Page 128 of Roadrunner

“I don’t like this,” I said.

“I know you don’t.”

“I’ve spent my whole life being told I didn’t need to know things,” I said, and I heard my own voice climb somewhere I hadn’t given it permission to go. “My father did that. Joshua did that, without even telling me there was something to know. I promised myself a long time ago I wasn’t going to build a life with someone who kept me on the outside of my own house.”

Riley didn’t flinch from that, which I gave him credit for later, once I’d had time to be less angry about all of it.

“That’s fair,” he said. “And I hear it. But there’s a difference between a man hiding something because he thinks you can’t handle it, and a man not telling you something because it was never his to tell in the first place.” He turned his hand over, palm up, the same gesture from the porch the night he’d proposed, when he’d had nothing else to offer. “I’m not hiding anything. I’m keeping something that belongs to other people. Those aren’t the same thing, even if they look the same from your side of the table tonight.”

I wanted to argue with him. I sat there working up the argument, and somewhere in the middle of building it I understood I didn’t actually have one, not one that held up, and that made it worse instead of better.

“Go to bed,” I said finally. “I need to think.”

He didn’t push. He kissed the top of my head on his way past, careful with his split hand, and I sat at the table a long time after I heard the bedroom door close, looking at nothing, the porch light throwing a small yellow square across the floor.

I drove to the shop the next morning before I’d decided to.

Price was in the back bay with a bike in pieces around him, and he looked up when I came in with an expression that told me he already knew exactly why I was there before I said a word.

“Morning,” he said.

“What happened last night.”

He wiped his hands on a rag, slowly, the way men in this world did most things when they wanted a task to hide behind. “You’ll have to ask Riley that.”

“I did ask Riley that.”

“Then you got your answer,” Price said. Not unkindly. Just final, the way a door is final once it’s shut all the way.

“Price.”

“Alex.” He set the rag down and looked at me directly, and for a moment I saw something almost gentle underneath the wall of him. “I’ve known that man since he was a kid. Twenty years. I’d take a bullet for him and he knows it and I know it, and there are still things I don’t know about some of what happens in this club, because that’s not weakness, that’s how you keep something like this alive longer than any one of us.” He picked the rag back up. “You want in, you’re going to have to want in on those terms. Not because we don’t trust you. Because trust isn’t the same thing as access. Never has been.”

I stood there a while longer, not because I thought he’d say anything else, but because leaving felt like agreeing to something I hadn’t agreed to yet.

I found Brisco at the clubhouse that afternoon, sitting alone at the picnic table out back with a coffee going cold in front of him, and something in the stillness of him told me he’d been expecting me too, in the way that everyone in this family always seemed to be expecting whatever was coming a half step before it arrived.

“Sit,” he said, without looking up.

I sat.

“He tell you anything?” Brisco asked.

“Not really.”

“Good,” he said, and when I looked at him sharply he held up a hand, not unkindly. “Not good like I’m glad you’re hurting. Good like he did right by all of us, including you, even if it doesn’t feel that way from where you’re sitting.”

“Everybody keeps telling me that. Doing right by everyone except me.”

Brisco turned his coffee cup a quarter turn on the table, considering that.

“Let me tell you something about this family,” he said, “since you’re about to marry into it for real, and you deserve better than a stranger’s version of the truth.” He looked at me. “You’ve been part of this for a while now. You’ve had Sunday dinners at Della’s table more times than you can count. You’ve seen bikes get built and buried, weddings and funerals, more love in one clubhouse than most people find in their whole lives.” He paused. “And in all that time, has anybody ever actually lied to you? Not left something out. Lied.”

I thought about it honestly, because he’d asked honestly, and I owed him that.

“No,” I said. “Not that I know of.”

“That’s the whole point,” he said. “You see what we want you to see, Alex. Everybody who loves you decides that, every single day, about every single thing. Your mother decided what you needed to know about your own family for twenty years, Joshua decided it about a boy who calls me uncle now, hell, you’ve decided it about things too, don’t tell me you haven’t. The question was never going to be whether people you love keep things from you. Every person alive does that, every day, out of love or fear or both. The question is whether what they’re showing you is true.” He held my gaze, steady. “Last night was true. Nobody got killed. Nobody’s in trouble that can touch this family. Riley came home to you instead of somewhere worse, which is not nothing, and you sat across a table from a man who came home to you covered in somebody else’s blood and still had the sense to shower before he let you see the rest of it, because he didn’t want to scare you worse than the truth already would have.” He shrugged, unhurried. “That’s not a man keeping you outside your own house. That’s a man deciding what a house is for.”