Page 95 of Roadrunner

“Is that all you wanted to say?”

He held my gaze. Something behind his eyes that hadn’t quite surfaced.

“For now,” he said.

I turned back to the mountains.

For now was enough.

Martina was at the kitchen table when I came back inside.

She’d heard everything through the open window. She had the look of a woman pretending she hadn’t.

“Don’t,” I said.

I sat across from her. “He said for now,” I said.

“For now,” she repeated.

“Meaning there’s more,” I said. “When the time is right.”

She looked at me steadily. “With that man,” she said, “the time will be exactly right.” She took a sip of her coffee. “Just be ready.”

“Ready for what specifically.”

She gave me the look. “To say yes,” she said. “Obviously.”

She got up and went back to the kitchen.

I sat at the table and thought about it.

In the morning I was still thinking about it.

I didn’t mind at all.

We moved in March, the way we’d said we would.

It took one truck and half a Saturday, which surprised me until I remembered how little of the rental had actually ever been ours. Furniture that came with the lease, dishes we’d bought used, a life assembled quickly and provisionally because none of us had believed, not really, that it was going to be permanent.

Arthur claimed the smaller of the two extra bedrooms before I’d even gotten out of the truck, on the grounds that it had a better view of the garage, which told me everything about his priorities and none of it surprised me.

“You could have the bigger room,” I told him.

“I don’t need the bigger room,” he said. “I need to be able to see when Riley’s out there working.” He set his box down inside the door with great finality. “This one.”

I didn’t say what I was thinking, which was that the motorcycle was out there too. The same boxes from the third bedroom, moved into the garage the week before in trips Riley hadn’t let either of us help with, still taped shut. He’d taught Arthur to check his own oil. Taught him which wrench was which before he could properly tie his shoes. Answered every question lobbed at him from the porch like the asking itself was the whole point of the conversation. But not that. Not yet. I told myself it was nothing, a man pacing a project too big to rush, and mostly I believed it. But some smaller, less generous part of me, the part still sitting on a secret of my own I hadn’t found the courage to hand him, wondered whether he could feel some version of the same thing I could, without either of us having a name for it yet. I didn’t ask him. Some things, I was learning, you leave in their boxes until they’re ready to be lifted out.

Martina took the other, and stood in the doorway of it for a long moment before she said anything, and when she finally spoke it was only to ask where the nearest outlet was for her sewing machine, which was as close as Martina ever came to saying a place felt like home.

I stood in the kitchen while Riley carried in the last of the boxes, and I ran my hand along the counter, his counter, for six years, now somehow also mine, and felt something settle into place that had been unsettled for longer than I could easily measure.

“Well?” Riley said, setting the last box down.

“It’s good,” I said. “It’s really good.”

“Just good?”

I looked around at the kitchen, at Arthur’s voice already carrying from the garage where he’d wasted no time inspecting the workbench, at Martina’s radio starting up faintly down the hall.