Page 63 of Roadrunner

I turned onto North Silverbell.

The building was there. Updated, as the photographs had suggested. New signage. The parking lot repaved and expanded. But the bones of it were the same. The same low roofline. The same position relative to the road. The same cluster of motorcycles along the front.

I drove past without slowing.

Went two blocks further. Turned around in a parking lot.

Drove past again.

This time I slowed enough to see the bikes properly. Six of them. Seven.

No one was outside.

I kept driving.

Lather, rinse, repeat, for two days.

I wasn’t proud of it. Driving past. Turning around. Driving past again. Parking across the street and down half a block and sitting with the engine off and telling myself I was building courage when what I was actually doing was losing it, incrementally, with each pass.

On the first day I saw Brisco.

He came out the front door at half past two in the afternoon and stood in the parking lot with a coffee cup and looked at the sky. He was older. His hair had gone gray. But the way he stood was exactly the same. Like a man who had never once been uncertain about where he was.

I slouched in the seat like a criminal.

He finished his coffee, looked at the sky a moment longer, and went back inside.

I sat there a while longer after he’d gone in, engine off, windows cracked against the heat. I let myself catalogue the parking lot the way I used to when it was mine to catalogue. The same faded yellow line dividing the same twelve spaces. The same dented dumpster around the side, repositioned maybe a foot from where I remembered it. A wind chime someone had hung from the eave by the side door, new, catching the light every few seconds and doing nothing at all in the still afternoon air. Small, meaningless details that had no business meaning anything, and meant everything anyway, because they were evidence that this place had kept existing without me in it, running its own quiet life while I ran mine in another state.

I ate lunch alone that first day at a diner two miles down the road, a different one than the one Riley and I used to go to, because I wasn’t ready yet to find out whether the old one was still standing. I ordered a chilidog out of some reflex I didn’t examine too closely and ate exactly half of it. I drove back to the hotel with the windows down, letting the desert air do what it had always done to me, which was make me feel like I was finally breathing correctly after a long time of forgetting how.

On the second day I saw Lackey.

He walked out with another man I didn’t recognize and they stood beside a bike in the parking lot talking about something. Lackey did most of the talking, which had always been true. His hands moved the way they always had, wide and emphatic.

I watched from across the street.

I felt ridiculous.

I also didn’t leave.

At one point that second afternoon, Della’s minivan pulled into the lot. I recognized it before I let myself admit I recognized it, the same dent in the rear bumper from an incident involving Brisco and a shopping cart that I remembered being told about in exhaustive detail years ago. She went inside carrying two grocery bags balanced against one hip with the exact competence of a woman who had been doing this specific task for three decades. She came back out twenty minutes later without the bags, paused at her car door, and looked, for one long moment, directly across the street.

I froze.

I don’t think she saw me. The sun was behind me and the glass was tinted and I was, by any reasonable measure, one anonymous woman in a rental Jeep among the handful of cars parked along that stretch of road. But she stood there longer than the moment required, her hand resting on the top of the door, looking in my direction with an expression I couldn’t read from that distance and didn’t want to. Then she got in and drove away. I sat there afterward with my heart going too fast for a woman who had, as far as she knew, done nothing at all.

I thought, absurdly, that she might have felt it. Della had always claimed to feel things before they happened. A phone call before it rang, rain before the sky earned it. I didn’t believe in that sort of thing. I believed in it a little, sitting there.

On the third day I saw Riley.

He came out just after noon. Alone. He stood in the parking lot for a moment the way he always had, letting his eyes adjust to the light. He was in jeans and a dark shirt and his vest, and his hair was shorter than the photograph but longer than I expected, and he moved exactly the way I remembered.

Like a man who had decided where he was going and was in no particular hurry to get there.

He walked to the far end of the parking lot. He crouched down to look at something near the rear tire of a motorcycle. He stayed like that for a few minutes. Then he stood. He pulled his phone from his pocket and looked at it. Put it back.

He looked up at the sky.