Page 90 of Roadrunner

“I already knew,” I said.

“Knew what?”

“That there were good things about you that weren’t obvious,” I said. “I’ve known that since a Harley came out of a dust cloud and stopped for a stranger who had nothing to offer him.”

Something moved across his face, the private kind he didn’t usually let land in the light. He looked away from me, out toward the unfinished gymnasium, like he needed a second to put it somewhere.

“You have this effect,” he said finally, “where you say something and I have to sit with it a minute before I can talk again.”

“I forgot I had that effect,” I said. “It’s nice to have it back.”

He laughed. It came out low and easy, the sound I’d been rebuilding a memory of for years and had never quite gotten right until I heard it again, live, in a half-finished building that smelled like cut lumber.

We stayed until the work lights were the only light left and the desert outside had gone fully dark, and he told me about the kids the center was for, and the roof budget that had run short twice, and Sparks nearly falling off a ladder in a way that had apparently become a permanent joke among the brothers. I told him about Arthur’s science project and the specific, escalating war he was waging against long division.

It was easy. It had always been easy, with him. I kept relearning it, over and over, as if it might stop being true if I didn’t.

He drove me home at ten.

We sat in the driveway in the dark with the engine off. The desert was doing its nighttime sounds around us. The sky above the house was enormous and ridiculous with stars.

“Thank you,” I said. “For tonight.”

“Thank my mother,” he said. “The tamales were her idea. The rest was mine.”

“I’ll thank her for the tamales, then,” I said. “I’m thanking you for the rest.”

He looked at the house. “Arthur okay over there?”

“Arthur is in heaven,” I said. “He may never come home.”

“He’s welcome to stay,” Riley said. “She’ll keep him.”

“Don’t tempt me.”

I reached for the door. Then I stopped.

I turned back and kissed him, easy this time, without the nerves that used to live in it, the way you kiss someone once you’ve stopped bracing for them to change their mind.

He kissed me back like a man with nowhere else he needed to be.

I pulled back.

He looked at me.

“Goodnight,” I said.

“Night,” he said. He caught my hand before I could open the door all the way. “Alex.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m glad you’re building something you can show me too,” he said. “Whenever you’re ready to.”

I didn’t ask him what he meant. I think I already knew, and I think he knew that I knew, and some things are better left to arrive on their own schedule.

“Soon,” I said.

He let go of my hand.