Page 112 of Roadrunner

I found him in the back bay, alone, working on a bike that didn’t need the amount of attention he was giving it. He had a rag in one hand and a wrench in the other and he was cleaning a part that was already clean.

“Hey,” I said.

He didn’t look up right away. “Hey.”

I stood in the doorway. The shop smelled like oil and metal and the quiet of a building after everyone else has gone home.

“You’ve been busy,” I said.

“Yeah.” He set the wrench down. Picked it back up. Set it down again. “Been thinking a lot.”

“About Arthur?”

“About everything.” He finally looked at me, and there was something in his face I hadn’t seen since the porch, not the same thing, though. That had been grief, mostly, grief with the edges still soft.

This was harder.

Something that had had three days alone in a garage to sharpen itself. “I keep doing this thing,” he said, “where I try to remember a specific day. His first day of kindergarten. His first tooth. The first time he rode a bike without someone holding the seat. And I can’t, Alex. I can’t remember any of it, because I wasn’t there for any of it, because I didn’t know I was supposed to be there.” He set the wrench down for good this time. “And then right behind that thought is another one, which is that you knew. The whole time. You knew there was a chance, and you let years go by without picking up a phone.”

I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t a version of the sentence I’m sorry that hadn’t already been said and hadn’t already been not enough.

“I’m not trying to punish you,” he said. “I want to be clear about that, because I can hear how this sounds. I’m not sitting back here trying to figure out the cruelest way to say it. I’m trying to tell you the truth, which is that I’ve spent three days being angrier than I’ve been at anything in my adult life, and some of that anger doesn’t have anywhere decent to go, and I didn’t want to say any of it to you until I was sure I could say it without trying to hurt you with it.”

“You can be angry,” I said. My voice came out smaller than I wanted it to. “You’re allowed to be angry at me. I’d rather have that than have you pretend you’re not.”

“I know I’m allowed,” he said. “I’ve been giving myself permission for three days straight. Doesn’t make it comfortable to sit across from you and feel it.” He looked at his hands. “I keep thinking about the two of us on that porch. How you needed me to already be past it, that same night, so we could get to the part where we tell him and everyone’s okay again. And I let you have that, because you needed it and because I didn’t know yet what I actually felt, underneath the grief. It took me three days alone back here to find out there was more underneath it than I let on.”

“I didn’t mean to rush you.”

“I know you didn’t mean to. That’s not really the point.” He wiped his hands on the rag, slow, deliberate, giving himself something to do with them. “The point is I get to be slow about this. Might still be angry a week from now. A month from now. Doesn’t mean I’ve stopped choosing you. Two different things.” He looked up. “I need you to be able to hold both without falling apart every time I need a minute.”

I made myself stay still. Made myself not reach for him, not fix it, not perform the anxious repair I’d been doing my whole life whenever someone else’s feelings got too large in a room I was standing in.

“Okay,” I said. “Be angry. Take the time. I’ll still be here.”

He looked at me for a long moment.

“That’s what I mean.” He shook his head slowly. “None of it’s going to go away on any kind of schedule that’s convenient for either of us.”

“I don’t need it to be convenient,” I said. “I need it to be honest. That’s all I’m asking for.”

“Then I’ll be honest,” he said. “Right now, today, I’m about eighty percent certain I’m not going to let this take us down. I can’t promise you what the percentages will look like tomorrow.”

“I can live with eighty percent,” I said. “I can live with the twenty, too, as long as you let me see it instead of doing this—” I gestured at the shop, the rag, the three unanswered days. “Instead of disappearing into a garage.”

He almost smiled. It cost him something to do it. “Fair.”

He put his hand against the side of my face, the way he used to. I let myself lean into it and didn’t ask for anything more than that.

“Sunday,” he said. “We tell him Sunday, like we said.”

“Sunday,” I agreed.

“And I’m going to be angry sometimes between now and then, and sometimes after,” he said. “Not at him. Never at him. At you, some. At myself, more, probably, for years of not asking a question I should have asked a long time ago.” He held my gaze. “I need you to let me have that without thinking it means I’m leaving.”

“I won’t think that,” I said. “I promise you I won’t.”

He nodded once, the way he nodded at things he’d decided to believe.