Page 89 of Roadrunner

“Good,” she said. “Mediocrity has no place in my kitchen.”

Arthur glanced over his shoulder at me with an expression that said he had found his people.

Riley picked me up at seven.

He was at the door in dark jeans and a dark shirt and his vest. His hair was pushed back. He smelled like soap and the warm clean scent I’d been cataloguing since the first afternoon on the back of his motorcycle at eighteen years old.

He looked at me.

“You look good,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said. “Where are we going?”

“You’ll see,” he said.

“Riley.”

“Get in the truck,” he said.

I got in the truck. There was a cooler behind the seat and a folded blanket beside it, which I noted and didn’t ask about, because asking would have ruined whatever he’d planned, and he’d clearly planned something.

He drove us to a building I didn’t recognize on the edge of downtown Marana. Scaffolding along one side. Fresh plywood over two of the windows. A hand-painted banner zip-tied to the chain-link that read MARANA COMMUNITY CENTER — REBUILDING, THANKS TO YOU, with a list of names underneath it in a dozen different handwritings.

“This is the fire building,” I said.

“Was the fire building,” Riley said. “Now it’s the club’s Tuesday nights and most of my Saturdays for the last four months.”

He parked around back, where a section of new roof was still open to the sky and a stack of drywall sat under a tarp, and he came around and opened my door and led me through a side entrance that didn’t have a lock on it yet.

Inside, the framing was up but the walls weren’t. You could see straight through to what would eventually be a gymnasium, a kitchen, a row of offices. Sawdust still hung faintly in the air. Someone had strung a single strand of work lights along one wall, the kind that clip to rafters, and they cast everything in a warm, amber, unfinished glow.

He spread the blanket in the middle of the future gym floor.

“You brought me to a construction site,” I said.

“I brought you to see what Price organized,” he said. “You don’t believe me when I tell you things. I decided to show you instead.”

“Price organized this?”

“Price organized this,” he said. “Every dollar. Every weekend. He hasn’t missed one.”

“The nephew,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

Riley glanced at me, surprised, then remembered he was the one who’d told me the story two weeks ago. “The nephew,” he agreed. “He’d still deny all of this if you asked him directly. Told Lackey it was ‘good publicity for the club.’ Hasn’t missed a Saturday in four months for the publicity.”

“Some men just don’t know how to say the real reason out loud.”

“Some men have a reputation to protect,” Riley said. “Price included.”

He opened the cooler. Sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, the good kind from the place by the clubhouse, and two bottles of root beer sweating in the desert evening.

We ate sitting on the blanket in the middle of a building that didn’t exist yet, surrounded by the skeleton of what it was going to be.

“Why here?” I asked. “Of everywhere you could have taken me.”

He considered the question the way he considered most things, slowly, like it deserved the time. “Because years ago I couldn’t have told you a single good thing about myself that wasn’t already obvious,” he said. “I wanted you to see one that wasn’t.”

I looked at the framing overhead. At the names on the banner outside. At a man who’d spent four months of Saturdays he didn’t have to give, giving them anyway.