Page 109 of Roadrunner

“Come in,” she said. Quieter than usual.

We sat at her kitchen table. The same table.

I didn’t make her wait.

“Arthur is Riley’s son,” I said. “99.9998 percent. The lab results came this morning.”

Della went very still.

Then she smiled. Small and steady, and not at all convincing.

“I know,” she said. “I’ve known for a while now, if we’re being honest. I have my ways. Felt it that first Sunday, same as I feel rain before the sky’s decided on it.” She folded her hands on the table, prim and composed, a woman delivering a piece of news she’d rehearsed for exactly this moment. “Some of us just know things, Alex. Runs in my mother’s side.”

I looked at her.

She looked back, chin up, holding the performance together by will alone.

It lasted about four seconds.

Then her chin dropped, and her hand came up to her mouth. Eleven years came out of her all at once. Nothing composed about it now. Nothing steady, nothing like the woman who’d just told me she’d always known.

She put both hands over her face. Her shoulders drooped, and the sound she made wasn’t the sharp involuntary thing from the kitchen on Sunday. It was something that had been held down with both hands for month.

She could no longer hold it.

I thought, absurdly, of Antonio’s obituary, still sitting somewhere in my phone months after I’d first read it. Three grandchildren, it had said, when the only ones anyone could account for were two. I’d told myself it was a printing error. Sitting in this kitchen now, I understood it hadn’t been. Some part of this family had known long before a lab confirmed it. The same instinct that had gone still over a ceramic roadrunner, the same instinct, maybe, that had once made an old man count a boy nobody had officially claimed yet.

I got up and went around the table and put my arms around her.

“I used to look at him on Sundays,” she said into my shoulder, “and think, there ought to have been more of you in this world by now. And there was. There was, the whole time, in another state. I didn’t know to go looking, and neither did you, and none of that gives years back.”

“I know,” I said.

“I’m not angry at you,” she said. “I need you to hear that clearly, because I can feel myself wanting to be angry at somebody and you’re the only one in the room.”

“You can be angry at me a little,” I said. “I’d survive it.”

“No,” she said, pulling back enough to look at me, her face wet and undone now, all the premonitions and probably-knew-it-all gone out of her. “I’m not angry at you. I’m angry at time. I don’t get those years back no matter who I forgive.” She wiped her face with the back of one hand, brisk and no-nonsense, a gesture that didn’t match the rest of her at all just then. “So we don’t waste any more of the ones still coming. Understood?”

“Understood,” I said.

She held onto me a while longer, and I let her. The kitchen was quiet except for the sound of a woman finally putting down something she’d been carrying alone since a Sunday months before, back when a boy picked up a ceramic roadrunner with his toes and she’d known, the way she knew rain, before either of us said a word.

“He doesn’t know yet,” I said, once she’d sat back and pressed a dish towel to her face with the briskness of a woman reclaiming her composure on purpose. “Riley. I need to be the one to tell him.”

“Of course,” she said.

“And Arthur needs to hear it first,” I said. “Before anyone else. Except Riley, of course.”

“Yes,” she said. “Tell Riley. Bring Arthur here. We’ll do it together.”

Together.

That word again. Applied by this woman to everything that mattered.

“Okay,” I said. “Sunday.”

I told Riley that evening.