Chapter 18 #2
Not game-night loud, I know that loud; that loud leaves with the guests.
I have had a roster of footballers here and the place still echoes empty.
This is a different frequency. There are two kids at my kitchen island doing homework and arguing about it.
Finn is wrong, but he’s loud, and he operates on the principle that volume is a form of correctness.
Eli corrects him with the weary patience of a boy who has been doing this his whole life.
The pizza boxes are open. Somebody’s juice has left a ring on marble that cost more than my first car, and I look at the ring and feel something in the neighborhood of gratitude.
I’m considering asking the cleaning lady not to clean it.
Even the voices from the living room — Callie’s questions, Grant’s easy rumble, give the place a substance it has never once had.
The house sounds inhabited. Turns out that was the feature missing from the spec sheet.
Coach tried to tell me that weeks ago, and again during the embarrassing film review last week, but I was too dumb to understand it.
From the kitchen, I catch pieces of Grant’s version, and it’s not dramatically different from mine, we’ve talked it to death over the years, but hearing him lay it out clean, for the record, does something to me anyway.
He always wanted pro ball; full ride to Duke; the draft landed him with the Outlaws and football has been the whole architecture since.
And then the part I want her to have: his college buddy.
Talented kid, real draft chances, until a leg break so catastrophic he never played again, one wrong tackle, whole future gone between whistles.
So when Danny and the others medicated through injuries to stay on the field, Grant understood it in his bones.
Didn’t approve. He says he even hated it.
Understood. It wasn’t league pressure, he tells her, and it wasn’t even really team pressure.
It was misguided passion, men protecting the thing that made them themselves, with all the excuses in the world without even considering an alternative.
Athletes are stubborn and hard working and that stubbornness doesn’t always deliver positive results.
Sometimes it wins you games. Other times it kills your career.
I knew every word of it. I still stand in my kitchen wanting her to have it, all of it, and God help me, I want her to write it. I want to read what this woman builds out of the truth when the truth finally cooperates.
“I should probably go.” Callie surfaces at last and checks the time, ten past eight, and Grant, three hours in, is only now hitting his conversational stride, which anyone who knows Grant could have predicted.
“How about I put these two to bed here, and you work as long as you want?”
It’s out of my mouth before I’ve reviewed it, and it earns me a smirk from Grant that I will be addressing at a later date, possibly during conditioning drills that I design.
Callie looks at me for a beat, one of her audits, quick and thorough, and nods, and drops back into work mode, and something in my chest files that nod somewhere permanent.
“Can I pick my bedroom?” Finn asks as I herd them up the stairs.
“Sure, bud. Stay out of mine, the other four are fair game.”
My bedrooms are not exciting for children.
They’re designed to excite the editor of an interiors magazine, neutral palettes, art nobody chose, beds nobody’s slept in.
Finn still conducts a full inspection tour of all four at a dead sprint and selects one according to criteria known only to Finn.
Eli takes the one closest to the stairs, because it’s first, and because he’s Eli, and being nearest the exit is a whole personality.
And then I do something I have never once done in my life: I put kids to bed.
I watch them brush their teeth with travel toothbrushes from Callie’s bag of infinite provisions.
I hand out two of my T-shirts, which fit them like formal gowns.
Finn requires water, then different water, then a ruling on whether the closet is ‘a normal closet,’ which I certify.
Eli requires nothing and says goodnight.
I stand in the doorway a second longer than necessary, both times.
Then I step into the hallway and just… stop. And stare at the wall.
There are clothes on the floor of two of my bedrooms. Small shoes, kicked off mid-stride, one upright and one capsized. A backpack avalanched against a nightstand. By the standards of the design magazine, the rooms are ruined.
The rooms have never looked better.
Because it was never about kids, exactly, it’s that for the first time, something is alive in this house besides me.
The clothes and the shoes are an interior-design improvement, the first honest ones this building has ever had: proof of other people, here, breathing, wanted.
That my personal life contains something other than empty rooms with excellent lighting.
I’ve spent a decade furnishing a life and calling the furniture a life.
As I’m standing there discovering the meaning of my own life my phone buzzes and I look at it. Text from Danny, short: I will do it
I exhale, once, at a wall, like a man finishing a very long drive. Then I go downstairs, where Grant is finally wrapping up.
#
After Grant leaves, with a handshake for Callie that started as a handshake and turned into him telling her two more stories at the door, she and I end up in the kitchen, eating cold pizza straight from the box over the island.
I come around behind her and wrap my arms around her, chin hooked over her shoulder, and feel her lean back into me like it’s already a habit.
“I’m proud of you. For standing your ground with Marty.” I press a kiss to the side of her neck, and feel more than hear the small hum she answers with.
“Me too.” A beat, and the laugh that follows has a wire of worry in it. “Ask me again when the mortgage is due.”
“You know I have money, right?” I say it lightly, already knowing precisely how this play ends. I can see the coverage before the snap.
“I don’t need your money, Nate.” Serious. Instant. There it is. Saw it coming, so not even a surprise.
“What is it with everyone telling me they don’t need my money?
” I let go theatrically and address the ceiling.
“What am I supposed to do with it, if not help my best friend or the woman I love? I swear to God, I’m going to start burning it in the fireplace.
Ceremonially. I’ll invite you all. There will be a program. ”
That gets the real laugh, the one that started this whole avalanche back at a Little League field …
and it hits me the way it always hits me, and she’s still laughing when she turns around inside my arms to deliver some follow-up ruling about my fireplace, and whatever she sees in my face stops the ruling in its tracks.
I don’t know what’s in my face. I know what’s behind it: two weeks.
Two weeks of her hating me from across town, of practices where I threw a ball with her voice in my helmet, of an empty house I finally understood was empty.
She’s here. She’s in my kitchen with her armor on the counter somewhere between the byline and the laugh, and I have permission again, and the permission is so new it still has tags on it.
“Nate,” she says. Different voice.
“Yeah.”
“You’re looking at me like—“
“I know exactly how I’m looking at you.”
I kiss her. Soft, once, a question, because after the month we’ve had I’m asking everything out loud from now on, and she answers by grabbing two fists of my T-shirt and pulling, and the question portion of the evening is over.
It’s not like anything we’ve had. There’s teeth in it, mine, hers, all that anger with nowhere left to live converting into something better paid, and she makes a low fierce sound into my mouth that I feel in my knees.
I walk her back until the island stops us.
Hands everywhere, hers under my t-shirt like she’s checking I’m real, mine in her hair, at her jaw, spanning the small of her back and hauling her closer because closer has become the entire agenda.
“I hated you,” she breathes against my mouth, and it’s not an accusation, it’s a confession, delivered while she’s pulling my t-shirt off.
“I know.” Her blouse joins the argument on the floor. “I hated me too. We had that in common the whole time.”