CHAPTER SIXTY
Alex
Now
The backyard at Della’s house looked like something she’d been planning since the beginning of time.
Which, I suspected, she had.
White lights strung between the posts along the fence.
Simple. Hundreds of them. In the afternoon light they were almost invisible.
When the sun dropped they would be everything.
Flowers I didn’t know the names of in colors that were exactly right.
Chairs arranged in two short sections with an aisle between them wide enough to walk through without the ceremony feeling like a performance.
An arch at the end. Wood. Simple. Della had wound something through it that was green and white and perfect.
I stood at the back door and looked at it.
Martina stood beside me.
“Well,” she said.
I smiled. “Yeah.”
She had nothing to add to that. Neither did I.
The guests arrived at four.
Not many. That was exactly right. The club occupied one side in their leather and a quality of collective stillness that I had always loved.
Brisco had combed his hair, which I noted as a significant personal sacrifice.
Lackey had a button down shirt under his vest. Price was Price.
Unchanged and unchangeable and standing at the end of his row with his arms crossed and his hair pushed back.
Addy was somewhere in the house doing something Della had assigned her. I could hear her from the back door. Her voice carried.
My parents arrived at four fifteen.
I saw them from the open window I was peering through.
My father in a suit. My mother in a dress the color of the desert at dusk. They came through the side gate and looked around the yard with the careful attention of people in an unfamiliar place who are trying to orient themselves without appearing lost.
Della found them within thirty seconds.
I watched her cross the yard. I watched her take my mother’s hands in hers.
I watched my mother’s shoulders drop slightly, the way shoulders drop when something tense releases.
My father shook Della’s hand and she ignored it and hugged him instead and he stood with his arms slightly out for a moment and then put them around her.
Robert MacAfee arrived a few minutes after them, alone, in a gray suit that had probably cost more than the wedding. He stood at the side gate with the stillness of a man unsure whether he’d been fully or mostly forgiven for six weeks of silence.
Arthur saw him first.
He crossed the yard at something just short of a run, which was as close to running as an eleven-year-old with dignity to protect ever allowed himself in front of witnesses.
Robert MacAfee, a man who had built four hospitals and sat on more boards than I could name, crouched right there in Della’s yard in a suit that cost more than the wedding and hugged his grandson like a man afraid he may had lost the right to.
“You came,” Arthur said, muffled against his shoulder.
“I couldn’t miss this,” Robert said, looking around. “Or, miss seeing you.”
He straightened. He caught sight of me, with my face pinched between the partially open window and the frame. He inclined his head, just slightly, the way you’d acknowledge a debt you intended to keep paying for the rest of your life.
I pressed my hand against my mouth.
Martina appeared at my shoulder. “Come away from the window.”
“Just a minute.”
“Alex.”
“One minute.”
I watched Della walk my parents to their seats. My mother touched the flowers at the end of the row as she passed. My father held her chair.
I came away from the window.
Arthur was in the hallway.
He was in dark pants and a white shirt and a jacket that fit him correctly, which had required two trips to the store and Martina’s final authority on the matter. His hair was combed neatly. He looked older than eleven. He always had.
He looked at me.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Are you?”
He straightened his jacket. “I’ve been ready,” he said.
He offered me his arm.
Eleven years old. Offering his mother his arm.
I took it.
We went out the back door.
The white lights were doing what I’d known they would do. Everything else fell away and it was just light and the smell of the flowers and the desert evening coming on around the edges.
Everyone stood.
I didn’t look at the chairs. I looked at the end of the aisle.
Riley was there.
He was in dark jeans and a dark jacket and his vest, which was exactly right for the occasion.
His hair was freshly cut, and his face was cleanly shaven.
His hands were at his sides. He was looking at me the way he’d been looking at me since the back room of the clubhouse.
Directly. Without apology. Like a man who’d made his decision and settled into it.
His eyes dropped to Arthur.
Something moved through his face.
He pressed his lips together once.
Then he looked back at me.
Arthur walked me down the aisle at the pace of a boy who understood that some things deserved to be slow. The white lights were in the trees above us. Brisco made a sound when we passed his row that he covered with a cough that convinced no one. Lackey wasn’t trying to cover anything.
Price stood with his arms crossed and watched us come.
When we reached the end Arthur stopped.
Riley looked at him.
Arthur looked at Riley.
He took my hand and placed it in Riley’s.
He held on for an extra moment before he let go.
Then he stepped to Riley’s side and stood there.
I’ll admit I heard very little of what followed with any precision.
What I was aware of was Riley’s hand around mine and Arthur beside him and the white lights in the desert evening and the smell of leather and something warm inside of me that resembled the day I was eighteen years old standing atop Mount Lemmon.
I was aware of my mother in the front row.
She was crying.
My father had his arm around her.
I looked at them for a moment.
My father caught my eye.
He nodded.
Once. Firmly. The way men nod when they mean something completely.
I nodded back because I thought I should.
When it was time for the words I’d written I looked at Riley and said them.
I didn’t read them. I’d written them out and read them back to myself enough times that they lived in me rather than on paper.
I told him about a desert. About two flat tires and a cloud of dust and a man on a motorcycle who stopped when he didn’t have to.
I told him that I had been trying to find my way back to that afternoon for years and that I intended to spend every remaining afternoon making up for the ones I’d wasted.
I told him that Arthur standing beside him was the most right thing I had ever seen.
I told him I loved him. That I had always loved him. That there had never been a version of my life in which I didn’t.
He listened.
He held my hand and listened with the same focus he brought to everything that mattered.
Then it was his turn.
He looked at me for a moment before he started.
“I’m not going to say as much,” he said. “Because I don’t need to.” He held my gaze. “You came back. That’s everything. That’s the whole of it.” He paused. “And you brought my son. So, I’ve got everything to be grateful for.”
He looked back at me.
“I love you,” he said. “I always have. I always will.”
He said it the way he said everything.
Directly.
Without decoration.
Like it was simply true and required no embellishment to be what it was.
It didn’t.
Arthur produced the rings from his jacket pocket, which he patted twice before locating them. The club’s side laughed, and that broke whatever remaining tension was in the air.
He handed them over with great seriousness.
When the talking was over, Riley kissed me in the unhurried way of a man who had been waiting a long time and had no intention of rushing now that the waiting was over.
The club erupted.
Brisco’s air horn appeared from somewhere.
Della was laughing and crying simultaneously which was a combination only she could make look dignified.
My mother was still crying.
My father was on his feet.
Arthur stood beside Riley with his hands in his pockets and watched all of it with the expression of a boy who had expected exactly what had been delivered and was satisfied with the result.
Della’s kitchen that evening held every person I loved in the world.
All of them. In one room. Talking and laughing and reaching for the same dishes and telling stories that ran too long and nobody minding.
My mother was talking to Della. They were side by side at the counter. Della was explaining something about the rice and my mother was listening with genuine attention and handing things when asked.
My father was talking to Price.
I needed a moment with that. My father. And Price. In conversation. My father was doing the talking, which told me Price had asked a question, which told me Price was interested, which was its own remarkable event.
Brisco was feeding Addy’s children something from a plate. Both children were accepting it with the unquestioning appetite of people who had learned that Brisco offering food was not to be declined.
Robert MacAfee stood near the kitchen island with a glass of lemonade he’d been nursing for twenty minutes, watching all of it, the leather and the laughter and the noise of a family that didn’t share a drop of his blood, with the quiet of a man recalculating something he’d believed his whole life and finding he no longer minded the new number.
Della found him there. She didn’t say anything at first. She just refilled his lemonade from the pitcher on the counter, unasked. It was what she did for anyone in her kitchen that she decided belonged there.
“You’re the grandfather,” she said flatly.
“I am,” Robert said. “Or I’ve decided to go on being one, at any rate. It appears to be a decision I’m allowed to keep making.”
“It’s the only kind that counts,” Della said. “Believe me. I’ve made a family out of worse material than blood for thirty years and never once regretted the ones I chose over the ones I was given.”
Robert looked at her for a moment, and something in his face eased. It seemed to be the last of whatever he’d been carrying since a restaurant table and six weeks of silence.
“Arthur talks about you constantly,” he said. “Della this, Della that. I confess I was jealous of you for a while, from almost a thousand miles away.”
“You don’t have to be jealous,” Della said. “There’s room. That boy has more people who love him than he knows what to do with, and you’re one of them. That doesn’t change because of a piece of paper.”
“No,” Robert agreed. “I’ve come to understand that. Rather later than I’d like, but I got there.”
Della patted his arm once, businesslike, and moved off to check on something on the stove.
Robert stood by the island a while longer with his lemonade, watching his grandson laugh at something Lackey said, looking like a man who had gotten back everything that mattered.
Arthur was beside Riley.
They were talking to Lackey about something I couldn’t hear. Arthur said something and Lackey laughed and Riley glanced at Arthur with that look he had.
The look that was private and complete and needed no witnesses.
I watched it anyway.
Riley felt me watching.
He looked across the kitchen at me.
I raised a bottle of root beer.
He produced one that I didn’t know he was holding and raised it in a mock toast.
Across the noise and the warmth of that kitchen. Across every year and every mile and every version of us that had existed between being stranded in the desert and the room we were standing in.
Root beer.
The most us thing in the world.