Page 61 of Roadrunner

I let him.

He was a man who had lost his son. Whatever else was true, that was true, and it deserved respect.

Robert looked older than the last time I’d seen him, at Arthur’s christening, a lifetime ago. He’d flown in the morning after the call and had been quietly, competently useful in the way wealthy men who have run large organizations their whole lives are useful at funerals. Handling the caterer, the florist, a disagreement with the funeral home about the program’s typesetting. Tasks small enough to be beneath him and large enough, in the moment, to keep his hands occupied.

“He talked about you,” Robert said to me, at some point in the long gray afternoon, apropos of nothing. “More than you’d think. More than he probably let you know.”

I didn’t know what to do with that, so I thanked him, and he nodded once and moved off to intercept a caterer with a question about chafing dishes, and I stood there for a moment turning the sentence over, unsure whether it was a kindness or simply a grieving father’s need to believe his son had loved better than he had.

Through it all, Arthur was a revelation.

He greeted every person who came through the door. Shook hands. Accepted embraces from people he didn’t know with a grace that made my chest ache. At one point I found him in the hallway talking to an elderly woman who had gotten turned around looking for the bathroom, walking her there himself.

He was still a child. Barely.

I watched him from across the room.

He caught me watching and gave me a small nod. A checking-in nod. Making sure I was upright and functional.

I nodded back.

The house emptied by seven.

Martina cleaned up. Arthur was asleep by eight-thirty. He’d been awake since five.

I sat on the couch in the quiet house.

I thought about the next day. And the day after that. And the shape of a life that was now defined by the weight of something I was carrying, and what it might feel like to set it down.

I didn’t know yet.

But I was going to find out.

In not time, a month passed.

I gave it a month. It seemed like the right amount of time to be in one place before I started looking in another direction.

I searched online. Quietly. At night after Arthur was asleep.

I found the same things I’d found before. The club’s charity work. The clubhouse address. Antonio’s obituary. Three grandchildren.

I found nothing about Riley.

He didn’t exist online in any meaningful way. No photographs. No mentions by name. He was a man who lived in the physical world and left no digital record of it, which was so consistent with who he was that I couldn’t even be frustrated by it.

I found one thing.

A local news piece from four years prior. A photograph of the club at a veterans’ event. A dozen men in leather standing in front of their motorcycles in a parking lot somewhere.

I looked at every face.

On the far right, slightly apart from the others the way he always stood, was Riley.

He was older. Of course he was older. His hair was shorter than I remembered. The lines around his eyes had deepened. He was still looking at the camera the same way he looked at everything. Directly. Without apology.

He was not smiling.

He never smiled for photographs.