Page 126 of Roadrunner

He studied me a second. “You sure?”

I thought about Della. About every Sunday dinner and every root beer and every dish towel and every time she’d stood at the stove and told me to stir slower and meant something more than the rice.

“She’s been planning this since I was nineteen,” I said. “Let her have it.”

Riley was quiet for a moment.

“Mom,” he said. “In charge of a wedding.”

“Yes.”

He looked at the mountains. “God help us.”

I laughed again.

He smiled.

The real one. The one that didn’t come out often enough.

I leaned against his shoulder.

He put his arm around me.

We sat on the porch while the desert went dark around us and the stars filled in above the mountains and inside the house Arthur and Martina argued cheerfully about something that didn’t matter.

Everything was exactly right.

We told Arthur together, at the kitchen table, once Martina had made a show of remembering something she needed to do in the other room.

Arthur looked between us for a moment, reading the room the way he read every room, and then a smile broke across his face that he didn’t try to manage or contain, wide and unguarded and entirely eleven years old.

“Finally,” he said.

“Finally?”

“I’ve been waiting for you guys to catch up,” he said, with the weariness of a boy who considered himself the most reasonable person at the table. “Since March. Kind of obvious.” He shrugged. “You were both being weird about it.”

“We weren’t being weird,” Riley said.

“You were a little weird,” Arthur said. “It’s fine.”

Riley looked at me over the top of Arthur’s head, something helpless and delighted in his expression, and I understood, watching the two of them, that whatever this family had become, it had built itself out of exactly the right materials, brick by ordinary brick, a Tuesday and a math test and a boy who’d apparently seen this coming longer than either of the adults would admit.

“So,” Arthur said. “Can I be there? When you tell everyone else?”

“You’re the first person we told,” I said.

He considered this. “Good,” he said. He picked his fork back up. “Can we have cake to celebrate?”

“We just had dinner.”

“That’s not a no,” he said.

It wasn’t.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

Alex