Chapter 28 #2
We walked back across the lot in the last of the gray afternoon, Justin between us, and halfway there he decided he was tired — a condition that arrives in him without warning and must be addressed immediately — and I said “up you go” and swung him around onto my back, and he latched on like he’d been doing it his whole life.
I could feel his chin on my shoulder. I could hear Jess’s boots on the pavement behind us.
I thought about the fact that I’d spent my entire life traveling light.
One bag. Nothing I couldn’t leave behind in an afternoon.
And here I was walking across a parking lot in December with a kid on my back and a little painted duck in my coat pocket and a woman behind me I could not have walked away from if somebody paid me, and my hands were so full I could barely get the car door open.
I got it open. I buckled him in. I drove my whole full-handed life home through the cold, and not once on that drive did the old voice show up to tell me I could set any of it down.
The snow started that night, coming down over the whole city.
I sat on Jess’s couch that night with her feet in my lap, and I kept coming back to the same moment. Justin looking up at me at the edge of that pond. Are you gonna stay too?
I’d said yes. I’d meant it. And nothing bad had happened. He hadn’t been let down, I hadn’t bolted, the floor hadn’t dropped out.
For most of my life I’d believed that letting people count on me was dangerous — that sooner or later I’d fail them, so it was kinder to keep everyone at arm’s length.
That kid had just knocked it flat without even trying.
He’d counted on me. I’d shown up. That was the whole story, and it was allowed to be that simple.
Some things stay. All winter, like the ducks. Turns out I could be one of the ones that stays.
Liam told me nine days before he did it.
We were the last two in the locker room after a Tuesday practice, everybody else already showered and gone, and he sat down next to me and got quiet in a way Liam doesn’t, and I knew something was up before he said a word.
“I’m going to ask Anne to marry me,” he said. “Christmas Eve. At the house, after the party, once it’s just us.” He stared at his own hands for a second. “Ring’s in my nightstand at home. I haven’t told anybody. You’re the first.”
I didn’t say anything for a second, because my throat had gotten in the way.
“Say something,” he said.
“I’m happy,” I managed. “This is my happy face.”
“It’s unsettling.”
“You’re going to be great. She’s going to say yes before you finish. Do you have a speech? You should have a speech, but not too much of a —”
“Do not coach me on my proposal.”
“I’m just saying —”
That was when Cole came around the lockers, half-dressed, and stopped, because Cole reads a room the way other people read a clock.
“Am I interrupting something?”
Liam looked at me, then at Cole, and made a decision. “Stays in this room,” he said. “I’m proposing to Anne. Christmas Eve.”
Something in Cole’s face went quiet and far away.
He sat down and started lacing his skates, and then he stopped.
“It’s the best thing you’ll ever do. I mean that.
” He was quiet a second. “I asked Claire on a Tuesday. Middle of the week, nothing special, I couldn’t wait for a Saturday.
Worst I ever shook in my life.” A small, private smile, the kind that costs something.
“I’d give a lot to be that nervous one more time. ”
Nobody said anything. Claire had been gone a couple of years. We all knew it, and we all knew he meant every word.
Then Cole went back to his laces. “Don’t screw up the speech.”
“I’m not going to screw up the speech,” Liam said quietly.
“I know you’re not.” Cole glanced up. “Nervous is the right way to feel. It means you know what you’ve got.”
But here’s the part that stuck with me, driving home: Liam had told me first. Before Cole, before anybody — sat down in an empty locker room and handed me the biggest thing in his life before he’d said it out loud to a single other soul.
Liam doesn’t do sentiment. He had Anne, he had a whole locker room of guys who’d take a bullet for him, and the person he brought it to first was me.
A year ago that wouldn’t have happened. Not because he didn’t like me — because I never let anybody get that close. I kept everyone at arm’s length on purpose and called it low-maintenance.
I’d spent years thinking I was just a guy who ended up alone.
Turns out I’d been doing it to myself the whole time.
Christmas Eve at Liam and Anne’s was chaos of the best possible kind.
The house was full — team guys and their families, kids everywhere, a tree that Anne had clearly won several arguments about.
Mark and Barbara were there too, because they’d driven down from Ames to spend the holiday with me, and when Anne heard they were in town she wouldn’t hear of them spending Christmas Eve anywhere but her house.
They’re Carter’s people, she’d said, in a tone that ended the discussion. That makes them ours. A year ago I’d have been mortified to have the two halves of my life in the same room.
That night I stood in the doorway and watched Barbara hand Liam a plate of cookies and tell him he looked thin, and all I could think was: this is what was on the other side of the wall. This is what I’ve been missing all these years.
Barbara does not attend a gathering empty-handed, so she’d taken over half the kitchen.
Jess was in the other half — the two of them thick as thieves by now, ever since Barbara took Justin for that sleepover back in the fall — and every so often one of them would laugh at something and the other would nod like a co-conspirator and I would decide not to ask.
Mark found me by the drinks.
“She’s good in a kitchen, that Jess,” he said, handing me a beer I hadn’t asked for and wanted anyway. “Barbara’s already decided about the both of them. You should know it’s decided. There’s no undeciding it now.”
“I figured. She spent two months on a sweater for a kid she’s met exactly twice.”
“That’s the tell, son. Barbara doesn’t knit a Christmas sweater for just anybody.
That boy’s got a hockey stick stitched on his chest and a spot in her heart she cleared out special.
He took a pull of his beer and looked out over the room — the noise, the kids, the tree, Jess laughing at something Anne said.
“You did good, getting yourself right. I want you to know I see it. You walk different than you did in the fall.”
I didn’t trust my voice for a second.
“I had help,” I said.
“Course you did. Everybody does.” Mark said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “That’s the part that took you your whole life to learn, son. Nobody gets themselves right alone.” He clinked his bottle against mine. “Merry Christmas.”
Liam found me by the drinks table around nine and stood next to me for a second without saying anything, watching Anne move through her own party with a dish towel over one shoulder, laughing at something Barbara said.
“Tonight,” he said. Barely out loud.
“I know.”
He blew out a breath. “Ring’s upstairs in my nightstand. It’s been up there nine days and never bothered me once.” He shook his head. “Tonight I can feel it through the ceiling.”
“You nervous?”
“No.” He thought about it. “Yes. Not about her. About — getting it right. Saying it in a way that’s equal to what I mean.” He shook his head. “I’ve decided I can’t. So I’m just going to say it.”
“That’s the right call.”
“You’d know.”
He said it plainly. No needling.
Liam never asked me what happened in November. Nobody on that team did. But he’d watched me come to practice looking like a dug-up grave for a week, and then watched me come back in December with Jess and Justin at a home game, and he’d drawn his own conclusions about what it took.
A year ago he wouldn’t have said a thing like that to me. A year ago I wouldn’t have let him.
“For what it’s worth,” I said, “you’re not going to get it wrong. When you love somebody that much, there’s no wrong way to say it. It lands right no matter how it comes out.”
Liam looked at me for a second. Then he knocked his bottle against mine and went back to his party and his dish-toweled future fiancée, and I stood there holding the biggest secret in the room and grinning like a fool.
The kids had a mission. I didn’t know what it was yet. You never do; a wise adult only monitors for structural damage.
It resolved itself around nine, when Finn — dragon-costumed for reasons no one had questioned all evening — planted himself in the middle of the living room and announced, to the room in general, “Everybody has to WATCH.”
The room, being full of people who love him, watched.
He had something clutched behind his back. He found Anne across the room and locked in.
Then he walked. The whole length of that living room, in a dragon costume, in complete ceremonial silence.
And behind him came Justin — because Justin could not be stopped, because he had appointed himself co-pilot of every mission in that kid’s life — matching him step for serious step, escorting his best friend on what was plainly the most important delivery either of them had ever made.
Anne crouched down to meet him.
“I made you a present,” Finn said, and brought his hands around front, and held it up in both of them like it was full of water. “At school. It’s a necklace. Mrs. Alvarez said we could use the good glitter.”
It was a macaroni necklace. Uncooked elbow macaroni on a length of yarn, painted a slightly overlapping green and gold — the Blaze colors, though I’d have bet money he didn’t plan that — and absolutely drowned in silver glitter, the kind of glitter that gets into a house and stays for a decade, the kind you find on your face in April.
“It’s the best necklace I have ever seen,” Anne said, and her voice had gone thick.
“I know,” Finn said, with the serene confidence of a man who has priced out the competition. “I put EXTRA glitter.”