Page 20 of Roadrunner

“You’re not winning this one, son,” Antonio said. “Sit.”

Someone knocked at the door.

“Oh, Lord.” Della’s napkin hit the table. She crossed her arms and looked at Antonio. “I thought we might get through one meal.”

“My uncle,” Riley told me, glancing at his father. “Dad’s brother. Pete.”

Every face at the table changed at once.

“Well?” Della raised her eyebrows at Antonio. “He’s your brother. Are you letting him in or not?”

“He drinks,” Addy said, finishing her wine in one go. “A lot. Brace yourself.”

Antonio went to the door. When it opened, a voice loud enough to rattle the windows filled the house.

“Am I late?” Pete shouted it, and I flinched.

“We’re already seated,” Antonio said.

“Want me to carve the bird?”

“We’re already eating. Come in.”

The two of them came into the dining room. Pete was lean, like Riley, and that was where the resemblance ended. His jeans were stained in places that looked permanent, his plaid shirt looked pulled straight from a hamper, and his boot cuffs were rolled over raggedy square toes. Long hair, unkempt, put me in mind of Sparks. He looked to be in his mid-fifties, older than his brother.

He scanned the room, and his eyes went wide and theatrical when they landed on me. He raked a hand through his hair and set both fists on his hips. “Well. What do we have here?”

“Hi. I’m Alex.”

“Alex.” He wrinkled his nose. “Short for Alexandra?”

“No. Just Alex.”

It was the truth, though not the whole of it. My father had never let anyone shorten it to something softer, and he’d never had to, because he hadn’t started with a nickname to begin with. He’d handed the courthouse a name that could just as easily have belonged to a son, and never once, in nineteen years, offered me a reason why.

I used to tell myself it was practical. The kind of name that looked capable on a resume before anyone got a good look at the rest of you. I’d started to suspect it was something else. That some part of him had wanted a boy badly enough to go ahead and name one, and he settled for handing me the name instead of the outcome.

It was, I sometimes thought, as close as he’d ever come to telling me what he thought of getting a daughter instead. I never asked him outright. Some questions felt too large to survive the answer.

He looked at Riley. “She with you?”

Riley’s jaw went tight. He put an arm around me, hand gripping my shoulder. “Yep.”

“Good for you.” Pete laughed. “Long as it’s been since anyone’s seen you with a woman, I was starting to wonder if you’d gone queer.”

Riley was out of his seat before I fully registered it, fists clenched. “Time for you to get in your truck and head back to Tucson,” he said, in a voice I hadn’t heard from him before. “Keep that mouth running and this gets ugly.”

“Pete.” Antonio’s voice dropped. “You’re out of line.” Then, to Riley: “Sit down, son.”

“I’m not letting him insult me in front of—”

“I was just messing around,” Pete said. “Didn’t mean anything.”

“That’s where I draw the line,” Della said, standing, arms crossed. “You want to talk like that, the bar on Tangerine’s open. I hear they serve lunch.”

Pete mimed tipping a hat he wasn’t wearing. “My apologies, Adella.”

“Sit down.” She smoothed her dress. “I’ll get you a plate.”