Page 115 of Roadrunner

“You look like him,” she said. “You’ve always looked like him.”

Arthur looked at Riley.

Riley looked at Arthur.

“Little bit,” Arthur said.

Riley made a sound. It might have been a laugh. It was hard to say.

Arthurs focus was on the table. “Can I ask something?”

“Anything,” I said.

“Do I have to feel different?” he asked, looking up. “Because I don’t. I feel exactly the same as I did this morning. I just know something now that I didn’t know this morning.” He looked around at the three of us, checking. “Is that wrong?”

“That’s not wrong,” Della said, before I could answer, her voice steadier now than it had been all afternoon. “That’s exactly right, baby. You were always exactly who you are. Today just gave the rest of us the right words for it.”

Arthur considered that, and appeared to accept it as sound, and reached for another tamale.

The afternoon sun moved across the floor.

Della made coffee and brought it to the table and we sat for a while longer. Not talking about big things. Talking about small things the way you do after big things have been said and the room needs to breathe.

Arthur ate another tamale.

He was handling it the way he handled everything. By processing it quietly and then going forward. He had Riley’s way with difficulty. He picked it up and examined it and set it down in its new place and moved on. I’d seen him do this before. In a hospital lobby, at ten years old, telling his father’s still body that the doctors were going to fix him. I knew better by now than to mistake the calm for the whole of what he felt. With Arthur, the second wave always came later, on its own schedule, once he’d decided it was safe to have it.

I watched him.

I thought about years.

I thought about everything Arthur had done and said and been during those years that I was only now able to read correctly.

“Mom,” Arthur said.

I met his eyes.

“Stop,” he said. “You’re doing the worried thing.”

“What worried thing?”

He shrugged, like he didn’t have a better word for it. “The face like you’re about to say sorry again.”

I looked at him.

“It’s okay,” he said. He picked his fork back up. “I already said.”

Eleven years old.

I let that sit for a second.

Riley stood.

He pushed his chair back and stood and looked at Arthur with an expression I had never seen on his face before.

Not in all the years I’d known him.

Open and unguarded and certain. Similar to the way he looked when he’d made a decision he intended to keep.