Page 123 of Roadrunner

He followed, long after I was done, biting his lip and making a face the entire while. We stayed there, pressed against one another, until the wall was just a wall again.

We made it to the bed after.

I lay against his chest and listened to his heart. Grease still at the edge of my jaw.

I left it.

A moment later, I cried.

Not the complicated kind. Not the kind tangled up with regret and guilt and all the weight of what had been done and left undone.

The other kind.

The kind that comes when something that was broken for a very long time is finally, completely whole.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

Alex

Now

Nothing marked the evening as different from any other, a Tuesday in May, if it needed a name. Arthur was at the kitchen table with his homework. Martina was doing what she did in the evenings. The house smelled like whatever she’d made for dinner, which had been excellent and was now mostly gone.

Riley was on the back porch.

I joined him.

He had a root beer. He’d started keeping them in the refrigerator again without announcing it. I’d noticed and said nothing because some things didn’t require acknowledgment.

They just required noticing.

I sat beside him.

The desert evening was warm. The sky was going through its sequence. Orange at the horizon. Purple above that. The first stars appearing above the mountain line one at a time the way they always did.

We sat.

“Arthur passed his math test,” I said.

“He told me,” Riley said.

“When?”

“Called me this afternoon,” he said. “From school.”

I looked at him. “He called you from school.”

“During lunch,” he said. “He wanted to tell me.”

I looked at the mountains.

Our son had called Riley from school during lunch to tell him about a math test.

I sat with that.

“He’s never done that before,” I said. “Called someone to share good news.”

Riley drank his root beer.