Page 154 of Roadrunner

Then he set it back on the rail.

He looked at the mountains.

“I know when,” he said.

“Same.”

He was quiet.

I watched his face.

He took a moment to absorb it all before he responded to any part of it.

Then he exhaled.

Long and slow and from somewhere deep.

He reached over without looking at me and put his hand over mine on the arm of the chair.

I turned my hand over and held his.

We sat there.

The desert morning was warm. The saguaro was doing its thing at the back fence. The mountains were blue at the edges. A roadrunner moved through the scrub at the far side of the yard with the purposeful efficiency of an animal that had somewhere to be.

“Arthur’s going to have something to say about this,” he said.

“Arthur’s going to be delighted,” I said.

“He’s going to have something to say about it anyway.”

I laughed.

He squeezed my hand.

“Are you scared?” I asked him.

I wanted the honest answer and not the comfortable one.

He thought about it, the way he thought about everything. Unhurried.

“A little,” he said. “Not of the baby. Of getting it wrong somehow. I missed years of practice with Arthur without knowing I was supposed to be practicing.” He looked at his hands. “This one I get from day one. I don’t want to waste a single part of it being scared instead of just being there.”

“You won’t waste it.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do,” I said. “I’ve watched you not waste a single Saturday with Arthur since the day you met him. You don’t have it in you to waste this.”

He looked at me for a long moment, something working behind his eyes that he eventually let surface. “Okay,” he said, simply, the way he said most things once he’d decided to believe them.

We sat on the porch and drank our coffee and said very little and needed to say very little and the morning went on around us, being exactly what it was.

We told Arthur that evening at dinner.

Martina already knew. She’d found the test in the bathroom trash and appeared in the kitchen doorway while I was making lunch with an expression that required no words and received none.

She’d hugged me.