Page 69 of Roadrunner

“The best kid,” I said. “He’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”

He was quiet for a second. He looked at his hands on the table. “What was it like? The marriage.”

“Long,” I said.

He gave me a look.

“Difficult,” I said. “He wasn’t a kind man. Not consistently.” I looked at the wall. “Not to me, anyway.”

Riley said nothing.

“I made my bed,” I said.

“You were twenty-two,” he said.

“Old enough.”

“Old enough to make a mistake,” he said. “Not old enough to have it held against you forever.”

I held his eyes. “Are you holding it against me?”

He considered it. “I was angry for a long time,” he said. “I won’t lie to you about that. I tried to find you. Called your number until it was disconnected. Called Martina until she stopped answering.” He picked up his cold coffee and looked at it. “It’s been years. At some point I stopped being angry.”

“What replaced it?”

“Nothing,” he said. “For a while, nothing.” He set the cup down. “Then just time. Work. The club.” He looked at me. “You didn’t exactly leave a gap I could fill with something else.”

I pressed my lips together. “I’m sorry.”

“I know you are.”

“Riley—”

“I know,” he said. “I mean it. I know.”

We sat with that for a while, the silence doing the work neither of us had words for. Somewhere outside a truck downshifted on the main road, the sound rising and fading, and a fly bumped twice against the window glass and gave up.

“Can I ask you something?” I asked.

He gestured for me to go on.

“Did you look for anyone else?” I asked. “In those years? Was there...” I stopped, unsure I actually wanted the answer, and asked anyway because not knowing had its own cruelty. “Was there someone serious?”

He considered the question with the same care he gave everything. “There was someone, for about two years,” he said. “Good woman. Ran a diner in Oro Valley. It didn’t take.”

“Why not?”

“She used to ask me what I was thinking about,” he said, “and about half the time the honest answer would’ve been you, and I got tired of lying to her about it. Seemed unfair to keep doing that to someone who didn’t deserve it.” He turned his cup a quarter turn on the table, an old habit I remembered suddenly and completely. “She figured it out eventually anyway. Told me I was the most decent haunted man she’d ever dated.” He almost smiled. “I didn’t argue with her.”

I felt something in my chest twist, gratitude and guilt tangled too tightly together to separate. “I’m sorry,” I said. “That I did that to you. Without ever knowing I was doing it.”

“You didn’t do it to me,” he said. “You did it to yourself too. I watched you just now, telling me about a ten-year-old boy who reads books he shouldn’t be old enough for yet, and I don’t think you’ve let yourself be happy in longer than I have.” He looked at me steadily. “That’s not a competition I wanted either one of us to win.”

He drove me back to the hotel. When he offered, I didn’t even think of leaving the rental at the clubhouse. Maybe I did, but I didn’t admit it. I wanted to be close to him. As much as I could.

We rode in his truck, which was different from the truck I remembered but felt the same inside. He drove the way he always drove. Settled. One hand on the wheel. The desert went by on both sides the way it did at dusk, the light going warm and orange along the ground while the sky above went purple.

I watched it go by.