Page 103 of Roadrunner

“Chicken, it is,” she said, and hung up before I could ask her what she’d actually meant, which I understood, even as I set the phone down, was entirely the point.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Alex

Now

Della kept Arthur on a Thursday evening.

She’d called that afternoon with a tone that didn’t invite discussion.

“Bring him at five,” she said. “Pick him up tomorrow morning.”

“Della, it’s a school night—”

“He’ll be in bed by nine,” she said. “I’ll have him at the bus stop by seven-thirty.” A brief pause. “Go be young.”

She hung up.

Riley picked me up at seven.

No particular destination discussed. He drove and I sat in the passenger seat and watched the desert go by in the dark and didn’t ask where we were going.

He took me to Mount Lemmon.

Not the restaurant. Not the trail. He drove up the mountain road in the dark, the headlights cutting through the pines that appeared as the elevation climbed, and he parked at an overlook I didn’t recognize and turned off the engine.

Below us the valley spread out in every direction. The city lights of Tucson scattered across the dark floor of the basin. The mountains on the far side were black shapes against a sky that was doing something extraordinary with stars.

We sat for a while without talking.

“I used to come up here,” he said. “After you left.”

I looked at him.

“Not often,” he said. “A few times.” He looked at the valley. “I’d sit up here and try to figure out what I did wrong.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I said.

“I know that now,” he said. “Took a while.”

I looked at the lights below. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“I know,” he said.

We sat.

“Do you remember the first time you brought me up here?” I asked.

He gazed out at Tucson. It was spread out like a much larger city. “Day one.”

“You kissed me at the top of that rock,” I said.

“You were waiting for it,” he said.

“I was trying to be subtle,” I said.

“You weren’t,” he said.