CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Alex
Now
Riley came home a little after midnight, and I knew before he was all the way through the door that something was wrong, because he came home a little after midnight so rarely that I’d stopped keeping a mental file on what it meant when he did.
I was on the couch with a magazine I hadn’t been reading. I heard the truck. I heard the engine cut off a half-second too fast, like he hadn’t let it idle down the way he always did out of some mechanical courtesy I’d never asked him to explain. I heard the front door.
Then I saw him, and the magazine went onto the floor without my deciding to put it there.
His shirt was dark down one side, stiff in a way cloth doesn’t get from anything ordinary. His knuckles on his right hand were split open, swollen, dried dark in the creases. There was a line of it along his jaw he hadn’t found yet, or had found and hadn’t cared about it enough to wipe it away.
“Riley.”
“I’m fine,” he said, before I’d asked the question that mattered. He said it the way you say a thing you’ve said before, to yourself, in the truck, on the way home, until it started sounding true enough to hand to someone else.
I was up and across the room before I’d decided to move. I put my hands on him, his chest, his arms, patting the way you pat down a fire, looking for the part of him that was actually hurt underneath all of it.
“Where,” I said. “Where are you hurt.”
“I’m not,” he said. “None of it’s mine.”
I stopped with my hands flat against his ribs.
“None of it’s yours,” I repeated.
“That’s right.”
I looked at his shirt. At his hand. At the line along his jaw that had gone from wet to tacky sometime on the drive home.
“Whose is it,” I said.
He looked at me for a long moment, and I watched him build something in real time, the way I’d once watched my own father build a case in a kitchen a lifetime ago, except this wasn’t a case. This was a door, closing, carefully, so it wouldn’t slam.
“I need a shower,” he said. “Can we do this after.”
“Riley—”
“Please,” he said. Quiet. Not cold. Just closed. “Let me get this off me first.”
I let him go because I didn’t know what else to do with a man standing in my kitchen covered in someone else’s blood who was asking me, politely, to be left alone for twenty minutes.
I heard the water run for a long time.
He came out in sweatpants and a clean shirt with his hair still wet, and he sat down across from me at the kitchen table like a man reporting for something he’d rather not be reporting for, and I understood, watching him arrange himself into the chair, that whatever came out of his mouth next had already been chosen, edited, and approved before he sat down.
“Everybody’s okay,” he said. “That’s the only thing that matters tonight.”
“That’s not the only thing that matters to me.”
“I know.” He looked at his hands. At the split knuckles. “I can’t tell you the rest of it, Alex.”
“Can’t or won’t.”
“Both,” he said, and at least he had the decency not to pretend there was a difference.
“There’s things that happen in this life that aren’t mine alone to hand out.
If I tell you, I’m not just telling you.
I’m telling everybody who was there tonight that what happens to them can end up on my kitchen table because my girl asked nicely.
” He held my gaze, and there was nothing hard in it, just tired.
“That’s not how it works. That’s not how it’s ever worked. ”
“I’m not just your girl,” I said. “I’m about to be your wife.”
“I know that too.” He reached across the table and put his hand over mine.
“And in a few years, when Arthur’s old enough to really ask, I’m going to tell him the same thing I’m telling you right now, which is that some doors in this life you don’t get to open just because you love the person standing behind them.
You get to trust that they’re not lying to you about what matters.
Nobody got killed tonight. Nobody’s going to jail.
That’s the whole truth I’ve got room to give you. ”
I sat with that for a while. The kitchen clock ticked. Somewhere down the hall Arthur’s door stayed shut, and I was grateful, in a small ugly corner of myself, that he’d slept through all of it.
“I don’t like this,” I said.
“I know you don’t.”
“I’ve spent my whole life being told I didn’t need to know things,” I said, and I heard my own voice climb somewhere I hadn’t given it permission to go.
“My father did that. Joshua did that, without even telling me there was something to know. I promised myself a long time ago I wasn’t going to build a life with someone who kept me on the outside of my own house. ”
Riley didn’t flinch from that, which I gave him credit for later, once I’d had time to be less angry about all of it.
“That’s fair,” he said. “And I hear it. But there’s a difference between a man hiding something because he thinks you can’t handle it, and a man not telling you something because it was never his to tell in the first place.
” He turned his hand over, palm up, the same gesture from the porch the night he’d proposed, when he’d had nothing else to offer.
“I’m not hiding anything. I’m keeping something that belongs to other people.
Those aren’t the same thing, even if they look the same from your side of the table tonight. ”
I wanted to argue with him. I sat there working up the argument, and somewhere in the middle of building it I understood I didn’t actually have one, not one that held up, and that made it worse instead of better.
“Go to bed,” I said finally. “I need to think.”
He didn’t push. He kissed the top of my head on his way past, careful with his split hand, and I sat at the table a long time after I heard the bedroom door close, looking at nothing, the porch light throwing a small yellow square across the floor.
I drove to the shop the next morning before I’d decided to.
Price was in the back bay with a bike in pieces around him, and he looked up when I came in with an expression that told me he already knew exactly why I was there before I said a word.
“Morning,” he said.
“What happened last night.”
He wiped his hands on a rag, slowly, the way men in this world did most things when they wanted a task to hide behind. “You’ll have to ask Riley that.”
“I did ask Riley that.”
“Then you got your answer,” Price said. Not unkindly. Just final, the way a door is final once it’s shut all the way.
“Price.”
“Alex.” He set the rag down and looked at me directly, and for a moment I saw something almost gentle underneath the wall of him.
“I’ve known that man since he was a kid.
Twenty years. I’d take a bullet for him and he knows it and I know it, and there are still things I don’t know about some of what happens in this club, because that’s not weakness, that’s how you keep something like this alive longer than any one of us.
” He picked the rag back up. “You want in, you’re going to have to want in on those terms. Not because we don’t trust you.
Because trust isn’t the same thing as access. Never has been.”
I stood there a while longer, not because I thought he’d say anything else, but because leaving felt like agreeing to something I hadn’t agreed to yet.
I found Brisco at the clubhouse that afternoon, sitting alone at the picnic table out back with a coffee going cold in front of him, and something in the stillness of him told me he’d been expecting me too, in the way that everyone in this family always seemed to be expecting whatever was coming a half step before it arrived.
“Sit,” he said, without looking up.
I sat.
“He tell you anything?” Brisco asked.
“Not really.”
“Good,” he said, and when I looked at him sharply he held up a hand, not unkindly. “Not good like I’m glad you’re hurting. Good like he did right by all of us, including you, even if it doesn’t feel that way from where you’re sitting.”
“Everybody keeps telling me that. Doing right by everyone except me.”
Brisco turned his coffee cup a quarter turn on the table, considering that.
“Let me tell you something about this family,” he said, “since you’re about to marry into it for real, and you deserve better than a stranger’s version of the truth.
” He looked at me. “You’ve been part of this for a while now.
You’ve had Sunday dinners at Della’s table more times than you can count.
You’ve seen bikes get built and buried, weddings and funerals, more love in one clubhouse than most people find in their whole lives.
” He paused. “And in all that time, has anybody ever actually lied to you? Not left something out. Lied.”
I thought about it honestly, because he’d asked honestly, and I owed him that.
“No,” I said. “Not that I know of.”
“That’s the whole point,” he said. “You see what we want you to see, Alex. Everybody who loves you decides that, every single day, about every single thing. Your mother decided what you needed to know about your own family for twenty years, Joshua decided it about a boy who calls me uncle now, hell, you’ve decided it about things too, don’t tell me you haven’t.
The question was never going to be whether people you love keep things from you.
Every person alive does that, every day, out of love or fear or both.
The question is whether what they’re showing you is true.
” He held my gaze, steady. “Last night was true. Nobody got killed. Nobody’s in trouble that can touch this family.
Riley came home to you instead of somewhere worse, which is not nothing, and you sat across a table from a man who came home to you covered in somebody else’s blood and still had the sense to shower before he let you see the rest of it, because he didn’t want to scare you worse than the truth already would have.
” He shrugged, unhurried. “That’s not a man keeping you outside your own house.
That’s a man deciding what a house is for. ”
I sat with that for a long time, the coffee going colder between us, the desert doing its ordinary bright indifferent thing all around the both of us.
“I don’t have to like it,” I said finally.
“No,” Brisco agreed. “You don’t. Della didn’t either, for about the first ten years. Might take you the same.” He almost smiled. “But you’ll stay. I’ve watched enough people almost not stay to know the difference on sight, and you’re not one of the ones who leaves.”
I didn’t answer that, because I wasn’t sure yet, that afternoon, that he was right.