CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
Alex
Now
Robert MacAfee called every other Sunday.
He had since the funeral. It wasn’t a schedule either of us had agreed to out loud.
It had simply become the shape of things, the way some arrangements do, without a conversation to mark their beginning.
He asked about school. He asked about the solar system project, and then, months later, remembered to ask how the grade had come back.
He sent a card for Arthur’s birthday with a check folded inside that was large enough to be its own kind of statement, and Arthur, with a tact he’d inherited from somewhere, always wrote him a thank-you note that mentioned the card and never the number.
I let it continue because Arthur was the only living piece of Joshua that Robert had left, and because Robert, for all his money and all his buildings with his family’s name on them, had never once used either to make me feel small.
He had held my hand at his son’s funeral and said nothing, which from a man like that was its own kind of grace.
I hadn’t told him about Arizona yet. About Riley. About any of it.
I was going to. I kept meaning to. There was never a version of the sentence that didn’t sound like an accusation, even when I built it as gently as I knew how.
I’d mentioned it to Della once, in passing, on a Sunday when the subject of Robert’s calls had come up over dishes. She’d gone quiet the way she went quiet when she had an opinion she was deciding whether to spend.
“You’re afraid of hurting him,” she’d said. Not a question.
“I’m afraid of a lot of things where he’s concerned.”
“He’s a grown man who buried his only son,” Della said.
“He can survive a hard conversation, Alex. What he can’t survive is finding out later that people around him were managing what he was and wasn’t allowed to know.
Men like that, men who’ve spent their whole lives being the one who delivers the bad news to everyone else, they know the difference between being protected and being handled.
They hate the second one a great deal more than the first.”
I’d turned that over for weeks without doing anything about it, which was, I understood now, its own kind of answer.
He called on a Tuesday, before I’d found the words.
“I want to talk to you about something,” he said, after the pleasantries, after asking about Arthur’s spelling test. “Nothing alarming. A practical matter.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I’ve had the foundation’s attorneys drawing up a trust,” he said.
“For Arthur. Education, primarily, though it extends beyond that if he wants it to. I’d like it finalized before the end of the year.
” A pause, brief and businesslike, the pause of a man who had delivered difficult diagnoses to boards of directors his whole career and had learned to leave room after them.
“They’ll need some documentation from you.
Birth certificate. That sort of thing. Formalities. ”
I sat down at the kitchen table.
“Robert,” I said.
“It’s not complicated,” he said. “It’s paperwork.”
“I know,” I said. “I know it’s paperwork.”
Something in my voice must have reached him, because he went quiet in a way that wasn’t like him.
“Alex,” he said. “Is something wrong?”
I looked at the notebook, which had not left the drawer of my nightstand since Arizona, since I’d finally shown it, all of it, to Riley and Della and Arthur at a kitchen table that wasn’t this one. I thought about the number on the lab report. Ninety-nine point nine nine nine eight percent.
I thought about a man who built hospitals telling his attorneys to prepare a trust for a grandson who was not, in the strictest and cruelest sense of the word, be his family at all.
“Nothing’s wrong,” I said. “I’ll get you the paperwork.”
I hated myself a little, saying it. Not enough to stop.
I told Riley that night.
We were on the back porch, the way we were most nights that year, the desert doing its long slow fade from orange to purple to the deep, complete dark it did nowhere else I’d ever lived.
He listened to the whole thing without interrupting, which was his way, and when I finished he sat for a while with his forearms on his knees, looking at the mountains.
“You’re going to tell him,” he said. It was a statement in the clearest sense.
“I don’t know.”
“You already know,” Riley said. “You wouldn’t have brought it out here otherwise.”
He wasn’t wrong, and I resented him a little for being right, and I sat with the resentment because it was easier than sitting with the fear underneath it.
“He’s an old man who just buried his only son,” I said. “If I tell him, I take the only thing he’s got left of Joshua and I tell him it was never really his to begin with.”
“And if you don’t tell him, you let him sign a trust for a boy he thinks is his blood, on paper, forever, based on a lie you’d be the one keeping.” Riley’s jaw worked once. “That sit any easier?”
“No.”
“Then there’s no easy version,” he said. “There’s just the honest one and the other one.”
I looked at him. Something hard had come into his face, something I recognized from years ago, from a bedroom doorway with a gun in his hand and my father standing in it.
“You’re angry,” I said.
“I’m not angry at you.”
“At him?”
“At the position,” Riley said. “At a rich man who gets to hand out trust funds and call it love and never once has to sit in a room and wonder if the kid he’s handing it to is really his to love in the first place.
” He exhaled, long and controlled, the way he did when he was working to keep something from getting away from him.
“That’s not fair to him. I know that. I’m saying it anyway. ”
“He held my hand at the funeral,” I said quietly. “He didn’t have to do that.”
“I know.”
“He’s not a villain, Riley.”
“I know that too.” He looked at me. “Doesn’t mean it won’t cost you something to be honest with him. Doesn’t mean it won’t cost Arthur something. I’d just rather it cost us now, honestly, than cost us later, when he finds out some other way and wonders what else you decided he didn’t need to know.”
I was not going to do that again. Not to Robert. Not to anyone.
“I’ll call him Friday,” I said.
“Want me there?”
“No,” I said. “This one’s mine to do.”
He nodded, and didn’t argue it, which was its own kind of support.
I flew to California instead of calling. Some things don’t belong on a telephone, and this was one of them, and I understood by then that I owed Robert MacAfee better than a phone call for something this large.
He met me at a restaurant I didn’t recognize, near the hospital that carried his name on a bronze plaque the size of a door. He stood when I came in, the way men of his generation still did, and he looked, for the first time since I’d known him, uncertain.
“You didn’t come all this way for paperwork,” he said.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t.”
I told him. The hotel I didn’t remember. The notebook in the locked drawer. The DNA result that had come back, eleven years too late, at 99.9998 percent. Arthur wasn’t Joshua’s.
I watched a man who had spent forty years delivering hard truths to other people receive one of his own.
He didn’t say anything for a long time. He looked at the table. He looked at his hands, which were spotted with age and folded very carefully in front of him, like a man holding something together by force of posture alone.
“I feel as though our relationship started with a lie,” I said. “A night in a hotel I’ll never remember. Or fully understand.”
Shame washed over him. “He never told me.”
“I’m telling you now because you’re setting up a trust based on something that isn’t true, and I couldn’t let you do that without knowing.”
Robert MacAfee looked at me with an expression I had never seen on him, not even at the funeral, not even in the hospital hallway with a tube in his son’s throat.
“The test says what it says.”
He looked past me like Arthur might be in the doorway.
“I loved him every other Sunday. That part doesn’t change because a lab learned how to spell.”
I said nothing. There was nothing to say that wouldn’t have sounded like an argument, and he had earned better than an argument from me.
He stood. He put money on the table, more than the bill could have been, the way a man does when his hands need something to do.
“I need to think. I’m not.” He paused. “I want to be fair to you, Alex. I’m not able to be fair to you today.”
“I understand.”
“I’ll call you,” he said. “When I can.”
He didn’t call for six weeks.