Page 134 of Roadrunner

I said nothing. There was nothing to say that wouldn’t have sounded like an argument, and he had earned better than an argument from me.

He stood. He put money on the table, more than the bill could have been, the way a man does when his hands need something to do.

“I need to think. I’m not.” He paused. “I want to be fair to you, Alex. I’m not able to be fair to you today.”

“I understand.”

“I’ll call you,” he said. “When I can.”

He didn’t call for six weeks.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

Alex

Now

Arthur noticed before I said anything, because Arthur noticed everything.

“Grandpa Robert hasn’t called,” he said, the second Sunday it didn’t happen. Not upset. Just accurate, the way he reported most things.

“He’s busy,” I said. “The hospital thing.”

“He’s always busy,” Arthur said. “He calls anyway.”

I didn’t have an answer that wasn’t a lie, so I didn’t give him one. I told him I wasn’t sure, which was true, and he accepted it the way he accepted most things he suspected were bigger than what he was being told, which was to let it sit without pressing, and to watch me more carefully for a while after.

The third Sunday, he didn’t mention it at all. That was worse.

I didn’t tell Della and Riley’s family the specifics. I told Riley everything, every week, in the late-evening quiet where we’d taken to saying the hard things out loud because neither of us wanted to build a marriage on the kind of silence I’d built the last one on.

“He’ll come around,” Riley said, more than once. He didn’t sound certain. He sounded like a man saying a thing because his wife-to-be needed to hear it and because he’d decided, for her sake, to believe it until proven otherwise.

“You don’t know that.”

“No,” he agreed. “I don’t.”

“Then why say it?”

“Because the alternative is you sitting on this porch every night assuming the worst,” he said, “and I’d rather you borrow a little of my hope than none at all. You can give it back if it turns out I was wrong.”

I loved him so much in that moment that it was almost inconvenient, given that I was also furious at an old man in California and frightened for my son and generally unfit for tenderness. I took the hope anyway. It was the only currency either of us had.

Arthur, for his part, handled the silence with more grace than either of the adults around him managed. He didn’t ask about it again after that first Sunday, but I noticed him take a photograph down from his dresser one evening, Robert at the christening, holding Arthur as an infant with the stiff formality of a man unused to babies, and set it face-down in the top drawer instead. Not thrown away. Just put somewhere he didn’t have to look at it every morning. I found it there weeks later while putting away laundry and didn’t say anything, and I understood, holding it, that he’d found his own quiet way of protecting himself from a loss he hadn’t chosen and didn’t yet have language for.

I put the photograph back exactly where I’d found it and closed the drawer.

Six weeks and one day after the restaurant, a car I didn’t recognize turned into the driveway.

I was at the kitchen sink. I saw it through the window before I heard it. A rental sedan, moving at the careful speed of someone checking a mailbox number against a piece of paper on the passenger seat. It stopped. The driver’s door opened.

Robert MacAfee got out of it in a suit that looked like it had spent five hours on a plane and hadn’t recovered, older somehow than he’d looked across that restaurant table six weeks earlier, though nothing about him had changed except everything.

Riley was beside me at the window before I’d said a word.

“That the grandfather?”

“That’s the grandfather.”