CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
Alex
Now
The clubhouse had mostly emptied by the time we drove home, Arthur asleep against the passenger window before we’d even reached the highway, worn out the specific way boys get worn out from a day spent being happy rather than busy.
Riley carried him in. I followed with the leftover plate Della had forced on us at the door, and by the time I came back downstairs he was on the back porch already with his boots off, looking at nothing in particular the way he did on nights that had asked something of him.
I sat down beside him.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Yeah.” He turned to face me. “Good day.”
“You called Jay twice a week for four months,” I said. “Before we were even engaged.”
He didn’t answer right away.
“Somebody told you that,” he said finally.
“Jay told me that.”
“Jay talks too much,” he said, but there was no heat in it. Just the embarrassment of a man caught being kinder than he’d meant anyone to notice.
“Why didn’t you say anything,” I asked. “All those months. You could have told me you were doing it.”
“I didn’t know yet if it would matter to you the way I hoped it would,” he said. “Didn’t want to give you something and watch you be polite about it. Easier to just do the thing quietly and let it land or not land on its own.” He looked at me. “It landed.”
“It landed,” I agreed.
The desert had gone all the way dark while we sat there, that complete, unlit dark that only exists far from anywhere else. Stars crowded in over the mountains like they had nowhere better to be. Somewhere out past the fence line a hawk called once and went quiet.
“When I got in the Jeep, I could smell it,” I said. “After everything. After the accident and the tarp and however many months it sat in Jay’s shop getting rebuilt from the frame up. It smelled exactly the same.” I shook my head slowly. “I don’t understand how that’s possible.”
“Some things don’t let go of what they are,” he said.
“Even wrecked. Even sitting under a tarp for a year not knowing if anybody was ever coming back for them.” He looked at me sideways, and I understood, the way I usually did with him a half second after he’d already said the real thing without announcing it as the real thing, that he wasn’t only talking about the Jeep.
“Is that why you fixed it,” I said. “Because you thought it was you.”
“Wasn’t thinking about myself when I started the calls,” he said.
“Was thinking about you, standing in a driveway in California looking at something you loved that got wrecked beyond repair, and driving away from it anyway because you didn’t think there was another option.
” He messed with his boots. “Then somewhere around month two I started thinking maybe it wasn’t only about the Jeep.
Maybe I just wanted to prove to both of us that wrecked doesn’t have to mean finished.
Frame’s still good under there. More often than not it just takes acre and time, and somebody got to be willing to put in both. ”
I reached over and took his hand. The one Jay had told me was busy making a hundred phone calls about a Jeep neither of us had spoken about in years, and held it the way you hold something you finally understand the full weight of.
“I love you,” I said. “I don’t think I say it enough in the actual words. I think I’ve been saying it in root beer and Sunday dinners and letting you teach our son to ride a motorcycle I was terrified of, and none of that’s wrong exactly, but I want you to have the actual words too.”
He looked at me for a long moment, something working behind his eyes the way it always did when a thing mattered enough to slow him all the way down.
“I love you too,” he said. “Have since I was young enough not to know what to do with it. Spent eleven years finding out the hard way that not saying it doesn’t make it go away. Just makes it wait.” He squeezed my hand. “Rather say it now. While we’ve got the chance.”
We sat with that for a while, the dark settling in around us, easy.
“Something’s been bothering me,” I said eventually.
“Yeah?”
“The night you came home covered in somebody else’s blood.
Months back now.” I felt him go a degree stiller beside me, not pulling away, just listening harder.
“I let it go because you asked me to, and because Brisco talked me down off it, and because it didn’t feel like a fight worth having every day.
But it never actually left me. I wasn’t trying to get into your business that night. I was scared, not knowing.”
He was quiet for a moment, the kind of quiet where I could feel him deciding something rather than avoiding it.
“Can’t give you all of it,” he said. “Not the where. Not the who.”
“It would help.”
“Payson. Sister club. Bartender was putting something in drinks. Somebody in the club’s sister.” His jaw worked once. “We handled it. I handled it. Volunteered, kind of.”
“Handled it how?”
“However it was needed.” He looked at me. “Women. Kids. People who can’t swing back. That line you don’t cross. Bartender crossed it.” He paused for a long moment. “Thought about you the whole ride there. About nobody showing up for you. That’s why I looked like that.”
I sat with that a while, turning it over slowly. The way he turned things over.
“I’m not going to pretend that makes it easy,” I said finally. “But it makes it make sense. That’s more than I had before tonight.”
“That’s all I’ve got room to give you,” he said. “Same as I told you then.”
“I know.” I found his hand again in the dark. “Thank you for giving me that much of it.”
He didn’t say anything else, but his hand tightened around mine. I understood, the way I usually did with him, that it was as far into that room as he was ever going to let me stand.
At that moment, it was enough.
We sat out there a long while after that, past the point where either of us had anything left to say. Just the two of us and the dark and the mountains and the quiet of a house that had finally, completely, stopped waiting for anything.
Inside, faintly, I could hear Martina moving through the kitchen.
The small domestic sounds of a house settling in for the night.
Arthur’s window was dark. The Jeep sat in the driveway where Riley had parked it, catching a thin line of moonlight along one clean fender, whole, home, exactly where it belonged.
I leaned my head against Riley’s shoulder.
He put his arm around me.
Neither of us said anything else.
Neither of us needed to.