Chapter 17
COLE
My mother called on a Tuesday, which was unusual because my mother called on Sundays.
Sunday was her day. She called after church and before the pot roast, and we talked about the weather in Duluth and my brother's AHL season and whether I was eating enough protein, and the calls were warm and predictable and never, ever mentioned my father.
Tuesday meant something was different.
"Hi, sweetheart." Her voice had that careful quality that mothers use when they're about to deliver information that requires padding. "How are you?"
"I'm good, Mom. What's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong. Everything's fine." A pause. The kind of pause that contains an entire weather system. "Your father wants to come to your game this weekend."
I was standing in my kitchen holding a spatula because I had been making an omelet, which I had learned to do from Mik, who had decided that my culinary education was a priority and had been teaching me one dish at a time with the patience of a man defusing a bomb. The spatula stopped moving.
"He what?"
"He wants to come to Saturday's game. He called your brother and got the schedule. He didn't want to call you directly because he wasn't sure you'd answer."
"I would have answered."
"I know that. He doesn't."
I turned off the stove. The omelet was going to be a casualty of this conversation and I accepted that. I sat down at the counter, on the stool where Mik usually sat when I cooked, and pressed my free hand flat against the surface to keep it from shaking.
"Why now?"
"I don't know, honey. He didn't say much. He just said he wanted to come. I think..." Another pause. "I think he's been watching your games. Online. He hasn't said so, but I found the Reapers schedule bookmarked on his computer."
The image hit me with a force I wasn't prepared for.
My father, alone in the den in Duluth, watching Reapers games on his laptop.
Not calling. Not texting. Not acknowledging.
Just watching in silence, the way he'd been silent for two years, except now the silence had a shape.
It had search histories and bookmarks and a man sitting in a chair in Minnesota following his son's career from inside the closet of his own shame.
"Okay," I said. "He can come."
"Really?"
"Yeah, Mom. He can come."
"Cole, if you're not ready, I can tell him it's not a good time. He'll understand."
"When has Dad ever understood anything?"
She was quiet. The silence was its own answer.
"Sorry," I said. "That wasn't fair."
"It was fair. It just wasn't the whole picture." She took a breath. "Your father is not good at this. He's not good at feelings or conversations or any of the things that this situation requires. But he's trying, and trying is new for him, and I think it deserves a chance."
"I know."
"I love you."
"I love you too, Mom."
I hung up and sat at the counter for a long time.
The omelet had congealed in the pan. Outside, the Atlanta afternoon was doing its thing, all sunshine and indifferent warmth, and somewhere in Duluth, Minnesota, my father had bookmarked my schedule on his computer and asked my mother to call me because he was too afraid to do it himself.
I told Mik that night. We were at his apartment, which had undergone a transformation so gradual that neither of us had formally acknowledged it.
My running shoes were by the door. My cereal was in the cabinet, next to Mik's steel-cut oats, a pairing that said everything about us.
There were photos now. Not many. One of Katya that his mother had mailed from Moscow.
One of Mik and me at a team dinner, taken by Jonah, printed at a drugstore and stuck to the fridge with a magnet.
We looked happy in it. We looked like two people who had stopped pretending.
"My dad is coming to Saturday's game," I said.
Mik was reading. He lowered the book. He had moved on from Dostoevsky to Tolstoy, which he described as "an upgrade in suffering," and the bookmark was a piece of paper on which I had written "you are a beautiful refrigerator" in terrible handwriting, which he pretended to hate and clearly treasured.
"How do you feel about this?" he asked.
"I don't know. Scared. Angry. Hopeful. All of them at the same time, which doesn't feel like it should be possible but apparently is."
"These are not contradictory emotions. They are layers. You can be angry at someone for the past and hopeful about the future simultaneously. This is not dysfunction. This is being a person."
"When did you get so wise?"
"I have always been wise. You were too busy being loud to notice."
I threw a pillow at him. He caught it without looking up from his book, which was infuriating and impressive.
Saturday arrived with the inevitability of all dreaded things.
I knew my father was in the building because my mother texted a photo of their seats, lower bowl, center ice.
Good seats. My brother must have arranged them.
The family network operating behind the scenes, moving pieces into position for a reunion that nobody had scripted and nobody knew the ending to.
I played well. Not my best, not my worst. Two assists, solid defensive play, the kind of steady performance that wouldn't make highlights but would make a coach nod with quiet approval.
Mik was brilliant. A plus-three, two blocked shots, and a stretch pass in the second period that set up our go-ahead goal and made the broadcast analyst use the word "elite" three times in forty seconds.
I found myself playing for my father. Not consciously.
Not in the way I used to as a kid, when every goal was a bid for his attention and every mistake was a failure measured against his expectations.
This was different. I was playing as the man I'd become in his absence.
A man who was good at hockey and honest about himself and in love with someone extraordinary.
I wanted him to see that. I wanted him to see that the thing he'd been silent about hadn't broken me.
That it had, in fact, been the making of me.
We won 3-2. The locker room was happy but not euphoric. A regular season win against a beatable team. Guys showered and changed and headed for the family area, which was a lounge near the arena exit where players met their wives and girlfriends and kids after games.
I walked in and my father was standing by the window.
He looked older. That was the first thing I noticed.
Two years of not seeing someone in person rewrites your mental image of them, and the man standing by the window was greyer and thinner than the man I'd been carrying in my head.
He was wearing a Reapers polo that looked brand new, still creased from the package, and the effort of it nearly broke me.
He had bought a shirt. For my team. In my city.
"Cole." His voice was the same. Low, careful, the voice of a man who measured his words because he'd been taught that words were expensive and you didn't waste them.
"Hey, Dad."
We stood there. Four feet apart in a room full of families reuniting, kids running to their dads, wives kissing husbands, the normal happy chaos of postgame life.
My mother was somewhere behind him, giving us space.
She was good at that. She'd spent thirty years managing the distance between the men in her family.
"Good game," he said.
"Thanks."
"That Russian kid. The defenseman. He's something else."
"His name is Mik."
"Mik. Right. You two play well together."
"We do."
A silence. Not the cold silence of the past two years. A different kind. An effortful silence. The silence of a man standing at the edge of something he wanted to say and not knowing how to jump.
"Your mother says you're happy here," he said.
"I am."
"She says you're seeing someone."
The room got very quiet inside my head. My mother wouldn't have told him the details without my permission, which meant she'd said just enough to open the door and was waiting to see if my father would walk through it.
"Yeah," I said. "I am."
My father looked at me. Really looked. And I saw something in his face that I had been waiting two years to see, something I'd almost given up on.
It was not acceptance. Not yet. Acceptance is a destination, and he was still very much in transit.
What I saw was effort. The visible, uncomfortable, sweating-through-his-new-polo effort of a man trying to be something he had never been taught to be.
"You look at him different," he said.
My heart stopped. Not metaphorically. I felt it pause, skip, restart.
"What?"
"The defenseman. I watched you after the game, walking to the locker room. You look at him different than you look at the other guys." He cleared his throat. "I'm not... I'm trying, Cole. I'm trying to understand."
I'm trying to understand. Four words that were not "I love you" and were not "I accept you" and were not even close to enough. Four words that were, by the standards of emotional expression my father had set across my entire lifetime, the equivalent of a symphony.
"Thank you," I said.
"I don't need thanks. I need time."
"I know."
"And I need you to know that I..." He stopped. His jaw worked. The same jaw I'd inherited, the one that Jonah said clicked when I was angry. My father's jaw was clicking now. Not from anger. From the strain of forcing words past a lifetime of silence.
"I watched every game," he said. "Every single one. Since you got traded here. I watched them on my computer in the den and your mother pretended not to notice."
"I know. She told me about the bookmarks."
The faintest crack in his composure. Almost a smile. Almost. "That woman cannot keep a secret."
"She kept yours for two years."
The almost-smile faded. He nodded. The nod contained acknowledgment and regret and something else that I chose to interpret as love, because my father had never said the word and I had spent my entire life learning to read it in his silences.
"Can I take you to dinner?" he said. "You and... Mik. If he's willing."
"You want to have dinner with my boyfriend."
The word landed between us. Boyfriend. I had never used it in front of my father. I had never used it at all, actually. Mik and I hadn't labeled things. But standing in front of my dad, in a room full of families, the word felt right and necessary and I was not going to soften it.
My father absorbed the word the way he absorbed everything. Slowly, completely, without visible reaction. Then he said, "Yes. If he's willing."
"I'll ask him."
"Okay."
"Dad?"
"Yeah."
"Thank you for coming."
He reached out and put his hand on my shoulder.
His grip was firm and brief, the physical vocabulary of a man who expressed love through duration of contact rather than intensity.
Two seconds. Then he let go and stepped back and my mother materialized at his side and put her arm through his and they looked like what they were, which was two people who had been married for thirty-two years and were still figuring out how to talk to their son.
I went back to the locker room. Mik was at his stall, dressed and waiting. He didn't ask. He just looked at me and I saw the question in his eyes, and the concern, and the readiness to be whatever I needed.
"He wants to have dinner with us," I said.
"Both of us?"
"Both of us. He called you 'the defenseman' and then corrected himself to 'Mik.' He bought a Reapers polo. It still had the creases in it."
Something moved across Mik's face. Not pity.
Not sympathy. Understanding. The understanding of a man who knew what it was like to have a father who failed you, and who knew that failure and love were not mutually exclusive, and who knew that the distance between them was where most people spent their whole lives standing.
"I will come to dinner," he said.
"Yeah?"
"He is your father. And he is trying. In my experience, trying is rare."
I sat down next to him and leaned my shoulder against his. In the locker room, in view of anyone who might walk by, I leaned against the man I loved and he leaned back.
Nobody walked by. But if they had, I would not have moved.
Neither would he.