Page 60 of Roadrunner

One evening after Arthur was in bed, Martina found me in the kitchen.

“He’s doing well,” she said.

“Arthur?” I poured a glass of water I didn’t want. “He’s too careful.”

“Yes,” she agreed.

“He shouldn’t have to be careful,” I said. “He’s young.”

She said nothing. She didn’t need to.

I set the glass down. “I keep waiting for this house to feel different.”

“Different how.”

“Like a thing ended,” I said. “It has. He’s gone. The days still look the same.”

She was quiet.

“I can’t go anywhere,” I said. “Arthur needs the days to look the same a little longer.”

I looked at her.

She looked back. And waited.

“I don’t know why I feel so little,” I said. “That’s the part I can’t say out loud anywhere else.”

“You are a decent person,” she said.

“I don’t know what I want,” I said.

“I know.”

“I keep waiting to feel something that makes sense.”

Martina folded the dish towel and set it on the counter. “One thing at a time,” she said.

I nodded.

One thing at a time.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Alex

Now

The grief was shallow.

I’ve felt worse about things that mattered less. I recognized that about myself and didn’t examine it too closely.

I did what was required. The arrangements. The service. The reception afterward at the house, where people I barely knew stood in my living room and said kind things about a man they’d known in a context I hadn’t been part of.

The service itself was well attended, in the specific way that a man’s professional life attends his funeral more thoroughly than his personal one ever managed to. Colleagues from the firm. Men from the country club who spoke about his golf handicap with more genuine emotion than anyone spoke about his marriage. A pastor who had clearly been briefed on the basics and delivered them competently, calling Joshua a devoted husband and father in a tone that suggested he’d used the same words at a dozen funerals for a dozen men he’d never actually met.

I sat in the front pew with Arthur’s hand in mine and listened to strangers describe a man I recognized only in fragments, and I wondered, not for the first time, how much of any life is visible only from certain angles, and whether anyone at my own funeral would someday struggle the same way to reconcile the versions.

His father, Robert MacAfee, held my hand for a long time without speaking.