CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Alex
Now
Della’s car door shut with the soft click of someone trying not to wake a house, which meant she already knew, before she’d even come up the walk, that this wasn’t a visit where noise belonged.
I didn’t get up. I heard her key in the lock of the front door. She’d had one since the second month I lived in Riley’s house, an arrangement none of us had ever discussed out loud, the way most of the important arrangements in that family got settled without a conversation.
The door opened and she was standing there in a coat thrown over what was clearly a nightgown, looking at me on the bottom step with a suitcase at my feet like she’d been expecting to find exactly what she had found.
She didn’t say anything at first. She closed the door behind her, quietly, and came and sat down on the step beside me. She looked at the suitcase for a long moment the way you’d look at a stray animal you weren’t sure yet whether to approach.
“Couldn’t sleep,” she said finally. “Had a feeling.”
I sighed. “You always have a feeling.”
“Most of the time I do,” she agreed. “Doesn’t make it less true tonight.”
We sat there. The house ticked around us. Somewhere upstairs a pipe knocked once and went quiet.
“You going somewhere?” she asked, eventually, nodding at the bag.
“I don’t know,” I said, and it was the first true thing I’d managed to say out loud all night. “I packed it. I got as far as here. Almost to the door.”
“But not through it.”
“No.”
She went quiet for a moment, like that answered something she’d been thinking about on the drive.
“Riley tell you what happened?” she asked.
“No. Price didn’t either. Brisco told me I wasn’t allowed to know, more or less, and then told me why.
I understood the why. I still hated it.” I looked at my hands.
“I keep telling myself it’s not the same as my father.
That this is different. Love keeping a door shut instead of control keeping it shut.
But sitting here at two in the morning I couldn’t make myself believe there’s actually a difference, and I didn’t know who to ask, because everyone I’d ask is on the other side of the same door. ”
Della was quiet for a while. When she spoke again her voice had dropped into a register I’d rarely heard from her. Not the commanding kitchen voice, not the loud, delighted one from Sunday dinners. Something quieter. Older.
“I sat on a step like this one myself,” she said. “More than forty years ago now. Different house. Same kind of night.”
I looked at her.
“Antonio came home at four in the morning once, first year we were married, with a busted lip and a story that had more holes in it than a screen door, and I did exactly what you did tonight. Packed a bag. Got as far as the porch.” She looked out at the dark yard.
“I sat out there until the sun came up, trying to decide if I’d married a man or a mystery, and somewhere around five o’clock I understood those weren’t actually different things.
Every man worth marrying is part mystery.
The question isn’t whether you get all of him.
The question is whether the part you don’t get is being kept from you out of love or out of contempt.
Those feel identical at two in the morning. They are not identical.”
“How did you know which one it was?”
“I didn’t,” she said. “Not that night. I found out over forty years, one Sunday at a time. You don’t get the answer in one sitting on one step.
Nobody does. I just decided that night that I’d rather spend forty years finding out than spend one night deciding I already knew.
” She glanced at me. “That’s the part nobody tells you when you’re young.
It’s not a decision you make once. It’s a decision you keep making.
I made it again the week he died, if you want to know the truth.
Furious at a man for leaving me with a bag I never got to unpack, after more than forty years of choosing him every single day.
Grief will make you want to run from a life the same as fear will.
They’re closer cousins than people let on. ”
I hadn’t expected that, and I hadn’t expected her, of all people, sitting on my step at two in the morning to hand me her own grief instead of taking mine off my hands.
“Do you still want to run from it?” I asked. “Now? Without him?”
She considered the question with more honesty than I’d braced for.
“Some mornings,” she said. “Not from the family. From the size of the house without him in it. From a bed that’s too big and a garage I can’t walk into without hearing him swear at a carburetor.
I don’t tell people that, because a woman my age isn’t supposed to still want things for herself, she’s supposed to want things for her children and her grandchildren and call it a life.
” She shook her head slowly. “That’s a lie people tell widows so we’ll sit still.
I want plenty. I want somebody to dance with me again before I’m too old for my hips to forgive me for it.
I want to see the ocean one more time, since Antonio never much cared for it and I gave that up along with a hundred other small things without ever once being asked to.
I’m not done wanting things, Alex. I just do most of my wanting quietly, at two in the morning, on somebody else’s front step, apparently.
” She almost smiled. “See. Now you know something about me nobody in that clubhouse knows. There’s a door on me too. Everybody’s got one.”
I put my head on her shoulder, and she let me. We sat like that for a while without talking.
“What do I do about the bag?” I asked.
“That’s not really the question you’re asking me,” she replied.
“No,” I admitted. “I guess it’s not.”
“You’re asking me if you’re the kind of woman who stays,” she said.
“And I can’t answer that one for you. Nobody can.
I can tell you what I know, which is that you drove years’ worth of desert highway to get back to this family the first time nobody made you do it.
A woman who leaves doesn’t do that. A woman who leaves finds the easier road.
” She put her hand over mine. “You didn’t come back here because it was simple, Alex.
You came back because it was true. Silence doesn’t undo true.
Not Riley’s, not your father’s, not mine, not even the years you spent not knowing you had a boy who needed you both.
True is still under all of it, waiting for you to be ready to stand on it again. ”
I sat with that for a long time, the desert going gray at the edges the way it does in the last hour before the sun actually commits to rising.
“I named something tonight,” I said quietly. “Something I never let myself call by its right name before.”
“I figured you might have,” Della said, gentle. “That’s usually what a night like this is actually about. The bag’s rarely the whole story.”
I didn’t explain further, and she didn’t ask, and I understood that not asking was its own kind of grace, the same grace Riley’s father had given me on a bleacher years ago, the same grace this whole family kept handing me at exactly the moments I most needed it and least expected it.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said, finally, and I felt the truth of it settle into my chest as I said it. Solid, decided, mine.
“I know,” Della said. “I’ve known since I pulled into the driveway.
I just needed you to know it too.” She patted my knee and stood, her joints creaking audibly in the pre-dawn quiet.
She held out a hand to pull me up off the step.
“Now. Are we going to sit out here until Riley wakes up and finds the both of us on these stairs, or are we going to go put that suitcase back where it belongs and make coffee before this family has to have a conversation before sunrise, which nobody in this house does very well?”
I let her pull me up.
We carried the bag back upstairs together, and I unpacked it while she made coffee. When Riley came down forty minutes later, still half asleep, he found the two of us at the kitchen table like it was any other morning.
He looked at Della, and then at me, and something passed between the three of us that didn’t need words.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
Della answered before I could.
“Everything’s fine.” She poured him a cup. “Sit down. Drink your coffee.”
He looked at me a moment longer.
I nodded, once, and meant it all the way through.
He sat down.