Page 18 of Roadrunner

“It certainly is,” his mother said, before he could answer, a trace of scorn still in her voice. She gave him one more look, then turned to me and smiled, clearly proud of herself. “Named after his great-grandfather. Arturo Nicolas Panzolini. Heaven knows how he came up with Riley. We’ve been calling him that for years, though. I think I’m about done with it, to tell you the truth.” Her eyes cut back to him. “Especially if he reaches over my table again. We raised him better than that.”

She was small—she couldn’t have weighed a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet, in a floral dress that looked like it might be as old as she was—and she’d just made a grown man apologize with a butter knife. Adorable, and clearly not a pushover.

Riley’s father speared a slice of turkey without looking up. He was lean and dark like his son, built the same way, the two of them nearly interchangeable except for the gray coming into his hair. “The kids on the football team came up with it,” he said, to no one in particular. “Means courageous. That’s why they picked it.”

“No it doesn’t,” Riley said. “I picked it because I liked it.”

“How old were you?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Nine or ten.”

“You were seven,” his mother said, in a tone that wasn’t up for debate. “Fall after your father bought that ugly green truck.”

“It wasn’t ugly,” his father said. “And it wasn’t green. It was brown.”

She gave him a look. “It was as green as a gourd.”

He appealed to me instead. “It was the most beautiful brown metallic you ever saw.”

“He has selective memory,” she said, pointing her fork at him. “Don’t listen to a word of it. All the neighborhood kids had already started calling him Riley. We just gave in eventually.” Her eyes went back to her son. “Use your manners, or I’ll call you Arturo for the rest of your God-given days.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

It was hard not to love a man who called his mother ma’am and his father sir. I looked around the table—the tablecloth that had clearly been handed down, the bronze candelabras, the mismatched serving spoons, the porcelain platters someone had clearly been collecting for decades. Whatever this was, I hadn’t had it growing up. I was old enough to know manners were not love. At this table they kept arriving in the same chair.

Riley’s sister looked up from her plate. Addy was small like their mother, fair, with dark wavy hair down her back.

“His friend Dale actually started it,” she said, to me. “But it wasn’t the friends who made it stick. He climbed up on the couch with a saucepan and a wooden spoon, banged on the pan, and announced that from that day forward he’d only answer to Riley. During a football game.”

“That part’s true,” their father said, raising a finger. “We were watching a game.”

“Fall of his seventh year,” their mother added. “I’d forgotten about the spoon.”

“Is your real name Addy?” I asked.

She laughed. “Adriana. Addy for short.”

“Adriana goes by Addy, you go by Della, Dad goes by Tony,” Riley said. “None of those are your actual names either. Find any irony in that, Mother?”

“Those are short for—”

“Abbreviated,” his father said, still not looking up. “The word’s abbreviated.”

“Abbreviated. Thank you.” His mother nodded. “Arthur, or Art, I could have lived with. Riley isn’t even close.”

“I used to call him Dip-shit when he was little,” his father offered. “Didn’t walk till he was almost two. I had my doubts. Wish that one had stuck. I liked Dip-shit better.”

Riley closed his eyes. “Enough. Can we just eat?”

“I was trying to,” his mother said. “Then you started acting like an untrained ape.”

“We don’t need to reenact my whole childhood at this table.”

“Let’s talk about something else, then.” She looked around at all of us before landing on Riley. “When’s the engagement?”

The color went out of his face.

“Oh,” I said, before he could stop me, “you didn’t hear? We’re already engag—”