CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
Alex
Now
The night before the wedding Arthur knocked on my bedroom door.
“Come in,” I said.
He came in and sat on the edge of the bed the way he had since he was small. He looked at the dress hanging on the back of the door. At the shoes on the floor beneath it.
“You nervous?” he asked.
“No.”
He looked at me.
“A little,” I admitted.
“Riley isn’t,” he said. “I asked him.”
“When did you ask him?”
“This afternoon. We were in the garage.”
I laughed. “Where else would you be?”
He looked at his hands. “He said the only thing he’s ever been nervous about in his life was whether you were going to come back.”
I looked at him.
“He said once you came back there was nothing left to be nervous about,” Arthur said. He looked up. “I thought you’d want to know that.”
I pressed my lips together. “Thanks, bud.”
He stood up. He looked at the dress one more time. “It’s a good dress.”
“Thank you.”
He went to the door. He stopped with his hand on the frame. He turned back. “Mom?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m glad you went to Arizona. The first time. When you were nineteen.” He looked at the floor, the way he did when a thing mattered enough that looking at me while he said it felt like too much. “Two flat tires and everything.”
I stared at him.
“Because if you didn’t,” he said, “you wouldn’t have met him.” He shrugged one shoulder, quick, like he wanted the sentence over with. “And then there wouldn’t be me.” Another shrug. “I don’t know. Good thing, I guess.”
He went to bed.
I sat in the quiet room for a long time.
Then I looked at the dress on the back of the door.
Then I looked at the shoes on the floor.
Then I looked at the ceiling with my hands in my lap and thought about a Jeep. About a desert. About a cloud of dust with a motorcycle coming through it.
About how you can spend years cataloguing the cost of a decision and never once account for what it made possible.
Arthur. Riley. This whole improbable, unplanned, better-than-anything-I-could-have-designed shape my life had ended up taking.
I turned off the light.
I went to sleep easily and completely, the way you do when you’ve finally arrived somewhere after a very long trip.