Page 64 of Roadrunner

I held my breath.

He went back inside.

I sat across the street with both hands in my lap and my heart doing something loud and inconvenient. I thought about ten years. About what ten years actually meant when you were sitting across the street from the person you’d spent them thinking about.

It meant nothing.

Ten years of distance collapses the moment you see the person. One look and it’s gone. All of it.

Just Riley. Standing in a parking lot. Looking at the sky.

My hands were shaking on the wheel.

I noticed, in the specific delayed way you notice a thing your body has been doing for a while before your mind catches up to it. I made myself sit with it rather than start the engine right away, because starting the engine felt like fleeing. I had done enough fleeing in my life that I recognized the shape of it instantly and refused, for once, to let it win outright.

I thought about walking across that street. I got as far as picturing it. My hand on the door handle, the heat coming up off the asphalt, the twenty or so steps it would actually take. Before the picture simply stopped, the way a film reel runs out, because I didn’t have the next part. I didn’t know what I’d say. I didn’t know what his face would do. Three days of watching had taught me nothing except that I still didn’t have the courage for the thing I’d flown nine hundred miles to do. That realization sat in my chest like a stone the whole drive back to the hotel.

I started the Jeep.

I drove back to the hotel.

I sat on the edge of the bed and called Arthur.

He answered on the second ring. “Hey, Mom.”

“Hey, bud.” I pressed the phone against my ear. “How’s things?”

“Fine,” he said. “Martina made the soup again.”

“What kind?”

“The good kind.” Tinny music picked back up behind his voice, some game he’d clearly paused to answer the phone and was now itching to get back to. “With the bread.”

I laughed despite everything. “I’ll go get some when I’m home.”

He paused. “When are you home?”

“Soon.”

“Okay.”

“Mom.” Another pause. Longer. “The soup’s better when you’re here.”

“I’m aware.”

“So come home.”

I pressed my lips together. “When did you get so bossy?”

“I learned from the best,” he said.

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

He hung up.

I looked at the phone.