Chapter 5 Best Kingman
BEST KINGMAN
DECLAN
Ihad a lot of great days.
Bowl wins. Draft day. The first time I made the Pro Bowl and called my dad from the locker room and couldn’t figure out why my voice wasn’t working right. The day Kelsey told me she loved me in a tiny cabin in the woods.
This was better than all of them. By a lot.
I stood at the edge of the dance floor and watched my wife dance barefoot to ABBA’s Dancing Queen with Jules and Sara Jayne, and I felt something that didn’t have a clean name yet, so I just let it sit in my chest and take up as much space as it needed.
Sara Jayne had been my mother’s friend since we were young. She was at every birthday party after my Mom died, because that was Sara Jayne. Showing up for all of us when we needed a positive female role model in our lives. She showed up.
Seeing her out there, arm in arm with my wife, laughing at something Jules had just done with her elbows, was the kind of thing that made my throat do inconvenient things.
Wiener the Pooh was doing her level best to join the chorus line.
She was still wearing the white braid and the blue-ish sparkly dress Jules had constructed for her out of materials I chose not to think too hard about, which made her look approximately like main character from the kids movie “Freezed,” which was Jules’s funniest bit of the day.
It was her third costume change since noon.
My person fave had been the snowman Pooh was going to sleep like a bag of rocks tonight, and I respected that deeply.
“Your wife can dance,” Levi said, appearing at my elbow with a plate of appetizers he had clearly liberated from a passing tray.
“I know,” I said.
“Like, really dance.” He offered me the plate. I took one. “Mom’s going to send her a recruitment letter.”
“She coaches soccer.”
“I know. I’m just saying.” He watched the dance floor with the expression of someone genuinely impressed. “Jules choreographed whatever they’re doing right now, didn’t she.”
“That is not a question.”
“No,” he agreed. “It is not.”
He was a good kid. He was going to be fine. Especially with his spitfire of a girlfriend, Olive, by his side.
The DJ transitioned and the tempo shifted and Kelsey looked up from the dance floor and found me immediately, the way she always did, like she had a standing internal notification set for my location.
She started toward me, cheeks flushed, hair coming loose from whatever had been holding it up, and she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my entire life.
I was aware of how that sounded and I did not care.
“Dance with me,” she said, and held out her hands.
“I don’t dance,” I joked, and took her hands. She knew I would for her. And only her.
She grinned and pulled me out there.
We’d had our first dance earlier to “King of My Heart,” which she had picked for us and which I had listened to approximately forty-seven times in the three weeks before the wedding because she’d mentioned offhandedly that it reminded her of us and then I couldn’t stop thinking about the lyrics.
I had not told her this. She probably knew anyway. She usually did.
This was different. This was just swaying, really, her arms around my neck and my hands at her waist and the two of us in the middle of our own reception existing in a slight bubble outside of all of it. Around us my family was in full form.
Hayes and Willa teaching the correct form of some line dance to Kelsey’s dad, who was executing it with enormous enthusiasm and no instinct whatsoever.
Gryff and Artie holding court at the bar.
Nana and Coach at a table looking at something on his phone that he kept trying to show her and she kept waving away.
The normal chaos of people I loved in a room together.
“I think this is the best night of my life,” Kelsey said into my shoulder.
“I’ve had a few good ones,” I said.
“Name one better.”
I thought about it seriously, which she appreciated. “The day you told me you loved me.”
She lifted her head to look at me. “Did I make fun of you for crying? Because I meant to if I didn’t.”
“You did. It was still the best day.” I paused. “This one is better.”
She made a soft sound and put her head back on my shoulder.
“I have one more thing,” I said.
“Declan.”
“Just one.”
She pulled back enough to look at me with the expression she reserved for when she was genuinely uncertain what was about to happen. I liked that I could still do that. I had a feeling I was always going to be able to do that, and I meant to keep it that way.
“I need to make a small announcement,” I said. “Then we cut the cake.”
I borrowed a microphone from the DJ and waited while the crowd settled into a general attention-paying shape.
Outside on the patio, the mountain air had gone cool and dark, and someone had strung additional lights along the railing at some point, which I was choosing to attribute to Jules even though she was already across the terrace giving me the look that meant she had no idea what I was about to do and this represented a significant security failure on her part.
“I want to thank everyone for being here today,” I said. “If you’re in this room, you’re someone who means the world to Kelsey and me. Tonight was just for us.”
Applause. A few Kingman whistles from the back that I was pretty sure were Flynn and Gryff working in coordination.
“I’ll keep this brief because I know you’re all waiting for the cake.
” Knowing laughter from my brothers, who understood the role of everyone’s favorite bakery in the Kingman emotional ecosystem.
“As you may have noticed, there are currently five Kingmans on the Denver Mustangs roster. Which is a lot of Kingmans.” I looked at Levi.
He raised his glass. “And the press has been very interested in the question of whether Kelsey would be changing her name.” I paused.
“They never seemed to consider the alternative.”
Complete silence.
I reached into the bag Ciara had been holding with the long-suffering patience of a woman who had seen a lot at weddings and was prepared to see more, and I pulled out the jersey.
Blue. Number 98. And across the back, in the official block letters of the Denver Mustangs:
BEST KINGMAN.
I held it up.
The silence lasted exactly one second.
“No way.” That was Everett, somewhere to my left.
“That’s illegal,” Chris said. The absolute authority in his voice suggested he had opinions about name-based jersey strategy that he had never previously aired.
“Flag on the play,” Hayes called from the back, delighted.
“Total bullshit,” Levi said, grinning so wide it looked like it hurt.
“Coach Shenanigan signed off on it,” I said, into the microphone, calmly.
That did not help.
Kelsey had both hands over her mouth. Her eyes were bright.
I could see her working through the full implications of it in real time — the press conferences, the jersey sales, the completely unprecedented nature of what I’d just done — and then she lowered her hands and just laughed, the real kind, the kind that came from somewhere low and meant she was fully, completely happy.
“I am changing my name too,” Chris announced, to the room in general.
“I don’t think they need Moore Kingmans,” Trixie said, with the precision of a woman who had been waiting a long time for exactly this setup. “Just the Best one.”
The noise that followed was significant.
I handed the microphone back and walked to my wife and kissed her in front of everyone, which I didn’t usually do, but it was our wedding and she was Kelsey Best and I had just changed my name and my jersey for her, so I figured this was the appropriate time to suspend my general policy.
“Declan Best Kingman,” she said against my mouth.
“Kelsey Best,” I said back. “Same team.”
We cut the cake at a table set up outside, which had been my specific request for reasons that I didn’t explain to Ciara and that she, professional that she was, had not questioned.
The cake was white chocolate coconut with raspberry cream filling and cream cheese frosting, made by the same Denver bakery that had made every Kingman birthday cake for as long as I could remember.
My dad still ordered from them. He’d never stopped.
When I was a kid I thought it was loyalty.
Later I understood it was something else.
Kelsey had found out about the bakery somewhere in the months of planning and had made the call herself, and then tracked me down while I was in the weight room to tell me the cream cheese frosting was non-negotiable because she knew it was my favorite.
A small thing. The kind of small thing she did constantly, the quiet paying-attention that lived underneath all of it.
It made me feel like my mom was here.
I didn’t say that out loud. I didn’t have to. Kelsey looked at me as she handed me the first slice and she knew. She knew the way she always knew the things I wasn’t saying, that specific talent of hers I had given up trying to explain or account for.
I ate the cake and it tasted like birthdays and love and home.
Then the fireworks started.
I’d arranged for them at the last minute, partly because the mountain at night deserved them and partly because Kelsey had mentioned once, on a car ride, that she’d loved the Fourth of July and New Years because of the fireworks. A small detail. Filed away for later.
The first crack and bloom lit the sky above the valley and she grabbed my arm and tipped her head back and whispered, “Ooh. Ahh. Oh.”
So fucking adorable. I joined in with her on the next round.
From the treeline came a different kind of crashing sound. Emerging from the dark into the edge of the patio lights, a woman rode in on — was that — a reindeer?