Page 141 of Roadrunner

I sat in the quiet room for a long time.

Then I looked at the dress on the back of the door.

Then I looked at the shoes on the floor.

Then I looked at the ceiling with my hands in my lap and thought about a Jeep. About a desert. About a cloud of dust with a motorcycle coming through it.

About how you can spend years cataloguing the cost of a decision and never once account for what it made possible.

Arthur. Riley. This whole improbable, unplanned, better-than-anything-I-could-have-designed shape my life had ended up taking.

I turned off the light.

I went to sleep easily and completely, the way you do when you’ve finally arrived somewhere after a very long trip.

CHAPTER SIXTY

Alex

Now

The backyard at Della’s house looked like something she’d been planning since the beginning of time.

Which, I suspected, she had.

White lights strung between the posts along the fence. Simple. Hundreds of them. In the afternoon light they were almost invisible. When the sun dropped they would be everything. Flowers I didn’t know the names of in colors that were exactly right. Chairs arranged in two short sections with an aisle between them wide enough to walk through without the ceremony feeling like a performance.

An arch at the end. Wood. Simple. Della had wound something through it that was green and white and perfect.

I stood at the back door and looked at it.

Martina stood beside me.

“Well,” she said.

I smiled. “Yeah.”

She had nothing to add to that. Neither did I.

The guests arrived at four.

Not many. That was exactly right. The club occupied one side in their leather and a quality of collective stillness that I had always loved. Brisco had combed his hair, which I noted as a significant personal sacrifice. Lackey had a button down shirt under his vest. Price was Price. Unchanged and unchangeable and standing at the end of his row with his arms crossed and his hair pushed back.

Addy was somewhere in the house doing something Della had assigned her. I could hear her from the back door. Her voice carried.

My parents arrived at four fifteen.

I saw them from the open window I was peering through.

My father in a suit. My mother in a dress the color of the desert at dusk. They came through the side gate and looked around the yard with the careful attention of people in an unfamiliar place who are trying to orient themselves without appearing lost.

Della found them within thirty seconds.

I watched her cross the yard. I watched her take my mother’s hands in hers. I watched my mother’s shoulders drop slightly, the way shoulders drop when something tense releases. My father shook Della’s hand and she ignored it and hugged him instead and he stood with his arms slightly out for a moment and then put them around her.

Robert MacAfee arrived a few minutes after them, alone, in a gray suit that had probably cost more than the wedding. He stood at the side gate with the stillness of a man unsure whether he’d been fully or mostly forgiven for six weeks of silence.

Arthur saw him first.