Riley and back to me, already ahead of the sentence the way he was ahead of most sentences, but he didn’t interrupt. He just waited, hands still folded, for me to get to the part that actually needed saying.
“My father didn’t approve,” I said. “He arranged a dinner, back in California, with someone he thought I should marry instead. Joshua. I didn’t want to go.
I went anyway, because I was young and I thought I owed my parents that much.
” I made myself keep looking at Arthur and not at the table.
“I had wine that night that I don’t remember finishing, and I woke up the next morning in a hotel room I didn’t remember going to, and I have never been entirely sure what happened in between.
I want you to know that, because it’s true, and because it matters to the rest of it. ”
Della’s hand found the edge of the table. Riley didn’t move at all.
“A few weeks later I found out I was pregnant,” I said.
“And I didn’t know. I genuinely didn’t know whether that was possible because of that night with Joshua, or because of something that happened before it, with Riley.
I was scared, and ashamed, and I made a choice that I now regret.
I told Riley nothing. I let him believe I’d simply left. I married Joshua instead.”
Arthur listened to all of it.
He didn’t interrupt. He didn’t react outwardly. He sat with his hands folded on the table and he listened the way he listened to things that required his full attention.
When I finished the room was quiet.
Arthur looked at the table for a moment.
Then he looked at Riley.
“You’re my father,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes,” Riley said.
Arthur looked at him steadily. “You didn’t know.”
“No,” Riley said. “I didn’t know.”
Arthur went quiet, turning it over. He looked at his hands, then at Della, who was doing the same thing she’d been doing since Sunday with the roadrunner, holding herself together by force of will, her hand at her mouth, her eyes full of something she wasn’t going to let out at this table.
Then his eyes came to me.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
I blinked. “I’m supposed to be asking you that.”
“You’ve got your worried face on,” he said.
I pressed my lips together hard.
“I’m okay,” he said. “In case you were wondering.” He looked at the table. “It explains some things.”
“Arthur—” I started.
“I meant what I said in the truck,” he said.
He looked at Riley, and some of his usual directness wavered, like he wasn’t sure it was still his to say out loud with everyone listening.
“About you being more like a real dad.” He shrugged one shoulder.
“I guess it’s just true-true now. Not just a feeling.
” He glanced at me, quick, checking. “Is that weird to say?”
Riley looked at the boy.
His jaw was tight.
He nodded once.
That was all. Just once.
Arthur nodded back.
Two men at a table making an agreement with a nod. I thought about what I’d once known about bikers and handshakes and how some things were contracts regardless of their form.
Della exhaled from somewhere deep. She reached across the table and covered Arthur’s hand with both of hers. She looked at him for a moment.
“You look like him,” she said. “You’ve always looked like him.”
Arthur looked at Riley.
Riley looked at Arthur.
“Little bit,” Arthur said.
Riley made a sound. It might have been a laugh. It was hard to say.
Arthurs focus was on the table. “Can I ask something?”
“Anything,” I said.
“Do I have to feel different?” he asked, looking up. “Because I don’t. I feel exactly the same as I did this morning. I just know something now that I didn’t know this morning.” He looked around at the three of us, checking. “Is that wrong?”
“That’s not wrong,” Della said, before I could answer, her voice steadier now than it had been all afternoon. “That’s exactly right, baby. You were always exactly who you are. Today just gave the rest of us the right words for it.”
Arthur considered that, and appeared to accept it as sound, and reached for another tamale.
The afternoon sun moved across the floor.
Della made coffee and brought it to the table and we sat for a while longer. Not talking about big things. Talking about small things the way you do after big things have been said and the room needs to breathe.
Arthur ate another tamale.
He was handling it the way he handled everything.
By processing it quietly and then going forward.
He had Riley’s way with difficulty. He picked it up and examined it and set it down in its new place and moved on.
I’d seen him do this before. In a hospital lobby, at ten years old, telling his father’s still body that the doctors were going to fix him.
I knew better by now than to mistake the calm for the whole of what he felt.
With Arthur, the second wave always came later, on its own schedule, once he’d decided it was safe to have it.
I watched him.
I thought about years.
I thought about everything Arthur had done and said and been during those years that I was only now able to read correctly.
“Mom,” Arthur said.
I met his eyes.
“Stop,” he said. “You’re doing the worried thing.”
“What worried thing?”
He shrugged, like he didn’t have a better word for it. “The face like you’re about to say sorry again.”
I looked at him.
“It’s okay,” he said. He picked his fork back up. “I already said.”
Eleven years old.
I let that sit for a second.
Riley stood.
He pushed his chair back and stood and looked at Arthur with an expression I had never seen on his face before.
Not in all the years I’d known him.
Open and unguarded and certain. Similar to the way he looked when he’d made a decision he intended to keep.
“Well, bud,” he said.
Arthur looked up at him.
“We need to get busy,” Riley said.
Arthur’s brow came down. “Doing what?”
“Building that motorcycle.”
The room went quiet.
Arthur looked at Riley.
Riley looked at Arthur.
Then Arthur stood up.
“I’ll get my jacket,” he said.