29. Briggs
brIGGS
Iclear Ophelia’s threshold shortly past ten and head toward the cemetery to visit my brother.
Sierra Vista sits a mere fifteen minutes from my dad’s place. The route is etched into my brain because I navigated it in a rented SUV back on the second of November with my father silent in the passenger seat. I haven’t allowed myself to go back there until today.
Once I park, I make a stop at my mother’s marker first.
The stone is a double, her details finished while my father’s name waits on the right. I press two fingers against the cool granite and leave them there for a long, heavy minute.
“I love you. I miss you. Honestly, I think Dad could use a good talk with you right about now.”
My father recounted a story once about what she’d said while she was pregnant with Zig. She’d been reading up on swifts—those birds that eat and sleep in the air, only descending to the earth to nest.
She’d decided then that her boys were destined to be just like them. Up and gone for the long haul but always returning to the same familiar spot.
She got one of us right. Never quite got to meet the other.
I shift my weight, looking past her marker toward the fresh green sod of the next plot over. ZIGMUND KEANE MAXWELL. I walk toward him, standing awkwardly with my hands in my pockets.
“So you were sober.”
Two crows are arguing in a palo verde over by the access road.
“For two years,” I say shakily. “You got a chip, and you didn’t call me, and I know why now. I had it explained to me an hour ago by somebody who had to break a promise to do it.”
The February wind pushes at the flowers in the next row over.
“I got your text in July.” It comes out fast, ahead of me. “One word. Hey. That’s all it was, and I looked at it for four days, and then I deleted the thread. I told myself it was nothing. That you should’ve called me if you wanted to talk.”
My throat closes. “I wish I would’ve answered.”
My hands have gone cold and tingling in my pockets. I can’t find the switch to shut it off. It’s the airport episode all over again, that same vise on my chest pressing my breathing down to a thin, jagged straw.
I stand there on the concrete border and count the breaths until the world stops spinning.
“I love you, Zig. Always have. Always will.”
I press the heels of my hands against my eyes. “Be at peace, little brother.” I swipe a palm across my cheek, looking up at the shimmering desert sky. “I hope you found Mom and told her I said hi.”
Ted’s name flashes on the console twice before I’ve even cleared the cemetery gate. I let the first one ring out, but I finally decide to answer the second at the light on Eastern.
“Maxwell,” he says, his voice grating on my ears. “Talk to me.”
“About the suspension or about the picture?”
“Look, the picture is survivable.” Keys clicking. “It’s not the worst thing that could have happened this week.”
I scoff. “A photographer got a picture of my ex-fiancée’s front door.”
“A neighbor with an iPhone snapped a little picture. Nobody’s chasing you.” Ice rattles in a glass. “What it did is put you in Las Vegas. In February. Of your contract year.”
The light goes green. I don’t move until the guy behind me leans on his horn.
“I grew up here.”
“Yeah, the hometown story is a good one. It’s a great one. Kid from Vegas, family’s there, brother’s buried there—”
“Don’t.”
“—and there’s a club in this city that’s been sniffing around every winger on the market since the deadline talk started.
” He’s warming up now. “I’ve had a conversation.
Nothing on paper, nothing you’d have to know about.
But the noise in that article didn’t come out of thin air, and it isn’t hurting us. ”
I pull into a Del Taco parking lot because I’ve stopped being able to drive.
“You put it there.”
“I put out a feeler. That’s the job. That’s the thing you pay me eleven percent to do.”
“In November, you said Chicago and Colorado.”
“In November, it was, but things develop.”
I watch a kid in a visor push a mop bucket across the lot. “Are you serious?”
Ted exhales through his nose, and when he starts again, he’s using his reasonable voice, the one I’ve heard him use on the higher-ups.
“The story broke Saturday, and my phone did not stop.” He’s picking up speed.
“You know what the clubs hear? They hear a guy who went through a tragedy and played eighty percent of a season anyway. That’s character.
That’s an asset. I’ve had two people this week use the word resilience about you unprompted, and I did not put that word in their mouths. ”
My jaw unhinges. “You’re selling my brother.”
“I’m selling you.”
“He’s been dead all of sixteen weeks.”
“And you’re a nearly thirty-year-old winger with a suspension on your sheet, so you tell me what else I’m supposed to be doing with the phone.” He stops in his tracks. “Briggs. That came out—”
“No, it came out fine.” My hands have gone very tight on the wheel. “We’re done.”
“You’re upset. Call me Monday.”
“I’m not upset, and I’m not calling you Monday.” My nostrils flare. “Send everything to my email. I’ll have somebody get in touch about the paperwork.”
“You cannot fire your agent in February of a contract year.”
“Watch me.”
I sever the connection mid-sentence, a first in my professional life. I spend several minutes idling in a fast-food lot in my hometown, the weight of the realization sinking in that I’ve managed to make a messy situation entirely worse.
Burying the frustration, I call my father.
He answers before the first ring finishes. Despite nearly a week of radio silence, he still picks up instantly.
“Where are you?” he asks, his voice gravelly.
“Eastern and Sunset.”
“That’s ten minutes away.”
“I’m well aware of the geography, Dad.”
A five-second stretch of static follows. Then, “Come over,” he commands, and the line goes dead.
When I pull up to the curb, he’s already holding the door open. He’s dressed in a golf shirt that’s survived since my junior hockey days, one hand anchored to the frame and the other clutching his cane. He doesn’t bother with a greeting or an invitation.
“You want a Coke?”
“Sure.”
He pivots and retreats inside, leaving the door ajar—the only welcome I’m likely to receive. I follow him through an entryway that’s been meticulously cleared of clutter.
The kitchen is more pristine than it’s been in a decade. A whiteboard is suctioned to the fridge, detailing medication intervals in Evie’s sharp hand. Tucked beneath the schedule is a note: Wednesday—Danny, 2pm, DON’T ARGUE.
My father retrieves two cans, sliding mine across the granite instead of handing it over. He lowers himself into his chair with a grimace and watches me until I sink into the seat opposite him.
“Say it, then.”
So I give him the truth.
I begin exactly where Ophelia did—that spring, three years ago. I talk about the house, the isolation of the offseason, and the wine that slowly transitioned from a social habit to a private necessity. I tell him about the morning she finally got pulled over.
My father is a statue until I reach the part where she walked into a church on Windmill and found my brother already occupying a seat.
Then his hand lifts off the table, trembling slightly.
“No,” he rasps. “How long had he been attending?”
“Five months by that point.”
He stares out the window above the sink, his jaw working but no words coming. I keep the momentum going; if I stop now, the wall will go back up. I deliver every ugly detail, from the things I’ve known for years to the blanks Ophelia filled in this morning.
A long, heavy silence follows. He taps the unopened can against the wood. “Renata? You said that was the sponsor’s name?”
“Yeah. Sixty-two, used to run a title company. I looked her up.”
“Was she at the service?”
I struggled to even breathe that day. “I’m not sure.”
“A woman in a red coat was standing at the back,” he says distantly. “She skipped the reception. I remember feeling like I should recognize her.”
He plants both palms flat. “He went out on Thursday nights.”
“Is that right?”
“Every Thursday. Six p.m., back by nine.” His thumb traces a restless pattern. “I asked him. The first time he left, he told me he was playing cards with some guys from the shop. I told him good, get out of this house, you’re twenty-four.”
“He kept the truth to himself.”
“He called it cards.” His voice hitches, the sound rough and wet.
“I’d ask about the score, and he’d say he lost forty bucks or that he’d cleaned ’em out, and I’d give him grief for it.
And I kept pushing him about you.” He looks up.
“Every single week. Have you called your brother? Are you going to? He’d say he was working on it, and I’d snap at him that working on it wasn’t the same as picking up a phone. ”
“It’s alright, Dad.”
“July,” he says. “You mentioned July was two years for him.”
“That’s right.”
“He was living right here in July.” He anchors a hand on the glass. “So he walked through that door on a Thursday with a two-year chip in his pocket, and he probably made me a damn chicken breast and asked about my hip.”
His composure fails entirely, and it happens fast.
He cries in a sudden, violent wave. Usually, I stay rooted and wait for the tide to recede. This time, I stand and move around the table.
He tries to wave me off, but I take his hand and pull him up regardless. My father collapses against my chest, his forehead finding my collarbone, and he feels so much smaller than the man I remember from three years ago.
“I gave him so much hell,” he murmurs into my shirt.
“You didn’t know, Dad.”
I lock an arm across his back. He fists my shirt at the shoulder, shaking, and his cane thuds onto the tile. Neither of us moves to retrieve it.
Then I break, too.
The last time I let it out was in that Detroit equipment room, armored up with a locked door between me and the world. Now, it arrives in a jagged, painful rush. I stand in my father’s kitchen with my face buried in his hair and just let it go.
We stay pinned together for a long time. Eventually, he pats my back twice—the same way he used to when I was a kid coming off a loss. When we finally sit back down, his face is a ruin, and I’m certain mine matches.
He hands me a paper towel. “Who else knows about this?”
“Ophelia. Renata, presumably.” I fold the towel over my knuckles. “And Evie.”
He looks up. “Evie.”
“I told her last month, after the game in Vegas. Not about the drinking—I didn’t have that piece yet. But the rest.”
His expression shifts, and I realize with a jolt that he’s relieved.
“Good,” he says. “That’s good, Briggs.”
“Dad—”
“No, you listen.” He plants a hand flat. “I’ve been sitting here all week with the thought that you bore that for two years with not a single soul to share it. You finally told someone.” He shakes his head. “That’s the first thing you’ve said today that makes me glad.”
“Thank you.”
“She’s been in this house since January. Five days a week.” He turns the thought over. “Right after that story broke, she drove here and made a shepherd’s pie. She stayed until nine o’clock.”
“I didn’t consider what it would—”
“You didn’t consider it at all,” he says plainly. “That girl walked through my door every day holding that secret entirely alone. It wasn’t hers to tell, and she knew it. She kept showing up regardless, which shows more spine than either of my boys has offered me in a long time.”
He traces the edge of the table. “Does she know you’re here?”
“No,” I mutter, “I haven’t reached out yet.”
He tsks. “So you’ve seen Ophelia, and your brother, and now me.” He marks them off against the wood. “When did the plane land?”
“Six a.m.”
“Twelve hours.” He lets it settle. “I asked for one thing when we spoke last Sunday. So what the hell are you doing sitting in my kitchen?”
I’m here because I’m not good at taking the difficult path, and I wanted to face my demons before I went to her. I’m worried she won’t see me or that I’ve run out of chances. I’m terrified that staying away is better for her than trying.
It’s the performative machine, malfunctioning again.
“The excuses I’ve made for myself aren’t good enough.”
“No, I’m sure they’re not.” He leans over and retrieves his cane. “Go on, then. Go get her before the clock runs out.”