CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
Alex
Now
Friday.
Pizza box on the coffee table like it had always lived there.
Arthur claimed the left end of the couch the way he claimed everything now. As if the furniture had been waiting for his exact length.
Riley took the middle.
I took the rest and the extra heat that didn’t belong to the room.
The movie was something with explosions that explained themselves.
Nobody asked what it was called.
Arthur narrated anyway.
“That’s not how guns work,” he said.
“It’s a movie,” Riley said.
“It’s still not how guns work. He shot 41 times. I counted. He has a 30-round magazine.”
Riley passed him the remote without looking.
Arthur didn’t change it.
He just wanted it known.
I shifted.
The back of my neck was damp.
January in Tucson was not supposed to feel like August in a closed Jeep, and my body had stopped taking instruction from the calendar.
I blamed the blanket.
Then I kicked the blanket off.
Riley’s hand found my ankle.
Not a question.
A check. “You want the window?”
“I want the planet to drop ten degrees.”
Arthur glanced over.
He had the look he got when he was adding things up and pretending he wasn’t.
“Ginger ale’s in the fridge,” he said.
I hadn’t asked.
He had been paying attention since the humming.
I went and got it.
The can was so cold it hurt my palm, which was the first honest temperature I’d felt in an hour.
When I came back they had left my spot the shape of me.
The gunshots kept arriving on schedule.
Riley laughed once, low, at something that wasn’t that funny.
Arthur’s foot tapped the table until Riley looked at it.
Arthur moved the foot.
Not because he was afraid.
Because the rule existed and he lived here.
I drank the ginger ale and watched them instead of the movie.
Martina passed through with a basket of laundry and did not comment, which was how Martina blessed a room.
I could have named what I was looking at.
I had named a lot of things in my life that would have been better left to the body.
A boy who corrected gunfire.
A man who passed the remote and kept his hand on my ankle like a fact.
A house that did not require me to perform gratitude in order to be allowed inside it.
My parents were probably somewhere with a view.
They usually were.
The view in front of me was a paused frame of a gun that shouldn’t fire and two profiles I knew better than any coastline.
I set the can down.
Riley’s thumb moved once against my ankle bone.
Arthur said, “See? That’s not how guns work.”
“Noted,” Riley said.
I closed my eyes for a second.
The baby was still mostly an idea with a pulse.
The rest of it was already here.
I didn’t need a speech for that.
I needed Friday.
I needed the movie to keep being mediocre.
I needed not to miss it by explaining it.