Page 139 of Roadrunner

“Alex—”

“I need to ask you something,” I said, “and I need you to answer it honestly, because I have never once asked it out loud and I am not having you play any part of me walking down an aisle in three weeks without asking it first.” I made myself look at him. “Did you know? That night? Did you know what it was going to be, or what it already was by the time Joshua had me in that car?”

He opened his mouth. Nothing came out of it for a long moment.

Upstairs, a door opened. My mother’s footsteps started toward the stairs.

I didn’t wait for his answer. I picked up my keys off the counter and told him we’d be late for Della’s. Neither of us mentioned the question again during the entire car ride. I felt the question sitting in the back seat with him the whole way there, patient, taking up exactly as much room as it needed to.

I did not get the answer.

I decided that was the answer I was going to live with.

I took them to Della’s for dinner that first night, which Riley had suggested and which I’d resisted for exactly four seconds before agreeing. He was right, because if my parents were going to understand anything my life they needed to see it, not just hear about it over a handful of stilted phone calls.

My father stood in Della’s kitchen looking, for the first time in my adult life, genuinely out of his depth.

He was a man who ran boardrooms.

He did not know what to do with Brisco’s laugh, or Lackey’s vest, or the particular ease with which Della handed him a plate and told him to sit down before he’d said a word about wanting one.

He sat down.

I watched him across the table for most of that dinner, half braced for the version of him that had sat at my kitchen table years before and asked what kind of man I envisioned marrying. The man who’d wanted a title and a country club membership standing in Riley’s place. That man didn’t show up. Instead, I watched my father listen, actually listen, while Riley told a story about a fire and a community center and a roof budget that had run short twice.

At the end of it my father said, that’s admirable work, and meant it. Riley said thank you, and something in the room settled that I hadn’t known was still unsettled.

Arthur held court between them like he’d been doing it his whole life, which in a sense he had. He told my father about the motorcycle build with the specific technical pride of a boy who’d earned every detail, and my father, who had never once, in years, asked Arthur a question about anything mechanical, asked three follow-up questions in a row, and Arthur answered every one of them like he’d been waiting for someone to ask.

Later, after Della had shooed everyone but me and my father out to the porch for coffee, he sat across from me in the dark with his cup untouched in his hands for a long time before he spoke.

“You asked me a question this afternoon,” he said. “In your kitchen. And I didn’t answer it, because I didn’t have an answer prepared, which is the first time in my life I can remember not having one, and it frightened me considerably more than I let on at the time.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I do,” he interrupted. “I spent the whole drive here deciding how to say this so it doesn’t sound like a man building himself an excuse, and I don’t believe there’s a way to do that. So I’m going to tell you the plain version and let you decide what it makes me.”

I said nothing. I made myself hold still and let him get to it.

“I didn’t hand Joshua MacAfee a glass and hope for my daughter to be blacked-out drunk,” he said. “I want you to hear that first, because it’s true. But I noticed you, at the end of that dinner. You weren’t yourself. Your words were coming slow, and you’d stopped tracking the conversation somewhere in the second hour, and when Joshua helped you into the car, you didn’t seem entirely aware you were being helped.” He turned the cup once in his hands, not drinking from it. “It wasn’t an accident of ignorance. It was a decision, made in about four seconds, standing on a curb, because asking a hard question of a man whose family I very much wanted attached to ours was inconvenient to me. So I put you in the car, and I went home, and I didn’t ask.”

“Dad.”

“Let me finish this part. I don’t think I’ll manage it twice.” He was looking out at the yard, not at me. “When you came to us months later, frightened and pregnant, and told us the baby was Joshua’s, some part of me that I am deeply ashamed to describe to you now, was relieved. Not happy. Relieved. Because a marriage was a tidy explanation for a night I had already decided not to examine too closely, and once you were his wife, the question I hadn’t asked myself at the curb could stay unasked forever. I let a wedding answer a question I was afraid to ask myself. That is the truest thing I have ever told you, and I expect it’s the ugliest.”

I felt something moving through my chest that wasn’t quite the fury I’d carried into the house eight hours earlier.

It was heavier than that.

Older.

“And then,” he continued, “once you were handled, as you said this afternoon, I let myself believe my job as your father was finished. That was its own decision too, made slowly over the better part of a decade instead of in four seconds on a curb, but it was the same decision, really. It is a great deal easier to stay away from a daughter than to sit across from her and wonder what you missed, or chose not to see, on a night you’ve spent twenty years arranging not to think about.”

“You could have asked me. Any time in those ten years.”

“I could have,” he said. “I told myself you didn’t want me to. That was also a story I built, because the true one was unbearable to me. I’m not going to sit on this porch and tell you it was for your benefit. It was for mine. I have been protecting myself from what asking might cost me since before Arthur was born, and I let you carry the whole weight of that protection alone for twenty years. I don’t have sufficient language to say how sorry I am for that. I don’t think language of that size exists.”

He paused, waiting for me to speak.