Page 111 of Roadrunner

He was quiet for a long moment, and when he spoke again his voice had changed, gone rougher at the edges. “I keep doing the math,” he said. “Eleven. Every birthday I didn’t know to mark. Every first day of school. Every time he was sick, or scared, or needed somebody to explain something to him and there wasn’t a father in the room to do it.” He shook his head slowly. “I taught that boy to ride a motorcycle on Saturdays and taught him a hundred other things besides, and every single time some part of me thought, I wonder what it would have been like to do this from the beginning. I didn’t let myself finish that thought. Guess I know now why I kept having it.”

“Riley—”

“I’m not saying it to hurt you,” he said, before I could apologize again. “I’m saying it because it’s true and I’ve been carrying it quietly for about four minutes now and I needed to say at least one true thing about it out loud before I figure out what to do with the rest.”

He looked at the mountains.

“How do we tell him?” he asked.

“I want to tell him the truth,” I said. “All of it. Whatever he’s old enough to understand.”

Riley nodded slowly. “When?”

“Sunday,” I said. “At Della’s.”

He was quiet.

“He should hear it there,” I said. “With her. In that house.” I looked at the yard. “It’s the right place.”

He thought about it. “Okay,” he said.

We sat on the porch for a long time after that.

He didn’t reach for my hand. I didn’t reach for his. We just sat in the quiet desert evening with the weight of it between us. Not uncomfortably. Just honestly.

Some things you have to sit with before you can move through them.

So we sat with it, his shoulder an inch from mine, until the sky over the yard went that deep, bruised color it turns right before the stars come out, and neither of us said another word, because none was needed yet.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Alex

Now

Riley didn’t come home the next day.

I told myself that meant nothing. He had a business to run, a shop full of motorcycles that didn’t fix themselves, a life that existed independently of me even now, even sharing a roof. I told myself this while checking my phone every twenty minutes, which is its own kind of answer.

He didn’t call. He didn’t text. By nine that night I’d stopped pretending to myself that I wasn’t afraid, and started being afraid outright, in the specific, familiar shape of a fear I recognized because I’d caused its exact twin once, a long time ago, to somebody else.

I called the shop. No one answered after hours. I called Price, who said, carefully, that he’d seen Riley earlier and Riley had said he needed a night to think. When I asked where he was now, Price went quiet a bit too long before he said he didn’t know, and the not-knowing in his voice did nothing to make mine any easier.

I didn’t sleep. I lay in the dark running through every version of the next morning, the ones where he came back and the ones where years turned out to run in both directions, and understood, somewhere around three in the morning, that I had absolutely no standing to ask a man not to disappear on me for a night, having once disappeared on him for years without so much as a note. That didn’t make the waiting easier. It only made it feel, cruelly, fair.

He called at seven the next morning. His voice was rough, like he hadn’t slept either. “I’m okay,” he said, before I could ask. “I needed to not be anywhere near people last night. I should have told you that instead of just going quiet. That wasn’t fair to you.”

I sat down hard on the edge of the bed, more relief in my legs than I’d expected. “Where were you?”

“Drove out past the Tortolitas and sat on my tailgate for about six hours,” he said. “Didn’t do anything dramatic. Just needed the quiet.”

He didn’t come home that day either. He called to say he’d crashed at the shop. Easier than driving back at midnight, he said, which might even have been true.

After the night before, it felt like something closer to relief than absence.

He texted. Short. Working late. Talk soon. Nothing in it I could point to as wrong, and nothing in it that sounded like him, either. Riley had never in his life texted me a sentence that could have been sent to anyone.

By the third day I drove to the shop.