Page 117 of Roadrunner

“That’s fair,” I said. “That’s completely fair, and I’m sorry. You should have been asked things. I didn’t know how, and that’s on me, not you.”

“I loved him,” Arthur said, quieter now, looking back down at the photograph. “Josh. Dad. Whatever I’m supposed to call him now. I loved him even though he wasn’t very good at it half the time. Is that stupid?”

“No,” I said, and meant it. “That’s not stupid. That’s just true. You’re allowed to love someone and be angry at them and grieve something you didn’t get to have, all at the same time. I’ve been doing exactly that for longer than you’ve been alive.”

He wiped his face with the back of his wrist, an old habit, unselfconscious. “Does it get easier? Holding all of it at once?”

“Some days,” I said honestly. “Other days it just gets more familiar, which isn’t quite the same thing, but it helps.”

He was quiet for a while, turning the photograph over in his hands.

“Riley’s not going anywhere,” he said finally. Not a question.

“No,” I said. “He’s not.”

“Good,” Arthur said. “I already picked him anyway. Before any of this. On Saturdays.” He looked up at me, and something in his face had settled, not fully, not completely, but enough. He shrugged one shoulder. “Just wanted somebody to know I’m still allowed to be mad about the rest of it too.”

“You’re allowed,” I said. “For as long as you need to be.”

He leaned into me again, and this time it was quieter, the worst of it spent, and we sat on the floor of his closet with a dead man’s photographs between us until he fell asleep against my shoulder the way he hadn’t done since he was small enough for me to carry him to bed afterward.

I carried him anyway. He was heavier than he used to be. I did it anyway.

In the morning he came down for breakfast and asked Riley, with no visible trace of the night before, whether the engine cases had come in yet, and Riley said Saturday, and Arthur said good, and that was that.

But he’d shown me the rest of it once, in the dark, on his own schedule, exactly the way I should have known he would. That was, I was beginning to understand, all any of us ever really got to have. Not the absence of the hard thing, but somebody willing to sit on the floor with you while you had it.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

Alex

Now

They started on a Saturday morning in March.

Riley backed his truck into the garage and unloaded the three boxes one at a time. Arthur took his end without being asked. They moved with the efficiency of two people who had been working alongside each other long enough to anticipate.

I sat on the steps with my coffee and watched.

Riley opened the first box. He lifted out each component and set it on the workbench in a specific order that meant something to him. Arthur stood beside him and watched and said nothing, which was the right thing to do and he knew it.

When the first box was empty Riley started on the second.

“Hand me that,” he said.

Arthur handed it over before I could see what it was.

Riley set it on the bench. He looked at the arrangement. He moved one piece slightly to the left.

“You know what that is?” he asked.

Arthur looked at it. “No.”

“Engine cases,” Riley said. “Everything runs through these. Fuel. Air. Exhaust. Heart of the machine.” He picked one up. “Feel it.”

Arthur traced his fingertips over the finned aluminum. He looked at the machined surfaces. The ports and passages that meant nothing to him yet and would mean everything eventually.

“They look heavy,” he said.