Page 43 of Roadrunner

“The door was open,” my father said, his voice steadier now that the immediate danger of the gun had passed. “The front door. It was unlocked. I knocked and no one answered, so I—”

“At two in the morning,” I said.

He looked at me.

“It’s two in the morning,” I said again, because it seemed important that he actually hear it. “You drove here at two in the morning and walked into my home.”

He straightened. I watched the old composure begin creeping back into his shoulders and his jaw. I recognized it because I’d watched it happen my entire life. “I wanted to see you. I have every right—”

“Get dressed,” Riley said over his shoulder, still looking at my father and no one else.

His attention shifted to my father. He motioned to the kitchen table with the barrel of the gun. “Sit down.”

My father blinked. He was not, in the whole of his life, a man accustomed to being told what to do, especially in his own daughter’s home.

He did it anyway.

My father sat at the kitchen table afterward and looked around my small apartment the way he looked at everything that failed to meet his standards. Carefully, without visible judgment on his face, filing every detail away for later use.

Riley set three cups on the table and sat down without waiting to be asked. My father’s eyes moved from Riley’s face to the gun, which Riley had set on the counter within easy reach of neither of them, a fact I don’t think was accidental.

“You could have killed me,” my father said.

“Yes,” Riley said, without hesitation and without apology. “I could have.”

A silence settled over the table that was not the comfortable kind.

“The door was unlocked,” my father said, directing it at me now instead of Riley. “I wouldn’t have come in if the door was locked.”

I thought about the back landing. The warm night air. The root beer sweating in my hand while I stood outside not thinking about anything at all.

I had left the door unlocked.

I said none of it.

“You came at two in the morning,” I said instead. “Without calling. Without warning.”

“I wanted to surprise you.” He looked at me as though this were self-evidently reasonable. “You graduated today. I wanted to—”

“You weren’t there,” I said.

The words landed in the small kitchen and simply sat there, taking up all the air in the room.

He set his coffee cup down carefully. “Our flight—”

“Was delayed,” I said. “Or cancelled. Or rerouted. Or something.” I looked at him steadily. “There’s always something, Dad.”

He had no answer for that, which was itself an answer.

Riley drank his coffee and said nothing at all, watching my father the exact way I’d once seen Price watch a stranger at the clubhouse door. Quietly, thoroughly, filing away every small thing the man in front of him gave away without meaning to.

My father looked at Riley for a long moment. “You sleep with a gun.”

“I do,” Riley said.

“That’s—”

“Standard protocol,” Riley said, before my father could finish deciding what word he wanted. “In Arizona.”