Page 40 of Roadrunner

He didn’t look fully convinced. I understood that no one sentence from me was going to undo whatever arithmetic a child does in the dark when a parent ends up in a hospital. So I didn’t try to finish the job right there in a lobby that smelled like corn chips and hand sanitizer. I just held his hand and let him take his own time getting there.

Martina stood a few feet off, not intruding, her purse held against her stomach with both arms the way she held it when she needed something to do with her hands.

“Ready?” I asked him.

“Ready,” Arthur said, and it wasn’t entirely true, and it was true enough.

He was very still in the doorway of the room.

He didn’t cry, which surprised me and then didn’t, because Arthur rarely cried where anyone could watch him do it. He stood there and looked at his father for a long moment, cataloguing all of it the way he catalogued everything. Then he walked to the side of the bed opposite the machines and stood there with his hands at his sides.

“Hey, Dad,” he said quietly.

The monitors kept their rhythm. Nothing in the room answered him.

“The doctors are going to fix you,” Arthur said. He said it like a fact he’d decided to make true through sheer will, which was his way of managing things too large to feel all at once. “You just have to do the part where you wake up.”

I stood in the doorway with my hand over my mouth.

He reached out, carefully, and touched two fingers to the back of Joshua’s hand, avoiding the IV line. It was the instinctive care of a child who had clearly been paying closer attention to the adult world than any of us gave him credit for.

Then he stepped back and looked at me.

“Okay,” he said. “I saw him. Can we go now?”

“Yes,” I said.

He didn’t look back at the bed on his way out. I understood, watching him go, that he had done exactly what he came to do. He was not going to spend one unnecessary second longer in that room than the visit required. This particular economy of grief, taking only what was needed and leaving the rest for later, was a thing I recognized. I did it too, and had been doing it, apparently, since long before I ever noticed it in myself.

Martina took him down to the cafeteria for pancakes, because pancakes were what Martina believed in for occasions too large for words. I went back to the waiting room to sit with whatever came next.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Alex

Then

Graduation day arrived without fanfare. Four years had gone faster than that first summer week. Twenty-two still startled me when a calendar told the truth.

My parents did not.

I’d sent the information weeks earlier. Dates, times, the specific parking details my mother had asked for twice, as if the logistics were the part she meant to get right. I told myself I wasn’t expecting them. I have never been a convincing liar to myself, in particular.

Riley found me before the ceremony, in the crush of families and gowns and someone’s toddler already melting down over the heat. He was wearing the same dark jeans he always wore, and a button-down that told me Della had been involved in the getting-dressed part of his morning. He looked good. He always looked good. But there was something almost boyish in the care he’d clearly taken, like showing up pressed and combed was the only part of this day he could actually control on my behalf.

“You nervous?” he asked.

“No.”

He smiled, slow and knowing. He’d caught the lie the same way he caught all of them by then, without needing to say so.

The club was there in full. They’d taken up an entire section of bleachers without apology, the way they took up space everywhere. Not aggressively, just completely, as though the idea that they might not be welcome had simply never occurred to them. Della sat in the middle of them like a queen holding court, in a yellow dress that made her impossible to lose in a crowd, which I understood later had probably been the point. She waved when she spotted me in the procession line, both arms, unembarrassed. Something in my chest loosened that had been wound tight since I’d checked my phone one last time that morning and found nothing on it.

Riley’s father stood when I walked past. He didn’t call out or wave the way Della had. He just rose to his feet, quietly, and stayed standing until I’d passed, the way you’d stand for something that deserved it.

I let my eyes go, briefly, to the block of empty seats I’d reserved in my head weeks ago without meaning to. Then I looked away and didn’t let myself look back.

My name was called somewhere close to the beginning. I crossed the stage on legs that felt like someone else’s, shook the hand that was extended to me, and took hold of the leather folder that represented four years of a life I’d built almost entirely without the two people who were supposed to have built it with me.