Page 78 of Roadrunner

“I met a guy when I was in college. Before your father,” I said. “Here in Arizona.”

“Are we moving where he lives?”

I wasn’t sure what he meant. “Not with him, no. But the same area.”

“Okay,” he replied.

He went back to studying the landscape.

I left it alone, at least for a while. We had plenty of time, if he had any questions.

I looked at the road, and let myself do the thing I’d been rationing all morning, which was think, in full sentences, about what was actually at the end of it.

I thought about the notebook. About the word wonderful sitting in the middle of Joshua’s handwriting like something I still couldn’t see around. About Arthur beside me, who had no idea yet that the man we were driving toward might turn out to be more to him than a family friend his mother used to know.

I thought about years, and how strange it was that they could feel, from this exact angle, both like an entire lifetime and like no time had passed at all.

I thought about the version of myself who had driven away from the state once already, in the opposite direction, certain of almost nothing.

I was not that person anymore. I didn’t entirely know yet who I was instead. I supposed that was part of what this drive was for. Not just moving furniture and a family from one state to another, but giving myself eight hundred miles and one motel ceiling to start becoming whoever I was going to be on the other side of it.

Some questions don’t get answered in the asking, Martina had told me at that kitchen table. They get answered in the living.

I was beginning to understand that living, in this particular case, involved a great deal of highway.

We arrived a little after five in the afternoon, the light already going long and gold across the yard.

The house was a rental. Three bedrooms. A yard that backed up to the desert. Riley had found it. I hadn’t asked him to. He’d texted me two weeks prior with an address and a photograph of the backyard, which was mostly gravel and one enormous saguaro that appeared to be standing guard over the property.

It’s close to the club, he’d written. Schools are good.

That was the whole message.

I’d looked at the photograph for a long time.

I’d written back: Perfect.

Arthur walked through the house once.

Front to back. Systematic. He opened the door to each bedroom and looked in and moved to the next. He opened the back door and stood on the porch and looked at the yard and the saguaro and the desert beyond the low fence.

He stood there for a moment.

“I like it,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“It feels like something,” he said.

I stood beside him. “Like what?”

He thought about it. “Like something’s going to happen here,” he said. “Good things.”

I looked at the yard. At the saguaro standing its post at the back fence. At the mountains visible above the roofline to the east, going blue at the edges in the afternoon light.

“Yes,” I said. “I think so too.”

Martina appeared in the doorway behind us. She looked at the yard. She looked at the saguaro. She looked at the mountains.