Page 124 of Roadrunner

I looked at the sky.

We were quiet for a while.

Then Riley set his bottle down on the porch rail. He looked at it for a moment. Then he turned and looked at me.

I recognized the quality of that look.

I’d been waiting for it.

Not impatiently. Not with anxiety. Just with the awareness of someone who knows something is coming and has made peace with it and is simply waiting for it to arrive.

“I need to say something,” he said.

“Okay,” I said.

He looked at me steadily. “I’m not good at this,” he said.

“Yes you are,” I replied.

He almost smiled. “I’m going to say it the way I know how to say it,” he said. “Which is directly.”

“That’s the only way I’d want it.”

He held my gaze.

“I want to marry you,” he said. “I’ve wanted to marry you since you were nineteen years old, drinking a root beer in a bar in Marana and asking me if I wanted to hang out.” He paused. “I want to marry you and I want Arthur to have my name and I want whatever comes after that to happen in that order.”

The porch was very quiet.

The mountains were going blue.

Something in my chest went tight and then wide, the way a door does when it has been stuck for years and finally gives. This was the only man I had ever loved. Not the first person who had said the word at me. The only one who had made it mean a kitchen and a Tuesday and a boy calling from lunch to say he passed a test.

My hands were not steady.

I did not try to hide it.

I had imagined this at nineteen and put the imagining in a drawer in California and called the drawer grown. Sitting on his porch with his voice still in the air, I understood I had not been grown.

I had been gone.

My throat did the inconvenient thing. I let it. If I spoke too fast I was going to sound like the girl on the rock, and I was that girl, and I was also a different one.

Both of them were saying yes before the word arrived.

“I don’t have a ring,” he said. “I’ll get one. That’s not the point right now. The point is I want to know if you want the same thing.”

He looked down at his own empty hand for a second, like it had let him down, then turned it palm-up and held it out to me instead. It was the only thing he actually had on him worth offering.

I looked at it. Then at him.

“Is that a proposal or a business deal,” I asked, because it was the only thing I could come up with, other than cry.

“It’s all I’ve got,” he said, dead serious. “Never got around to the other part. Figured this would have to do until I did.”

I almost laughed, except it wasn’t funny, it was just him.

No velvet box, no rehearsed speech, just a man on a porch offering me the one thing he actually had, which was himself, plainly.