Page 102 of Roadrunner

He went down the driveway.

Not fast. Not slow. Smooth and controlled and upright and already committed to it the way he committed to things once he decided to do them.

He went through the back gate and into the flat scrubby ground behind the house.

I stood up from my chair.

He went through a wide arc. Then another. Then he opened the throttle slightly and the engine note changed and he went further out and came back around and I could see from here that he was smiling.

Not the polite smile. The real one.

Martina put her hand on my shoulder.

I sat back down.

Riley was watching Arthur from the driveway. His arms were crossed. He was doing what he did when he watched things that mattered. Still. Focused. Absorbing.

Arthur came back through the gate and rolled to a stop in front of us.

He killed the engine.

He took off his helmet.

He looked at Riley. “Well?”

Riley uncrossed his arms. He looked at the boy on the bike. He looked at his posture. His hands on the bars. The way he’d sat through the whole of it like someone who’d been doing it for years.

“Natural,” Riley said. He started to say something else.

Then he stopped.

He looked at Arthur for a moment longer.

His jaw worked slightly.

Then he looked away at the mountains.

He didn’t finish what he started to say.

I watched him not finish it.

I thought about what the rest of that sentence might have been.

I thought I knew.

Della called that evening, ostensibly about Sunday’s menu, and worked her way around to it with the patience of a woman who had learned long ago that the direct route wasn’t always the fastest one.

“How’d the bike go,” she said.

“He’s a natural,” I said. “Riley said so himself.”

A pause on the line, longer than the sentence required. “I imagine he did,” she said.

“Della.”

“I’m making chicken Sunday,” she said. “Unless you’d rather have the pot roast again.”

“Della.”