Page 132 of Roadrunner

I hadn’t told him about Arizona yet. About Riley. About any of it.

I was going to. I kept meaning to. There was never a version of the sentence that didn’t sound like an accusation, even when I built it as gently as I knew how.

I’d mentioned it to Della once, in passing, on a Sunday when the subject of Robert’s calls had come up over dishes. She’d gone quiet the way she went quiet when she had an opinion she was deciding whether to spend.

“You’re afraid of hurting him,” she’d said. Not a question.

“I’m afraid of a lot of things where he’s concerned.”

“He’s a grown man who buried his only son,” Della said. “He can survive a hard conversation, Alex. What he can’t survive is finding out later that people around him were managing what he was and wasn’t allowed to know. Men like that, men who’ve spent their whole lives being the one who delivers the bad news to everyone else, they know the difference between being protected and being handled. They hate the second one a great deal more than the first.”

I’d turned that over for weeks without doing anything about it, which was, I understood now, its own kind of answer.

He called on a Tuesday, before I’d found the words.

“I want to talk to you about something,” he said, after the pleasantries, after asking about Arthur’s spelling test. “Nothing alarming. A practical matter.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I’ve had the foundation’s attorneys drawing up a trust,” he said. “For Arthur. Education, primarily, though it extends beyond that if he wants it to. I’d like it finalized before the end of the year.” A pause, brief and businesslike, the pause of a man who had delivered difficult diagnoses to boards of directors his whole career and had learned to leave room after them. “They’ll need some documentation from you. Birth certificate. That sort of thing. Formalities.”

I sat down at the kitchen table.

“Robert,” I said.

“It’s not complicated,” he said. “It’s paperwork.”

“I know,” I said. “I know it’s paperwork.”

Something in my voice must have reached him, because he went quiet in a way that wasn’t like him.

“Alex,” he said. “Is something wrong?”

I looked at the notebook, which had not left the drawer of my nightstand since Arizona, since I’d finally shown it, all of it, to Riley and Della and Arthur at a kitchen table that wasn’t this one. I thought about the number on the lab report. Ninety-nine point nine nine nine eight percent.

I thought about a man who built hospitals telling his attorneys to prepare a trust for a grandson who was not, in the strictest and cruelest sense of the word, be his family at all.

“Nothing’s wrong,” I said. “I’ll get you the paperwork.”

I hated myself a little, saying it. Not enough to stop.

I told Riley that night.

We were on the back porch, the way we were most nights that year, the desert doing its long slow fade from orange to purple to the deep, complete dark it did nowhere else I’d ever lived.

He listened to the whole thing without interrupting, which was his way, and when I finished he sat for a while with his forearms on his knees, looking at the mountains.

“You’re going to tell him,” he said. It was a statement in the clearest sense.

“I don’t know.”

“You already know,” Riley said. “You wouldn’t have brought it out here otherwise.”

He wasn’t wrong, and I resented him a little for being right, and I sat with the resentment because it was easier than sitting with the fear underneath it.

“He’s an old man who just buried his only son,” I said. “If I tell him, I take the only thing he’s got left of Joshua and I tell him it was never really his to begin with.”

“And if you don’t tell him, you let him sign a trust for a boy he thinks is his blood, on paper, forever, based on a lie you’d be the one keeping.” Riley’s jaw worked once. “That sit any easier?”