Page 74 of Roadrunner

I was already thinking about what needed doing. The house. The school enrollment paperwork. The boxes in the back bedroom I hadn’t opened since Joshua died. The shape of a life being packed up and moved toward something better.

I had a month.

I intended to make it less.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Alex

Now

The California house sold itself, mostly.

That was what the realtor said, standing in the entryway with a folder of paperwork and the brightness of a woman who could smell a fast commission. Ocean view. Good school district. A widow motivated to leave. She didn’t say the last part in those words, but she didn’t have to.

I gave myself six weeks. Enough time to empty a house I’d lived in for most of a marriage, enroll Arthur somewhere in Arizona, and not lose my mind in the process.

I did the closets first. Then the kitchen, which took longer than it should have because Martina and I kept stopping to hold up objects and ask each other whether they meant anything, and mostly they didn’t, and we set them in the donate pile and moved on.

Joshua’s office I left for last.

Not out of grief. I left it for last because I didn’t know what I’d feel standing in it, and I’d spent years arranging my life around not finding out what I felt about things until I absolutely had to.

I went in on a Thursday. Martina had Arthur’s old room. I had the office.

It was orderly in the way everything of Joshua’s was orderly. Files labeled in his blocky banker’s print. A desk he’d had shipped from Italy that he’d used maybe four times a year. A locked bottom drawer that took me twenty minutes and a flathead screwdriver to open, mostly out of stubbornness.

Inside the drawer there wasn’t much. A passport. Cufflinks. A manila envelope with the house’s original closing documents.

And a notebook.

Small. Black. The kind you’d buy at a drugstore checkout without thinking about it, which made it strange to find locked in a drawer like something that mattered.

I sat down on the floor of his office with my back against the desk and opened it.

It wasn’t a diary. A diary has feelings in it. This had dates. Short lines. The handwriting of a man who wrote the way he did everything, which was as if someone might audit him later and he intended to have his records in order.

Most of it was nothing. Meetings. A car serviced. A reminder to call his father about a golf trip.

Then, dated in June after my college graduation, four words.

Alex called. Pregnant. Confirm.

I sat very still.

Confirm.

Not congratulations. Not a question mark, even, the kind a normal man might put down if he were surprised or hopeful or afraid. Confirm, like a delivery date. Like something that could be checked against a schedule.

I turned the page.

Three weeks earlier, in the same blocky print: Dinner. Three glasses. She did not finish the third.

I read it twice.

I don’t know how long I sat there. Long enough that the light through the office window moved. Long enough that Martina eventually appeared in the doorway and asked if I was all right and I said something that satisfied her enough to leave again, though I couldn’t tell you now what it was.

I kept reading.